And then fall swept in just as we flipped the calendar, like it knew we were turning the page on summer. I was ready to heat up my kitchen again after several weeks of warm weather. I was ready for socks again, too.

And then–back to the dinner menu–I came across the Unfussy Apple Cake (101 Cookbooks), and worked backwards from there. It was going to be the perfect dessert centerpiece for an unfussy evening.

After the apple cake was finished baking (the quickest thing ever!), I wrapped the pork tenderloins snugly (like tucking my daughter in for the night) for the Prosciutto Wrapped Pork with Sweet Potatoes and Pears (Real Simple). This is the unfussiest recipe of them all. It literally takes about four flicks of the wrist, eight swift chops, and a creatively messy arrangement of sweet potatoes, pears, and thyme on a baking sheet–then you add the pork bundles.

I whipped up a quick spinach salad with chopped walnuts, pomegranate seeds, and a dribble of oil and balsamic–dinner was done.

The kitchen smelled divine. It smelled like fall.

Fall might just be my favorite cooking season. What’s yours? Do you have a favorite fall menu?

Sarah Fullerton, content marketing & editing. Armed with a masters in journalism from Northwestern, a passion for all things cooking, and a perpetual oven mitt, Sarah loves nothing more than to camp out in the kitchen with a new recipe, interpret it creatively (a dash of this, a dash of that), and then surprise her husband and daughter, her friends, and herself with the results. Sarah’s favorite recipe. She can be contacted at sarah [at] plummelo [dot] com.

To some, crispy restaurant potato skins have virtues of their own. But for me? They are merely a vehicle for shoveling sour cream in mixed company. If it were socially acceptable for me to eat sour cream straight out of the container with a spoon, I’d do it. I mock Shakespeare: sour cream, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways… consequently, I have adopted a love of all foods Mexican simply because they pair so well with my favorite condiment.

Even though I don’t have a drop of Mexican blood, I heart Cinco de Mayo because it gives me an excuse to create a fun Mexican menu (see below), dinner guests optional. Enchiladas will be the main course. I’ll present my dear husband with a perfectly tart, salted margarita when he gets in the door. We’ll nosh on guacamole with our favorite Green Mountain Gringo White Tortilla Strips (sour cream on the side). Now can I get a dollop of Daisy?

Recipe Review: Barefoot Contessa / Ina Garten’s Real Margaritas

Maybe I just have a plain old crush on the Barefoot Contessa, but for me she always gets it right. This is the perfect margarita recipe. Ina provides instructions for how to do it on the rocks or frozen, however you prefer, and the recipe itself serves six. If that doesn’t say “party time,” I don’t know what does!

There are two keys that make this cocktail truly spectacular: one is fresh lemon and lime juice (a snap if you have a citrus juicer) and the other is using white tequila. Patron is a good example. It’s a little more expensive than the standard Cuervo, but when you’re using just a few star ingredients, it’s smart to buy the best you can afford.

Whether you like your rim plain, sugared, or salted, whether you like your drink frozen or on the rocks… just say tequila.

Robin Horrigan is a stay at home mom to a 6-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter. She is the cruise director for her busy family, keeping the calendar full of the stuff that makes life worth living, but leaves plenty of time to shop for shoes. When they’re all at home, you’ll find the Horrigans knee-deep in chocolate chips and cookie racks, baking treats together that celebrate the four seasons and even the silliest of holidays.

My father carving a beautifully roasted lamb, my brothers exclaiming over the silky texture of the chilled soup, the children relishing their brussels sprouts… it just doesn’t happen.

What does happen is that the kids are hungry long before the meal is ready, they need their plates of food dished first, something spills to soak the tablecloth and there are 17 requests for refills and other accompaniments all at different moments. By the time my sister in law, my Mom and I all sit down to actually eat our own meals, we’re sweating and exhausted. And our chilled soup has actually gotten warm.

For Easter this year, my solution to the usual chaos is a Barefoot Contessa-inspired casual brunch buffet that has foods to please the adults as well as the kids with very few modifications. I’ll do a station outside the kitchen for coffee, juice and the Peach Bellinis. The Sour Cream Coffee Cake and dessert will be made a day ahead of time. I have a double oven, so the Orange Baked Ham can go in one while the asparagus roasts in another (small kitchen hint: if you only have one oven, try steaming the asparagus instead of roasting–it will still please people). Hands’ on tasks: arrange the salad, carve the ham, and scramble a huge pan of eggs. This will leave me plenty of time to enjoy the short as well as the tall folks in my family, no sweating required.

