When preparing to make some quick bread for a morning coffee, I started my usual online search, looking for muffins using the apple butter and raisin bran that I wanted to use up. While there were lots of recipes using these, almost all were unfortunately much higher in sugar and fats than I wanted. Not…

Long ago and far away, I copied this recipe on to a scrap of paper that I later glued to a standard recipe card that went into the file with the rest of recipes I collected. As much as possible, I always tried to document my sources, but this one says only,  “From a magazine…

Sometimes, having leftovers is not a bad thing.  Leftover breads, for example. Earlier this week, I made whole wheat hard rolls for pulled pork sandwiches. Not knowing exactly how many people would be at lunch, I made a large batch of dough–when you’re working with yeast breads, it takes hardly any effort to make more….

Have you ever thought of how much we tend to associate certain foods with specific seasons or holidays, often serving them only during a limited time period? Cranberries are like that. Make some cranberry relish to go with the Thanksgiving feast, maybe make a cranberry dessert during the Thanksgiving to Christmas festive season, but then,…

Winter weather has finally arrived, the richness of holiday meals is mostly past, and the time has come for simpler, more nutritious, frugal, and warming comfort foods. Here in Minnesota, we have the promise of weather perfect for being outside, enjoying the snow, even as our friends in the east are facing the “other side”…

In this time of holiday gatherings, office potlucks, and a desire to share home-baked gifts, finding recipes that are fast, relatively inexpensive, and even just a little healthy (or at least less unhealthy) can be a challenge. Enter mini-muffins. These bite-sized morsels are especially good for times when we want to try all the foods…

Over the years, I watched the Pillsbury Bake-off reward bigger and bigger prizes, often for what seemed like easier and easier dishes to make. It would be fun, I thought, to have a recipe that would just get me to the final bake-off, a room full of cooks and mocked up kitchens, chaotic and fragrant…

I love clam chowder, the white and creamy New England style, so the beginning of winter weather this weekend was a great time to make up a batch. Now it happens that I also have lots of butternut squash and am always looking for ways to add this sweet, high vitamin and fiber ingredient to…

Over the years there have been recipes I have not even tried because they contained ingredients that didn’t fit my tight budget. That wonderful spinach artichoke dip, as delicious as it can be, was full of  too expensive things like artichokes, sour cream, and “real” Parmesan cheese, so I just enjoyed it when it was…

Our local Aldi started carrying dried kidney beans, at a very attractive price, so I bought a few pounds and then cooked up two pounds of them for a weekend of chili making–two large crowd events with three batches of chili would call for a lot of beans. Not, however, quite as many as I…