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My Top 9 Favorite On-the-Side Recipes…Celebrating 3 Years!

Kathy Strahs — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:07:17 +0000

Three years ago this week I decided to branch out from panini-making a bit and start this blog “on the side”. I hoped to discover some hidden gems among the recipes I found printed on the food labels in my kitchen…I wound up finding a real treasure trove.

To celebrate Cooking On the Side’s blogoversary (blog birthday, whatever you like to call it) I thought I’d share with you my Top 9 Favorite On-the-Side Recipes from the past three years. These are dishes that have either become instant favorites, like last week’s Yogurt Mixed Berry Pie, or that have become my go-to recipes that I make all the time now. It was a challenge to narrow the list down to just these nine – here they are, in no particular order:

Meyer Lemon Whipping Cream Pound Cake (adapted slightly from the Swan’s Down Cake Flour box)

I originally described this pound cake as “the lightest, most velvety, lemony pound cake I’ve ever tasted” and I still stand by that. I loved this cake so much I baked several back-to-back for last year’s Food Blogger Bake Sale (by the way, this year’s sale is coming up on April 28, 2012 – find one in your city here).

Vanilla Glazed Baby Carrots (adapted from the back of the Trader Joe’s Baby Carrots package)

These glisteningly sweet vanilla-glazed carrots were from one of my very first posts on Cooking On the Side. They have become my go-to side dish for special occasions as well as for everyday. Even my vegetable-avoidant two-year-old will eat these!

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Check Out Some of My Most Popular Posts:

~ My most popular post to date was the one in which I compared three different brands of self-rising flours to see which produced the best biscuit. Find out which flour won!

~ King Arthur Flour calls these The Best Ever Fudge Brownies and I agree.

~ My Ice Cream Cookie Pie was over-the-top scrumptious.

About Cooking On the Side...

It’s the recipe collection I didn’t even realize I had – the one derived from the side of a bag of fresh vegetables, a box of sugar, a jar of mayonnaise. Cooking On the Side – as in on the side of food packaging – is all about “revealing” these on-the-package recipes, with photos of how they actually turn out, cooking notes and more descriptive directions than package space usually allows for. -- Kathy

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A Visit to the Nestlé Kitchens

Kathy Strahs — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 05:21:30 +0000

Ani, me and Chris

These ladies with the gorgeous smiles standing with me in the photo above are Ani Simón and Chris Garboski, managers of the test kitchens at Nestlé USA. I took a little road trip up to the Los Angeles area last week to visit the Nestlé headquarters in Glendale, see firsthand what goes on in the test kitchens and find out what it’s really like to be an in-house recipe developer at a major food company.

In front of the Nestlé USA headquarters in Glendale, California

I didn’t realize before that Nestlé is actually the world’s largest food company, with more than 25,000 employees in the United States alone. Besides Toll House morsels (aka, chocolate chips), which is the product I most often associate with the company, Nestlé USA owns a slew of other well-known brands, including Buitoni, Carnation and Libby’s Pumpkin. A major corporate headquarters might be the last place you’d expect to encounter warm hospitality, but that’s exactly what I experienced during my visit. Entering Chris and Ani’s workplace kitchen was like being a guest in their home.

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Holiday Q&A with Lucinda Scala Quinn + Panettone French Toast

Kathy Strahs — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 22:02:51 +0000

Holiday entertaining tips and traditions were the topics of a lovely conversation I had last week with Lucinda Scala Quinn, Executive Director of Food & Entertaining at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, cookbook author and host of Hallmark Channel’s Mad Hungry with Lucinda Scala Quinn. Whether you’re attending a holiday party this week and need ideas for the perfect hostess gift or you’re looking for a homey comfort dish to serve on Christmas morning our interview will give you some great options. A spokesperson for Bauducco Panettone, Lucinda also shared some tasty ways to enjoy the sweet, Italian specialty cake during the holidays. You’ll find a great recipe for Panettone French Toast at the end of this post.

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Lucinda Scala Quinn

Cooking On the Side: What are you and your family planning to do for the holidays this year?

Lucinda Scala Quinn: Normally, we stay in New York. We love New York, it’s very festive. We have our traditions for Christmas Eve: we do the Italian side of the food chain on Friday night and then we do the English side on Saturday. So I make a big Italian feast for Christmas Eve and then for Christmas Day we have a six-rib standing rib roast. It’s kind of a present in and of itself. Only once a year would I buy something like that. It’s actually quite easy to cook if you handle it properly. And then it gives off all those drippings and I make individual Yorkshire puddings. I can’t even make enough of them anymore. It’s one of those things about building traditions – if I tried to stop doing that I would have a riot on my hands. I didn’t grow up with that but I just started doing it myself and then my family just loved it.

COTS: I wanted to ask you about when you attend gatherings. What do you typically like to bring as a hostess gift when you’re invited to somebody’s house around the holidays?

LSQ: I always think about bringing something that’s not going to complicate the hostess’ life. Around this time of year I do the simplest, simplest thing. I buy vodka and a bunch of Meyer lemons and I just peel off the peel and try to do it in a nice circular sort of spiral. Then I just put the lemon peel in the vodka, buy a nice-shaped bottle, take off the commercial label, clean up the bottle and put on a bow. So you’ve got the clear [bottle] with the beautiful lemon peel. Even if it only sits one day and they want to use it it’s great. If it’s two months [later] it’s great. It looks like it’s a gift, it isn’t just meant to be used that night.

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Congrats to the Windows Phone 7 Winner!

Kathy Strahs — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 05:28:25 +0000

Congrats to our Windows Phone 7 “Do More With Less” giveaway winner, Schmidty (#169)!

Thanks to everyone who entered. I’m glad I asked you to share the ways you make your life easier in the kitchen – I’ve already adopted many of the great tips!

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Cooking On the Side for iPhone

Kathy Strahs — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:21:53 +0000

It just got a whole lot easier to navigate Cooking On the Side from your iPhone – welcome to the mobile version!

So often I need to look up a recipe while I’m away from the computer – I love it when a recipe site has a mobile version I can access on the fly and easily find what I need. If you use an iPhone, all you have to do is navigate to www.cookingontheside.com in the Safari browser as usual. The site will automatically detect that you’re using an iPhone and display the mobile version. Prefer the regular full version? You can always switch back, using a link at the bottom of the screen.

iPhone users: Give it a try and let me know what you think!

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