I’ll put aside a little bit of fruit from the Fruity Spinach Salad for the kids, and I’ll need to omit the nuts from the coffee cake recipe because of an allergy, but otherwise this menu will please the entire crowd. Lastly, my friend Eleanor’s genius idea of turning a simple pan of brownies into Easter Brownie Cups would charm even the most hard-hearted adult. View her instructions here. I found the edible Easter grass at Target.

The great thing about brunch is that it is so easy to add to and change without messing with the overall theme of the meal. If this menu is too sweet for you or you need another dish, try a wild rice salad. Need more bread? Brioche and fruit butter or fresh bagels and flavored cream cheeses would be perfect. Happy Easter!

Photo courtesy of Eleanor Touchet

I was a self-taught cook—mainly by trial and error. Most cooks learned from an older family member who knew their way around the kitchen blindfolded and had all their treasured recipes in their head (with no quantities, they just knew). My mother will admit that she is not the most enthusiastic cook, and I didn’t live near enough to my grandmothers growing up to learn in that manner like so many women do. My sister wasn’t into it until much later, and so I was pretty much on my own.

I envy that, for my aunt (who learned much of her cooking from my grandmother), putting a delicious home-cooked meal on the table for us is not only an expression of love but also she makes it look effortless. So I asked her what her secrets are.

Make ahead. She takes full advantage of a spare freezer in the garage and pulls out what she needs when she needs it. She made ahead the stuffed chicken breasts so that she didn’t have to spend quite as much time cooking on our weekend together. She baked them on a cookie sheet and they were magically ready at dinnertime (this is the seemingly effortless skill to which I referred). Same for the beef stew and the cake. I’m sure it was hard work for her, but to the untrained eye, she seemed to whip it all up in a matter of an hour.

Avoid tending to something on the stove. I watched her chop a few sweet potatoes and throw them into a crock pot with some butter. She could then set the gadget on high for 6 hours and avoid babysitting a pot. This is one trick I will surely try at home. The mashed sweet potatoes were perfectly creamy and melted in my mouth.

Canning and freezing fresh fruit and vegetables when they are in season. This deserves its own post.

See what I learned in a few short days of watching a more experienced cook? These lessons are invaluable.

My sister, whose husband is half Italian-American, tells me that her mother-in-law is her primary go-to source at holidays. And both of us have been known to call upon our step-mother, who also cooks by heart, for those big-piece-of-meat type dinners.

We always seem to call on those who have trodden the road before us, and they always seem to have the answers–because they learned from the generations before them.

Who do you look to for lessons in cooking?

When I was invited to join the group, I had hesitations. Making dinner for a football team’s worth of people seemed daunting, and the initial outlay of money in ingredients was a bit stressful–cooking for myself meant that hefty grocery bills could be mentally amortized across a week or two. There were also the ideological considerations: all of us were vegetarians, but at the time I was much less adventurous than most. My friend Ray, while breathlessly encouraging me to jump onboard, rhapsodized about an entree based largely on tempeh they had all enjoyed the previous week; I felt myself subtly recoil. Tempeh?

Ultimately, the one incontrovertibly strong deciding factor that impelled me to say yes was my own need for connection. What drew me to the group initially–along with Ray and several other members of the group, both male and female–was the fact that it represented something all of us were craving. A healthier relationship with food, a familiar and beautiful ritual in the middle of days that often felt uncertain, the chance to nurture those you cared about when you previously hadn’t been sure you could even take care of yourself: dinner group offered our group of twenty- and thirty-somethings a chance to actively shape who we wanted to be as eaters and sharers of food.

The 12 friends split into 6 pairs and each duo cooked a dinner for the group once every 2 weeks. That was the simple part. I quickly learned to scale up my cooking for many people, plan menus to stretch ingredients, and cook multiple courses simultaneously on my two-burner studio apartment kitchenette. (The secret there is to constantly stay in motion; cooking becomes a kind of high speed, twirling ballet.)

What excited me most was the thrill of menu planning. While not overly competitive, I will admit that all of us quickly learned what each pair’s strong points were–and that we took pleasure in outdoing ourselves week after week. Over dinner, we’d talk about classes, our jobs, our hopes, and dreams. Sharing each other’s homes and tables night after night led to a desire to nurture each other–and also a desire to surprise.

One group excelled at inventive salads; another pair’s forte was exquisite Southern comfort food. Two others provided wonderful picnic-esque spreads (they were living on a boat at the time, so this was no surprise). My partner and I specialized in combining unusual, unexpected tastes.

For me, these often took the form of desserts–including the quirkily titled beeramisu, which has become a staple of mine. (Don’t let the name fool you; it’s a subtle and elegant dessert. I usually replace the stout with a fruity Belgian beer, like Lindemans Frambois Lambic or Peche.)

