Not Your Mother's Cookbooks

Citrus is a perfect ingredient in making a sweet breakfast or dessert popover during the winter.  I think tangerines are too underused in baking, their tart-sweet flavor a bit more assertive than regular oranges.  Placing them in a cold oven…

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This is the recipe I got from my mother and it originally came from a wonderful cookbook written by the late actor, artist, and home chef, Vincent Price.  I often use different types of flour, add herbs, or grated cheese,…

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Desserts in a slow cooker sounds kinda weird, but once you have gotten used to using the appliance, the sky’s the limit. When Julie and I went to research and test dessert recipes we had a problem we had not predicted—there were too many things to make instead of not enough.

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Cooker:  Medium or large round
Setting and Cook Time: HIGH for 2 1/4 to 2 3/4 hours
Serves 6 to 8

Ingredients

• 1 cup sugar

• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/3 cup light olive oil
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1…

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A good cooking apple needs to keep its shape during baking. Its flavor, sour-sweet when raw, mellows delightfully. We like baking with medium- to large-sized Pippin, Granny Smith, and Fuji; Golden Delicious and McIntosh are wonderful if very firm, and…

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Hot Fudge Sundae cake is an old-fashioned pudding cake where the ingredients naturally separate during baking. When you take off the lid, the rich fudge sauce will have sunk to the bottom, with a gooey, spongy layer cake on top.…

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Cheesecake in the slow cooker? Absolutely and it just might be one of the best I ever made for the texture is fabulous—unbelievably silky with no crack on top like in regular oven cooking. And it cuts into picture-perfect wedges.…

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Every first week of January is the time to make New Years’ resolutions. It’s just something that goes with the turning of the calendar year, the gateway of looking back at the old and looking forward to the new. As a child, my resolutions were things like I will be nicer to my sister, I will work harder to get better grades, and maybe we can get a puppy.

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As an ex-caterer, I have seen many special and individualistic dining rooms. I used to work for an interior designer and he would hire me to do the first dinner, a type of baptism, in the newly completed kitchen and…

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New Years, Birthdays, Weddings, Celebrations of all types call for the crème de la creme of wine—Champagne. Just the word Champagne evokes the feeling and atmosphere of the rarified, the exlusiveness, the privilege.

When Dom Pérignon, the Benedictine Monk who invented…

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