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I absolutely love this drink! It’s perfect for the holidays and cold weather and it tastes like a dessert, while still being fairly low-cal. It takes only a couple of minutes to whip this up, so please give it a try!

Ingredients (for 1 cup)

3/4 of a mug or cup of milk (whatever you’re serving this in)
3 teaspoons of Ovaltine Rich Chocolate
1/2 shot of Kahlua, or another coffee liqueur
Whipped cream
Cinnamon

Directions

1. Microwave milk in mug or cup until warm, usually about 1:30 to 2 minutes, depending on your microwave.

2. Add half a shot of Kahlua and stir.

3. Top with whipped cream and sprinkle with cinnamon. Stir if desired.

Great for entertaining and a fabulous holiday appetizer! If you’ve never tried Brie, you have to give it a try. It’s one of the creamiest cheeses out there with a slight nutty flavor. Sure, you can make a baked brie torte, but this recipe puts a nice twist on traditional baked brie, scales much better (it’s easy to put out some more when you’re running low), and can be served as finger food, no silverware required!

Ingredients

Cranberry-Orange Sauce, recipe found below
1 French baguette
1 wedge of French Brie, any kind

Directions

1. Take out the Brie about half an hour before you assemble this appetizer. It’s easiest to cut when it’s at room temperature.

2. Once you’ve made the cranberry-orange sauce, put it on low heat so it stays warm.

3. Cut French baguette into small, round wedges and top with a slice of Brie. Put in the toaster oven until Brie starts to melt and bubbles up a little.

4. Take out the bread and top with a small spoon of cranberry-orange sauce.

For a nice variation, you can also try thinly sliced pieces of red onion on top of the Brie. Serve with chilled wine.

This is my favorite way to make cranberry sauce for the holidays. You should definitely give it a try before you opt for canned cranberry sauce. It’s quick, easy, and great for entertaining as well.

Ingredients

1/2 12 Oz bag of fresh cranberries
5 teaspoons of brown sugar, lightly packed
1 teaspoon of orange liquor or triple sec
1 cinnamon stick
Zest of 1 orange
1/4 cup of water, more if needed

Directions

1. Wash the cranberries and carefully zest the orange. You want to make sure that you don’t grate the white part of the skin of the orange, which is bitter. The zest itself is full of fragrant oils that will add great flavor and freshness to the sauce.

2. Once you’ve washed the cranberries and zested the orange, put a medium saucepan on medium heat and add the cranberries, brown sugar, cinnamon stick, zest, orange liquor, and water. Stir from time to time until cranberries start to pop.

3. Reduce to low heat and cook until your desired consistency has been reached. Keep stirring from time to time and add more water if needed. Add more brown sugar if the cranberries are too tart and you like for the sauce to be a little sweeter.

Not sure what to serve this with? Of course there’s turkey and traditional holiday foods, but try the cranberry-brie bites, for an easy holiday appetizer. Also try topping waffles or pancakes with this. Add a dollop of whipped cream and you’re brunch is good to go.

Take the Spinach and Mushroom Risotto (below) and top it with the following:

Ingredients (for 4 people)

1/2 cup of grated parmesan cheese
1/2 cup of bread crumbs
1/4 cup of sundried tomatoes, coarsely chopped OR
3/4 cup of crumbled bacon (pan fried or microwaved)

Directions

1. Prepare the spinach and mushroom risotto according to directions.

2. Preheat oven to 350.

3. Crumble bacon or chop up sundried tomatoes (these usually come in jars). If you want to be really adventurous, try topping the casserole with both! Morningstar Farms also makes a veggie bacon if you want to keep this meat-free.

4. Top the risotto with all ingredients and bake for 5-10 minutes, or until cheese has melted. If you want to speed up the process, put the dish under the broiler for a few minutes. Enjoy!

This dish is great by itself, but also try the Risotto bake for a casserole-like variation.

Ingredients (for 4 people)

1/2 bag of fresh spinach
1 container of baby bella (portobello) mushrooms, sliced
1 cup of Arborio rice
3 cups of vegetable or chicken broth
5 medium cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped
2 tablespoons of olive oil
1/4 stick of butter
A handful of pine nuts
Salt to taste
Water, as needed

Directions

1. Chop the garlic and saute the Arborio rice in the butter in a medium sauce pan on medium heat for about 2 minutes. Add the broth and bring to a boil.

2. Reduce heat to medium-low and stir occasionally. Keep cooking until rice is al dente. If needed, add more water. The risotto should be creamy and not too dry when done.

3. Slice the mushrooms and saute with the spinach and garlic in olive oil, add salt to taste. When spinach is just wilted, add in the pine nuts and saute for 2 more minutes.

4. Add to the warm risotto until mixed well and serve immediately.

A wonderful weekday side dish that’s ready in minutes. Top with French fried onions and take to a potluck or serve as a Thanksgiving dinner side. The nice thing about this side is that you can turn it into a vegetarian dish by simply adding soy instead of ground meat. Or, if you like your greens all by themselves, leave out the soy or meat and serve alone. Either way should be great.

Ingredients (for 2 people)

1/2 16 Oz bag of frozen turnip greens
1 cup of soy crumbles, ground turkey or beef
1/2 onion, chopped
1/2 stick (4 tablespoons) of butter
A pinch of nutmeg
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Chop onion and melt butter in pan on medium heat.