The experience of needing to pull food together quickly while keeping it fresh and exciting has become a signature part of my cooking style. Cooking for multiple people, while it can initially seem like a chore, becomes an incredible gift when what you’re doing is using food to make people think, or smile, or open up. I treasure what I learned about myself in that group, the capacity I discovered that I have to give.

Let me first tell you about how Dan and I usually get our meal on the table. Many of our dinners are planned over email with subject lines like, “What’s for din din tonight?” With both of us toiling away at our respective jobs all day it can be hard to plan our meals in advance. In an ideal world, I would map out everything for the week on Sunday, but The Dan Factor can often work against this since he enjoys the spontaneity of deciding a meal the day of.

This is where our planning and shopping styles begin to diverge—but for the sake of love, let’s say our differences complement each other perfectly.

Our trips to the grocery store are often met with this same challenge: I have my list mapped out by aisle, and Dan is spur of the moment—finding inspiration in the endless options in the produce and meat aisles and spontaneously adding them to the cart. (I do confess, however, that some of his best meals have come from this approach; the pork butt for pulled pork was probably my favorite.)

As the baker in the duo, everything to me is mapped out in advance and I know that an exact amount of each ingredient will yield a cake, or a bread–I think of it as a science, so I need to be slightly more planning-oriented. But as the chef, Dan doesn’t need to follow a recipe and feels comfortable experimenting.

Both self-taught, by TV and an endless supply of foodie magazines, we have managed to master what most couples often fear: cooking together.

As we thought about what to make for this year’s dinner I was reminded of the first dinner Dan cooked for me. The menu was delivered in advance via email, and I still have it. We thought Valentine’s Day would be the perfect opportunity to re-create that meal.

In the dessert department, I decided to create a surprise dish for Dan and he had to guess the secret ingredient. For Valentine’s Day I had to go with a decadent chocolate treat. The molten cake’s secret ingredient? Espresso powder. I’m pleased to say, I stumped Dan on this one.

We’ve learned to cook together and share the triumphs and failures that go along with it. This Valentine’s Day dinner was a success, but I’m sure we’ll have some more obstacles in the kitchen. And whether the meal is planned a week in advance or on the spot we aim to make it as delicious as possible!

Don’t forget the Champagne and the romance. These are both key ingredients.

Photos by Melissa Devereaux

When my book club started meeting 10 years ago (it’s hard to believe it’s been that long!), the woman hosting would set out some appetizers–cheese and crackers, maybe some grapes, veggies with hummus, some nuts–and we would actually talk about the book. Not the whole time, but enough to do it justice and call it a book club.

Over the course of time, it evolved into a much loved and much savored evening of sharing and bonding. It also evolved into dinner. This was an impromptu decision by one of the women, who is known to to be the foodiest among us. One night the 5 of us arrive at her city pad expecting a spread of munchies but instead are greeted by a pasta feast of spaghetti and meatballs.

And the bar kept rising, month after month. We would comment each time, “Oh no, how am I going to top this?” and think to ourselves “How am I going to not embarrass myself or look like a slacker?”

Years later, the woman who had her take-out menus organized rather than her recipes surprised us with a beef tenderloin and asparagus on the grill–invoking excitement mixed with fear and trepidation at the expectation of providing a meal of that caliber once our turn came around.

When it has been my turn to host the group of 6, I have tried a few menus, but the common theme is really good food that impresses but is surprisingly simple to prepare. After all, we’d rather spend our time chatting with friends, not tending to food.

I’ll make a big salad in the summer, a stew in the winter. In fact, a nicoise salad on a pretty platter worked so well I have served it more than once. Last winter I made a hearty and healthy stew and served it with bread and green salad.

It doesn’t need to be anything fancy. While we always enjoy the food and wine, what we enjoy most is laughing with friends. We’re over trying to impress each other. We still like to fool everyone into thinking it’s actually an in-depth discussion about the book.

Girlfriends will find any excuse to get together. And what better way to spend a cold Saturday than with food and friends. In order to justify our absence from our husbands and kids, we decided we’d better find a way to benefit them as well.

And girlfriends trust each other. Girlfriends share their opinions about everything–recipes and food are no exception. Most women I know are always looking for their next batch of great recipes, so we decided to get together and test some out.

The ultimate goal was to come home with four meals to enjoy throughout the week (or stash in the freezer for a busy night).

We accomplished several things during our three hours together this weekend: quality time, trying new recipes, and preparing meals to take home for our families. Here is how it went.

