Columns

Homemade Gift Week: Don’t forget to enter below to enter the Duda Farm Fresh Giveaway for a Meyer Lemons, a $25 Williams-Sonoma giftcard and a KitchenAid Artisan 5-Quart Stand Mixer in Majestic Yellow. Entry rules below, click here for contest introduction.

This is the latest installment of my Tales from the Trenches Series. An ongoing series where friends and readers share their stories and recipes about the great food they fit into family life. We all have tips and tricks to share with each other: when we cook, what we cook and how we cook the delicious food we love to eat. If you are interested in contributing a story and recipe please feel free to contact me. Today my friend Winnie of Healthy Green Kitchen is sharing an amazing recipe for her favorite homemade chocolate bark, a simple and delicious holiday gift.

When it comes to holiday presents, I am a big fan of giving (and receiving!) those that are homemade. I preserve lots of jams and fruit butters throughout the summer and fall, and I save them in my pantry to give to family and friends during the holiday season. I also make big batches of granola which I package up to give away.

Homemade Gift Week: Don’t forget to enter below to enter the Duda Farm Fresh Giveaway for a Meyer Lemons, a $25 Williams-Sonoma giftcard and a KitchenAid Artisan 5-Quart Stand Mixer in Majestic Yellow. Entry rules below, click here for contest introduction.

I am filing this under “naptime entertaining” because flavored dipping oils are one of my favorite things to have on hand when we entertain. I love slicing up a baguette and pouring little pools of oil in various shallow bowls for people to sample while we wait for dinner to be ready. I’ve come to love coming up with new oil flavors based on what is fresh in my herb pot which is, by the way, thriving in our bedroom for the winter months. These oils are so simple to make and poured into pretty glass bottles they make beautiful gifts!

Welcome to Naptime Chef homemade gift week! This week we are going to talk all about edible homemade gifts. I, for one, am so excited to give my friends some of my favorite homemade gifts this season. Do you make anything for your friends and family? I’ve heard some people say they are hesitant to give edible homemade gifts because they think it means they have to tackle complicated, intimidating recipes. But I can assure you this is not the case. There are many tasty and easy recipes that are very simple to make and are terrific presents. Those are the ones we will talk about this week!

Holiday Cookie Week!: Don’t forget to enter to win my HUGE holiday cookie week baking package giveaway, details below!

I just couldn’t do a whole week of cookies without mentioning these favorites, Buttery Pecan Snowballs. They might actually be the most ubiquitous holiday cookie of all time (or are did they originate as Mexican wedding cookies, or tea cakes in Russia?) and I do not know of one person who doesn’t like them. My Mom’s recipe has always called for pecans so that is what I use in ours. Like a true Powernap recipe, these cookies are an absolute cinch to make. The dough calls for four ingredients assembled in one bowl. Then they are rolled up and baked before be covered with a light dusting of sugar.

The Occasion: Early Mom holiday get together.

Menu: Champagne, holiday cookies galore!

Attendees: 10 mommies!

Naptime Goals: Bake cookies and make frosting, then sandwich cookies right before the event!

Holiday Cookie Week!:Don’t forget to enter to win my HUGE holiday cookie week baking package giveaway, details below!

When some Moms and I decided to get together for an early holiday gathering we all agreed to bring some tasty cookies. It wasn’t a cookie swap per se, more like a cookie potluck. I asked around for ideas on what people wanted and got a whole variety of requests, but the two that stuck out to be were eggnog cookies and snickerdoodles. At first I thought about doing both cookies separately and then I thought, heck no, I’ll combine them!

This is the latest installment of my Tales from the Trenches Series. An ongoing series where friends and readers share their stories and recipes about the great food they fit into family life. We all have tips and tricks to share with each other: when we cook, what we cook and how we cook the delicious food we love to eat. If you are interested in contributing a story and recipe please feel free to contact me. Today my friend’s Cara Eisenpress and Phoebe Lapine, the talented bloggers behind Big Girls, Small Kitchen and Small Kitchen College are sharing one of their favorite holiday cookie recipes. Be sure to check out their first cookbook, In the Small Kitchen: 100 Recipes from Our Year of Cooking in the Real World, it was published in May and makes a fabulous holiday gift!