2. Add soy, turkey, or beef, and onions and saute until lightly browned.

3. Microwave frozen turnips for 2 minutes and add to pan. Add nutmeg (goes great with dark greens), salt, and pepper.

4. Saute for another 5-7 minutes. Serve warm.

Don’t be intimidated when you see the list of ingredients for this recipe, it’s a lot easier than it looks and extremely satisfying if you enjoy rich, Indian food. If you cook fairly frequently, you probably have most of these ingredients already. Otherwise, a quick trip to the Indian grocery store will get you most of what you need. If you want to be truly authentic, you can make the paneer yourself and make your own tomato sauce out of fresh tomatoes. If you’re like me and want to make this after you come home pretty late from work, you can use the short cuts I suggest =).

Ingredients

2 cups of fried paneer
1 15 oz can tomato sauce
1 cup of heavy cream, more if desired
1/2 stick of butter
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 cinnamon stick
4 cardamom pods
1/2 teaspoon of mustard seeds
1/2 teaspoon of garam masala
1/2 teaspoon of turmeric powder
1/2 teaspoon of cumin powder
1/2 teaspoon of red chili powder
1 teaspoon of coriander powder
1 teaspoon of honey (any kind)
1 teaspoon of salt
2 teaspoons of dried fenugreek
2 teaspoons of tandoori masala
2 teaspoons of sugar
2 teaspoons of ginger-garlic paste
1/4 cup of chopped red onion
1 medium tomato, chopped
1 handful of cilantro, chopped

Directions

Melt the butter and comibine with the olive oil on medium heat. Add the ginger-garlic paste, cardamom, cinnamon, mustard seeds, tomato, red onion, and half the amount of cilantro. Saute for about 5 minutes, then add the garam masala, tumeric powder, cumin powder, red chili powder, and coriander powder. Stir and saute for another 2 minutes. Add the tomato sauce, then the heavy cream, fenugreek, salt, sugar, tandoori powder, and honey. Adjust amount of heavy cream based on creamyness or color desired. Cook for about 5 minutes, then add the paneer. Lower heat to medium-low and cook for another 5 minutes. Take off heat and garnish with cilantro. Serve with warm rotis or rice.

Variation

Saute 2-inch pieces of chicken breast in the butter and olive oil (until almost completely cooked) before adding other ingredients to turn this into chicken makhani. As always, make sure the chicken is completely cooked before serving.

This is great for if you’re just getting started with rotis since this is one of the most basic recipes.

Ingredients

2 cups of chapati flour, all-purpose flour, or whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon of ghee or melted butter
3/4 to 1 cup of warm water, adjust as needed
1 teaspoon of salt (optional)
Some extra ghee or melted butter for basting
Some flour on the side, for rolling the dough

Directions

Mix two cups of chapati flour (available at Indian grocery stores), all-purpose flour, or whole wheat flour with ghee and water. Add salt if desired. Let stand for 10 to 15 minutes. Dough should be soft, but not too sticky. Break of 10 balls from the dough and flatten one at a time with a dough roller, adding flour to the roller and surface as needed, so that the dough does not stick. Put a medium frying pan on medium to high heat and cook rotis for about a minute or two on each side, or until they are a nice and light gold in color. Baste with butter or ghee when done and cover with aluminum foil so that the rotis stay warm. If you want to make these extra authentic, you can puff up the rotis on high heat on open flame, but please be careful when doing this since it’s pretty easy to put the roti on fire, especially if it has some flour on it. Enjoy!

This is a very easy recipe that’s great for entertaining! I copied Ina Garten’s recipe, which can be found here: Fruit tart recipe. Rather than copying that recipe on the blog, I will just give you a few tips and will tell you what I did differently:

• Instead of using plums, I used quartered nectarines and blue berries to make this tart more colorful.
• I used an 11 inch tart pan instead of a 9 inch one. If you do this, you will need to multiply the amounts by 1.5.
• Don’t worry if your crust mixture is more of a paste instead of crumbs. Just tightly press the mixture into the pan and separate out out small lumps of the mixture to top the fruit.
• Ripe fruits work best here. You can certainly substitute other fruits, but blueberries give almost all other types of fruits a nice touch and sweet, mellow flavor. They melt nicely as well.
• You can leave out the egg yolk if you’re cooking for vegetarians who don’t eat eggs. If you’re using an 11 inch tart pan, I would still only use 1 egg yolk, since it’s hard to separate out 1.5 egg yolks.
• Serve this for breakfast with some coffee and croissants. Alternatively, you can serve this, slight warm, for dessert with some caramel drizzled on top and a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream.

This is my mom’s recipe and is absolutely my favorite way to eat eggplant! Don’t worry about using whole cloves of garlic…this won’t make the eggplant too garlicky since roasted garlic has a nice and mellow flavor.

Ingredients

1 medium eggplant
About 9 to 10 whole cloves of garlic, peeled
2 teaspoons of olive oil
1 teaspoon of garam masala
1 teaspoon of coriander powder
1/2 teaspoon of turmeric powder
1/2 teaspoon of cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon of mustard seeds
1/2 teaspoon of red chili powder

Directions

Preheat your oven to 500 degrees (yup, you read that right). Carve 1 to 2 inch slits all around the eggplant and cut off the front part (with leaves attached). Insert whole garlic cloves into the slits and cover the entire eggplant with aluminim foil. Bake in the oven for 1 to 1.5 hours, until eggplant is soft. Cool the eggplant for about 15 minutes, or until it is cool enough to pick up. Remove the skin and mash the eggplant with garlic in it in microwave safe bowl. Heat olive oil, garam masala, coriander powder, turmeric powder, cumin seeds, mustard seed, and red chili powder on medium-high heat until seeds start to pop. Add to the mashed eggpland and mix together. If the eggplant is cool, microwave for 1 to 2 minutes. Serve hot with rice or rotis.