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Chickpea, orzo and tomato stew with feta and dill recipe. Chocolate Crinkles Recipe. Please welcome guest author Garrett McCord as he shares some of his best-loved holiday chocolate crinkle cookies.

Chocolate Crinkles Recipe

~Elise One of the best parts about any holiday—be it Christmas, Thanksgiving, a birthday, Diwali, Columbus Day, whatever—is that you get an excuse to eat some of your favorite foods. For me, that means chocolate. Now, I’m generally not a big chocolate eater during the year, but when December rolls around it’s totally game on. The chilly weather and holiday spirit just make me crave it for some reason. It also means it’s time to make those adorable looking cookie fiend favorites, chocolate crinkles. These chocolate crinkles are a holiday staple in winter, but are great any time of the year. Crinkles are easy-peasy to throw together and make for a flashy addition to any cookie platter.

If you want, you can jazzify these cookies in a number of ways. Ingredients Method. How to cook perfect summer pudding. On the face of it, few desserts are more peculiarly ill-suited to sticky, sweaty weather than claggy bread pudding – yet, in a long-suffering nod to Britain's changeable climate (and in homage to our stubborn love of stodge: do mushy peas ever taste sweeter than on a windswept August beach?)

How to cook perfect summer pudding

We've bestowed the contrary designation "summer pudding" upon this determinedly solid sweet. Well chilled, however, and sodden with wine-dark fruit juices, it's surprisingly refreshing stuff – especially when served with the obligatory dollop of thick, ivory cream. (To digress briefly, bread puddings have been around for almost as long as stale bread but, according to the invaluable Oxford Companion to Food, this particular cold confection first pops up in the 19th century, when they were popular at pastry-phobic health farms – under the strikingly unappealing name, "hydropathic puddings". Smoke Signals recipe. Nigel Slater's Middle Eastern recipes. I have always regarded mopping food from my plate with a piece of bread as one of life's little pleasures – no doubt made twice as enjoyable by the fact that I was forbidden from doing it as a child.

Nigel Slater's Middle Eastern recipes

Those last puddles of sauce sponged up with a wodge of floury bap or a jagged shard of warm pitta form a natural conclusion to my day's cooking. Given half a chance, I would happily transfer an entire meal from plate to mouth in pieces of warm bread. Any soft dough, flat or bun-like, can be used to scoop sloppy, spicy or stew-like things from our plates. Yes, the bread adds substance to our supper, but the real point – for me, at least – is the tactile pleasure to be had from holding the hot sauce in a piece of damp, warm bread.

It feels as good as it tastes. I sometimes make some sort of flatbread at home, the sort of slipper-shaped breads you can split and stuff or tear into rough pieces to dunk into taramasalata, puréed chickpeas or chunkily textured tomato sauce. How to cook perfect dal. Not all comfort food transcends cultures.

How to cook perfect dal

I find it difficult to imagine turning to spam fried rice to mend a broken heart, or stuffed cabbage to banish winter blues (although this recipe does sound pretty damn good), but I fell in love with the soupy, wholesome qualities of dal on our very first meeting. Unlike many of its British equivalents (mash, hotpot, steamed puddings, even the surprisingly similar pease puddings which preceded the potato in this country), dal is a dish which can comfort all year round: the fresh, sharp spices and clean herbs work as well for me on a cooling summer evening as a dark winter's night.

Madhur Jaffrey writes evocatively of the "deep satisfaction" of the dish – "you can take meats and fish and vegetables from an Indian" she says in her Curry Bible, but you cannot take away his dal – "the core of his meal". A bit of a soak? Cooking liquid Masala zone Tarka dal Salt? Perfect dal Serves 4 1. 2. 3. One of my favorite things … Pretzel Rolls « STRESSCAKE.

It started with a burger.

one of my favorite things … Pretzel Rolls « STRESSCAKE

You see, a while back I met a friend for lunch at Kuma’s Corner, which has become a bit of a legend in Chicago. With good reason. The food is fantastic but the environment is something else – a heavy metal bar with an amazing beer list that serves some awesome burgers. The music is loud, the servers are wonderfully tattooed and the wait is crazy long. But the food, oh dang that food. What I really love is that these beauties are served on pretzel rolls. To shape - start pinching Since then, I’ve had a bit of an obsession with pretzel rolls, pretzel bread, soft pretzels and the whole damn pretzel family. The bottom of the roll It only took one stale roll to light the fire again. I sat down in earnest and poured over my many cookbooks. The finished roll, nice & smooth Then I found it …. I usually make these in my stand mixer with the dough hook but if I’m feeling particularly lazy or time challenged, I’ll pull out my cursed bread machine. Poaching ever so gently.