The last time I hosted Easter at my house, I made these cute little bunnies out of napkins and put one at each place setting.   Especially if you have children in your home, you may want to try these this Easter.  They are simple to do and you get better after each one!  Thinner napkins work a little better, if you have a choice.  

Also, this is the time to start thinking of making Italian Easter Bread.  If you have never made this delicious bread, give it a go this year.  It is slightly sweet and a real treat. If you are looking for additional Easter recipes, you can try my Pesto Stuffed Eggs, which are so pretty at Easter.  You can also try these pretty Edible Easter Egg Nests, which I have made and placed on the table for dinner.   Enjoy!

Thanksgiving is just around the corner and so I thought I would compile a little roundup of recipes from the blog that might give you some new ideas or helpful tips. These are some of my favorites - some oldies but goodies! There's everything from a very different way to make turkey to a fun version of pumpkin pie.  I hope you enoy some of these posts!

Happy Thanksgiving! 

Elaine 

Make Ahead Buffet Mashed Potatoes 

Worried about having the time or energy to make mashed potatoes while you're juggling the turkey, side dishes and all your relatives?  You can make this dish the day before Thanksgiving and have it all ready to pop in the oven on Thanksgiving Day or even the week before Thanksgiving and freeze it.  It's delicious. 

 

 

 

Let's have a review of pasta rules, shall we?  I still hear far too many people ask whether they should rinse their cooked pasta or not.  Really?  Haven't we settled this long ago?  I guess some myths still remain. So let's just touch on some helpful rules of cooking pasta:

 

Six Rules of Pasta

1.  Weigh your pasta.  Over the years, I got tired of making way too much pasta or trying to eyeball how much to cook.  Now, I just weigh my pasta.  It's accurate and easy.  Get yourself a nice little scale - you will use it for a hundred tasks in the kitchen - and weigh your pasta.  Determine how much pasta you eat for a main dish or a side dish.  We usually eat 2 ounces each as a main dish.  It's so much better to just weigh it and know exactly how much you are cooking. 

Goodbye, Summer.  We're sad to see you winding down.  Hopefully, the weather will cooperate for Labor Day weekend and most of us will get to have one last summer hurrah at the beach, or the lake or just in the backyard. If you're part of a potluck or just grilling out by yourselves, here is a recipe roundup of summer favorites that I hope you find handy. 

 

There's so much basil in the garden right now - whip up a batch of Basil Lime Cocktails

 

The minute we got back from the Amalfi Coast, Brian wanted to make homemade limoncello.  When you go out to dinner in any of the towns in that area, they serve you little shots of icy cold limoncello after dinner - you know Italians and their wonderful digestifs obsession.  You get used to it pretty easily.  It's a nice custom. So we started researching recipes when we got back.

Aren't these adorable?  They are the perfect little thing to put on your Easter table. And they are completely edible.  Kids and adults alike will love them.  I wanted to post this far enough in advance that you would have time to go out and get the proper ingredients to make them, if you wanted to.

I just crossed an item off my bucket list this past week - dinner at Alinea.  It's something I've wanted to do for a long time but, even though we've had sons in school in Chicago, just haven't gotten there.  This time I made the reservation many weeks in advance and actually got a table.  The restaurant is, indeed, amazing.  The dishes are completely unique, the service is extraordinary and the space itself is stunning. But the story behind all this is equally compelling.

Pomegranates have become so popular - they're delicious and healthy.  But they can be a pain to deseed, squirting juice everywhere and making a mess.  I'll show you how to easily clean a pomegranate and get all those seeds out.

I'm going to be posting a lot of pasta dishes this winter, so I thought I would give you a nice refreshing, light salad first!  The key to making a great salad is two things:  1) make your own dressing  and 2) only lightly dress the greens.  Salad dressing shouldn't weigh down a salad - it should just lightly coat it.  The greens and the fruit or vegetables should be the star.   The salad should be refreshing, not a soggy mess.  

