Naptime Everyday: Recipes for Everyday Cooking and Baking

I made this soup over the weekend to get us back to neutral. Right after Christmas Day a solid mass of winter germs swept through our house. My daughter was on antibiotics in less than twenty-four hours and I was obsessively slurping down hot tea and clementines to beat my own sniffles and burning throat. My husband, lucky devil, was away in the office and generally avoided getting too close to us when he was home. During the day my daughter and I adopted a solid afternoon nap schedule. She napped for longer than I did, so when I got up from my rest I would use my brief burst of energy to make some healing soups. Early in the week I started with a big batch of Tomato Florentine to use up the spinach from Christmas dinner. Later in the week I moved on to using up the rest of the mushrooms I’d purchased for our holiday pot pie.

We are in holiday wind-down mode. All of our family has gone home, the presents are put away and we are more or less decompressing from all of the excitement. My daughter has actually been napping pretty regularly for the past few days. She really needs that hour or so in the afternoon to make up for all of the energy she is expending. Yesterday I used her naptime to make a quick, comforting baked risotto with the last of the Meyer lemons in my fridge.

I have our Christmas menu pretty much set. Instead of a ham, this year we are going to try this pot pie recipe from Williams-Sonoma. Our side dishes will include carrot souffle, green beans and twice-baked potatoes and they’ll be some delicious cheesecake for dessert. I am also going to serve up these rolls with dinner. These are not rolls I reserve especially for Christmas, they are more of everyday rolls that go with just about every occasion.

The closer I get to Christmas the more I am thinking about large desserts to feed a crowd. Enter the bundt cake. I am a longtime fan of the large, circular bundt cake. It is relatively simple to pull together and serves a lot of people. The other day I had a half quart of eggnog in the fridge and decided test drive a new naptime holiday recipe for next week’s festivities. I knew it wouldn’t fulfill my daughter’s request for more decorations that “sparkle and flash,” but at least it would fulfill my need for a crowd-pleasing dessert.

For this webisode I am demonstrating how to make delicious Almond Dragees, or chocolate covered almonds. They make fantastic holiday gift and are incredibly simple to make during naptime or whenever you have a free moment. Today I am making them while my daughter is at school! To give them as gifts I like to package them up in clear plastic bags or to-go containers lined with parchment paper. Everyone loves them this way and they make a great holiday party nibble.

Over the weekend I spent a long time reviewing the new Food52 cookbook that I just received in the mail last month. As you may recall, Food52 is a website that hosts weekly themed recipe contests and compiles the winners into a series of the cookbooks. This is the first cookbook in their series and I have three (3!) recipes in it. I was so excited to win these contests and it is absolutely awesome to see them in print. Of course, I follow the website closely and a lot of my friends and fellow food bloggers also have awesome recipes in the book. I highly recommend checking out…, .. and ….. . If you don’t know the site, don’t worry, this cookbook stands on its own and is great to cook from. A vast majority of the recipes lend themselves perfectly to naptime cooking and entertaining. There are even several short and quick dishes that would be perfect powernap recipes!

We are green bean fanatics around these parts. My husband and I can’t get enough of the them and my daughter is even coming around. Last summer my friend told me about a favorite green bean salad with tarragon vinegar her Mom makes and the idea stuck with me. I adore the earthy must of tarragon and can see how it would pair so well with green beans. Since I didn’t have her recipe on hand I decided to wing it on my own, taking care to use only basic ingredients I could easily buy in Florida.

In today’s naptime webisode I am canning apple pie filling with my Dad. As most of you know, I love canning with my Dad. And, despite the fact that he bought me my very own canning equipment for our home in Connecticut, I still like to do it with him when we visit Cooperstown. In this webisode you’ll notice my lips moving while I talk over the picture, that is because Dad and I were chatting the entire time we did this project. We were catching up on all the news around town and, of course, all the happenings at pre-school here in Connecticut. Our canning projects are more than just the chance to preserve delicious food, they are our time to catch up with each other.

This year my daughter is going to be a pink lollipop for Halloween. It is a fitting ode to her favorite treat and a nice imaginative costume, I think. For better or worse, this also means that I have to make her costume this year. Some people seemed surprised when they hear I am not a crafty person. But I am not lying when I say I can barely sew a button. All this is to say that on this particular fall day it was especially important I make a simple meal ahead of time so I could dedicate the afternoon while she was at school to making her costume.

Apple picking is easy, so easy that we often pick wayyy more apples than we need. Hence, I bring them home, put my daughter down for a quick snooze, or usher her off to school, while I make several batches of apple chips, apple bread and apple snack muffins. I usually often make scalloped apples that night for dinner! Every year I try to add a few new apple recipes to my repertoire to keep things interesting. Last week I decided this years new dish would be a traditional apple crumble with the additional of caramel sauce and chopped crystallized ginger. I loved the idea of giving a favorite food a new twist.

The lower temperatures of fall have arrived and they are slowly inspiring me to revisit my cold weather cooking favorites. The weather isn’t terribly cold yet, but it is too cool for gazpacho and cold chicken salad. I am turning the page to warmer soups and heartier baked dinners. This newest weeknight chicken dish was inspired by my daughter’s recent favorite snack, Craisins. I constantly toss them into salads and have always wanted to try them out in more savory dishes. When a bag literally fell out of the cupboard last week as I was reaching for some graham crackers I took it as a sign that it was time to try!

I have perfected yellow cake with chocolate frosting because it is my husband’s absolute favorite cake of all time. When we first started dating he informed me of this and mentioned that Duncan Hines was his preferred mix. I shuddered. A cake from a box? Perish the thought! This classic cake is one of those recipes you should have down pat since it can be used for just about any occasion. This time I made it I even gave it my own special twist, browning the butter at the beginning to infuse the cake with a deeper, nuttier flavor.