Cooking On the Side » Christmas

Foodie Gifts on RedEnvelope + $75 Gift Card Giveaway!

Kathy Strahs — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 18:33:33 +0000

{Today’s post and giveaway have been sponsored by RedEnvelope.}

I can remember this time of year circa 1998. A coworker, who had been tooling around the Internet shopping for holiday gifts, looked up from his computer and triumphantly announced across the cubicles, “This is gonna be an e-Christmas!”. Ha ha ha, we all fell over laughing at this crazy idea of doing actually doing all of one’s holiday shopping online. That was just unheard of. Today, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

RedEnvelope, one of my favorite gift sites since those early “e-Christmas” days, recently sent me a gift card to shop their site and share my experience. They’ve also got a gift card for one lucky reader! Read on for a chance to win a $75 Red Envelope electronic gift card plus a few of the fun foodie gifts I found on the site.

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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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Tamales

Kathy Strahs — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 05:36:31 +0000

I hope I whet your appetite for Mexican food with last week’s sopes because I’m back this week with Tamales!

I caught the hint that tamales might be a tad labor intensive when three different people kind of sighed and waved their hand when I suggested I wanted to try making them. There’s a good reason families typically save these to make around special occasions, like Christmas. They take hours to make! But I’ll tell you what, when you’re spending half the day slow cooking meat, grinding chiles, mixing masa with your hands and wrapping and steaming little corn husk packages, you can’t help but pour a little love in there as well.

They were certainly the freshest tamales we’d ever had, as they came right from our own kitchen. I had concerns about simmering the pork (it didn’t dry out after all), the chile concoction (it adds deep, earthy flavor to the pork) and the lard (first time ever venturing to cook with it) but I gave the recipe a try anyway. My husband said these were the best tamales he’d ever tasted and I agreed.

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Gingerbread Biscotti with Apricots

Kathy Strahs — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:53:30 +0000

I have been holding onto this Gingerbread Biscotti recipe for months now, waiting for the holidays to give it a try. It was definitely worth the wait, although I wish I’d tried it much sooner – they are fantastic!

Most of the biscotti I’ve had in the past have been tasty but not especially noteworthy on their own. They usually come to life upon being dunked in a nice cup of coffee or tea. But these spices within these Gingerbread Biscotti, along with the fresh ginger and dried apricots mixed in, have wonderful flavor all on their own. I confess to having enjoyed several without even dunking.

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Holiday Cheese Log with Cranberries & Pecans

Kathy Strahs — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:25:41 +0000

It isn’t the holidays until someone breaks out a cheese log, am I right? Well this year I guess that someone is me. I can honestly say I’ve never really been all that into cheese logs. The whole concept is so odd…rolling out cheese into log form, crusting it in nuts and serving it with crackers? It’s just always seemed like this strange retro holiday food that’s continued to show up on appetizer tables inexplicably over the years.

I decided to make one – what the heck? What convinced me was the ingredient list in this recipe, which actually sounded like something I’d want to eat. Feta, cream cheese, Swiss cheese and honey? That combo was sure to be super tangy and a little bit sweet. And I’ve definitely demonstrated my affinity for cranberries and pecans over the past month. It would come together quickly and I could easily refrigerate and transport it to the holiday party I’m attending on Tuesday. Really…what’s not to like?

So I abandoned my past judgments on the issue and made one tasty holiday cheese log.

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Toffee Almond Shortbread

Kathy Strahs — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 07:01:25 +0000

You’d think that after all the toffee I consumed last week I wouldn’t want anything more to do with the stuff for a while, but it’s not so. On the contrary, I was quite eager to chop up some of the decadent candy that had eluded my eager hands and parlay them into the Toffee Almond Shortbread recipe that I found on yet another package of butter (I’ve definitely become a fan of these recipes from the butter producers!).

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Cranberry Nut Bread

Kathy Strahs — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:47:36 +0000

Well, it’s a good thing I like cranberries.

What did your junior high home ec teacher always tell you to do before you started to prepare a recipe? Read it first. Not just give it a quick scan, but actually read it through so you understand what you’re about to do. For some reason, that lesson never quite sunk in with me. I still routinely skim the directions and good percentage of the time that means a degree of improvisation somewhere in the middle of my cooking. Making this Cranberry Nut Bread recipe from a package of cranberries was one of those times.

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Oatmeal Cranberry White Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Kathy Strahs — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:19:12 +0000

Whew! As much fun as Thanksgiving cooking was, I’m actually kind of glad to switch over to other late-autumn treats (if you’re looking for some good leftover turkey ideas, check out the leftover panini recipes on my other food blog – Panini Happy). Cookies call my name all year round, and as we enter part 2 of “the holidays” I find oatmeal cookies with dried cranberries and white chocolate chunks especially irresistible.

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