Well, the holidays are over and what a whirlwind it was.  And so much fun. My brothers and their families came to visit and I did a ton of cooking for that, including an enormous batch of chicken ragu, which I smartly froze ahead of time. That was a timesaver.  I made big pork loins stuffed with one of my favorite stuffings.  I also made Jamie's Peanut Butter Parfaits which were a big hit. We decorated Oreo cookies and I made Cranberry Upside Down Cake. It was all a lot of fun. 

I also got to reveal something that I had kept a bit of a secret all year.  I started a knitting blog last spring but did not talk about it at all here because I couldn't let my family know about it.  In March, I started a big project to knit something for every person in my family by Christmas.  I ended up knitting 17 projects for everyone.  What a thrill it was to finally present them to everyone during their visit. It was hours of knitting and thousands of stitches and lots of tinking, but a whole lot of love knitted into every item. 

I've been having so much fun with this little DIY project that I had to share it with all of you because I know you will love it, too.  These beautiful "snow" candles are pretty, easy and cheap to make.

I love sharing fun things I have found with you all and so I thought I would post a few things for Christmas that I'm either enjoying now or plan to make myself.  So here are a few fun links for Christmas:

These candy cane marshmallows from Martha Stewart would be a nice little DIY gift to give out:

 

 

Well, you can actually make any kind of pie you want.  But you will make pie dough.  Because it's such a snap and it's so good when it's homemade.  You don't think you can make homemade pie dough?  What if I told you that if you have a food processor, you can  make it in 60 seconds?  You don't have a food processor?  Put it on your Christmas list. You need one.

It's hard to get back into the swing of things after such a lovely holiday break with all my sons home under one roof, but here we go into 2011.  I sure did a lot of cooking, baking and cleaning with all the entertaining we did and having family come from out of town.  What fun we had.  And I had such a picture perfect day for my birthday - sitting in front of a roaring fire with all my boys, watching my favorite Lord of the Rings movies and knitting to my heart's desire.  It just couldn't get any better than that.  

I'm thinking about Thanksgiving already.  That's right - but it's not because I'm so super organized or anything, it's because I've been saving and freezing chicken parts all year and now it's time to make some wonderful homemade chicken stock for Thanksgiving.  (I need the freezer space.)  I usually buy whole chickens from The Egg Man, cut the backbones out and cook them this way.  I just freeze these backbones and any other chicken or turkey parts that I may acquire through the year. Then, in the fall, I take them all out and make this super stock.  Making homemade stock is basic, easy and something everyone should learn to do.  

Merry Christmas!  I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. As I've written before, every year we give a little Christmas Eve party and I give out some kind of homemade goodie at the end of the evening.  This year I wanted to do the fun DIY thing of making your own vanilla extract.  I go through so much vanilla extract and the good stuff is so expensive.  I love the idea of making your own from good vanilla beans and then just adding vodka to it to keep it going - after all, that's all vanilla extract is, really - alcohol and vanilla beans.   All you do is pour unflavored vodka into a glass jar, cut a couple of vanilla beans in half and then split them and stick them into the bottle.  You need to let this steep for a couple of months until it is ready to use.  I started all these bottles in October, to give out at Christmas. So everyone got a bottle of vanilla extract and a little bag of caramels topped with Sicilian Sea Salt, which I made.

Can you stand another tomato recipe?  I've been cooking a lot with tomatoes lately, but hey - everyone's got an excess of tomatoes right now.  Some friends dropped off some of their tomato excess the other night to us (thanks, Brian and Diane!) and that was fine with me.  What was I going to do with that many tomatoes?  I was going to make my own tomato paste.  

It has become a summer tradition for us to make a trek to the Pacific Northwest. For three years we have gone to Seattle, as you may have read in this post from last year and we absolutely love that area. This year, however, we decided to finally check out Oregon. We had heard and read about the great food and wine culture there and the beautiful coast. And boy, did Oregon deliver.