Holiday Cookie Week!:Don’t forget to enter to win my HUGE holiday cookie week baking package giveaway, details below!

Around this time last year, as our Thanksgiving fullness waned and our tummies grumbled in anticipation of holiday food, we had the opportunity to attend not one but two cookie swaps.

Full admission: we’re not sure we’d ever been to a cookie swap before those two invitations landed in our inbox, but the idea is pretty genius, and of course we caught right on. If it’s not obvious (it wasn’t to us!), here’s how it works: everyone in attendance makes enough cookies for everyone else in attendance to take at least one of each variety home. Participants put out their own cookies, fill up empty boxes, and leave with a far vaster assortment of cookies than they’d ever have had the patience to make themselves. Like a potluck, a format of which we’re very fond, since it cuts down so much on prep time and clean up. And a cookie swap is even more productive than our philosophy of BYOB to dinner parties, since normally by the end of those there isn’t anything to take home. All the wine’s been drunk.

Welcome to Naptime Chef Holiday Cookie Week! I am a huge fan of baking holiday cookies and I know I am not the only one. This week I want to hear all about your naptime cookie baking. Are you working with tried and true recipes? Experimenting with new ones? Do share! Of course, no Naptime Chef theme week would be complete without a great giveaway package. Today I have loads of goodies you will love for your holiday baking!

The Occasion: Afternoon chili bar in a snowstorm!

Menu: Chicken Chili, Melissa Clark’s Whole Wheat Honey Cornbread, Pumpkin-Ginger Tart, Beer & Wine

Attendees: Party of 6 adults, 3 kids

Naptime Goals: Bake cornbread, prepare chili.

The weekend before Halloween we invited some friends up from New York for the weekend. Our mutual friends, who live in our Connecticut neighborhood, were also invited over for lunch with their kids so we could all catch up together. We had expected to celebrate a late fall weekend with a hot lunch and plenty of fresh air and then, wouldn’t you know it, it snowed! Snow is no big deal around here in, say, January, but it was highly unusual in late October. We didn’t lose power during the Snowtober drama, thank goodness, but if we did it wouldn’t have been a problem – we had steaming bowls of chili and the most amazing sweet cornbread to last us all weekend long.

A Winter Village as decorated by a little kid (ps – my fancy camera is in the shop!)

It’s that time of year again – time to plan holiday gifts for family and friends! I am a huge advocate of giving homemade gifts for Christmas. Giving a simple bag of homemade candy bark or jar of hot fudge sauce is a heartfelt way to show friendship and happiness and is much less expensive than buying bags of gifties at hefty retail prices. I am planning an entire week dedicated to homemade kitchen gifts that are naptime cooking-friendly in early December, so stay tuned. Today we are going to talk about planning for these gifts and things to consider in your gift giving this year, including some great ideas for reasonable gifts from Red Envelope to pair with your homemade delicacies.

This is the latest installment of my Powernap column. The series where I share quick, easy food that can be made for all kinds of situations. Powernaps are short and sweet, and so are these recipes. These are the things I make in a jiffy when I need a quick snack, am in the mood for a recipe experiment, or simply need to clean out the pantry.

Last week I bought my first fresh cranberries of the season. They were floating loose in a container of water at the grocery store and I quickly scooped up a a few cupfuls to bring home. Though I often make cranberry sauce and cranberry cakes this time of year, this time I wanted to make something sweet that my daughter would love, but with a healthier slant, so I turned to these muffins. Today I am excited to be sharing the recipe with the Macy’s mBlog and they have generously donated a gorgeous Red Martha’s Stewart Ceramic Covered Casserole Dish for me to giveaway to one lucky person!

I make it no secret that I am a huge fan of Magnolia Bakery. Not very long ago I lived, literally, right around the corner from the UWS location. It was a very dangerous time. I used to walk at least five times around the block before purchasing a cupcake, then walked around several more times after eating it. It was always worth it. As luck would have it, last week my friend Nicole and I went to delicious Thanksgiving dessert tasting at that very store to sample some of the amazing desserts they are offering this Thanksgiving season.

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 Cara’s Secret Ingredient Beef Stew, Veronica’s Secret Cookies. 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!