I invited 5 girlfriends who, like me, are busy moms who are into cooking and trying new recipes but are short on time. Six people was the perfect size. The dads planned on staying home for some quality time with the little ones.

I looked through my recipes on Plummelo for a few important criteria: little to no cooking on prep day; highly freezeable; no more than about 10 ingredients each; and using relatively inexpensive ingredients. We narrowed it down to 4. We wanted to start out with an attainable goal.

I saved these 4 recipes to My Recipes on Plummelo and emailed them to my friends so they could save them into their recipe boxes as well. I put the recipes into My Plans and then into My Shopping List.

Here was the part where Plummelo really saved the day in this planning process: Once the recipes were in my shopping list, Plummelo adjusted the servings for me!

For 6 people, we needed everything times 6 (for a grand total of a lot of food). The recipe showed number of servings as 4, so I entered 24 (4 x 6), and the Plummelo shopping list automatically changed all the quantities for me (for example, 1 1/2 cups of ricotta became 9 cups of ricotta).

I then hit “Email Shopping List” on Plummelo and sent the combined list to my friends. We divvied up the shopping by section of the grocery store (which was also easy because the Plummelo shopping list is divided by category, such as Meat, Produce), and each went grocery shopping on our own schedule and planned to arrive with the assigned items.

One friend and I hit Costco for all the meat, and the others went on their respective treasure hunts. I was surprised at how little effort went into the shopping when we divided and conquered.

The day of, I packed it up the food and a few essentials (including my favorite knife), ready to take to the hosting friend’s house. We allowed 3 hours for our cooking adventure, with some time built in for girl talk and munching on freshly baked muffins.

We started out with the Chicken Marbella. One team of two trimmed the chicken thighs, another team minced garlic (of course, with the garlic gadget!), and another team measured spices, olives, capers, and prunes. In no time our chicken was marinating in the bowl, and we divided the massive quantity into 6 Ziploc freezer bags for each family to pull out on the designated night.

The routine went like this for the remaining recipes. Chopping and dicing, dividing and conquering (and washing some dishes in between). Meal prep is much more fun when it is organized in advance and shared with good friends. It’s also more fun digging into a huge bowl of ground turkey when wearing plastic gloves! We had a lot of laughs about food favorites and not-so-favorites, cooking blunders, and each other’s techniques, and fed each other bites of blueberry muffin while we worked. It didn’t seem like work at all.

It took us two and a half hours and $37.50 per family (that’s less than $10 per meal) to make 4 delicious meals that are ready for our loved ones to enjoy. Economies of scale definitely pay off!

Now we each have 4 new recipes in our repertoire and 4 new meals for the week. And after receiving a big thank you from more than one of the husbands, I know we have a hall pass for another girls’ afternoon out.

Try planning a cooking day with your friends. Let us know how it goes.

That was the usual routine in our house.

Under my roof there are two working parents and three active kids (one with food allergies, which made finding recipes often tricky), for a total of five hungry bodies. Preparing for dinner–from thinking about what we wanted to eat to making a shopping list to getting to the grocery store to starting to chop the vegetables–was never easy. The “process” was disorganized and disconnected.

When you love to eat and you want to cook a delicious, healthy meal for your family but you’re short on time, you need a solution. We were in desperate need of a more efficient meal planning, preparation, shopping, and cooking process from start to finish.

That, in short, is how Plummelo was born.

I’m not only the founder, but I’m also a daily user. Not to mock the Hair Club for Men slogan, but Plummelo fixed just about all of our former problems in meal planning.

Here are a few of the major hurdles my wife and I were encountering (pre-Plummelo):

Old problem: My recipes are scattered. Some in a recipe box, some in the pages of an old magazine, some in miscellaneous computer files, some in my head. If I found a recipe online, I had trouble finding it again. New solution: My recipes are all in one place. Not only are they categorized, tagged, and searchable, but I can rate the ones we love and delete the ones we don’t.

Old problem: The hardest part is figuring out what to cook this week. New solution: I can quickly browse my recipes, look at what other people on Plummelo are cooking, and get new ideas.

Old problems: Making a shopping list from my recipes takes too long. New solution: Now I don’t even have to write out the shopping list. I can drag and drop my recipes for the week into My Plans and Plummelo automatically populates a grocery list for me. My wife can hit “Email Shopping List” and it comes to my iPhone and I can pick up the groceries on my way home! (Note: iPhone app to come in 2010!)

There is so much more Plummelo will be doing to help connect more of your cooking world and keep your kitchen life organized.

Give Plummelo a try this week.

One that I like to use as the base is Three-Bean Chili. Packed with tons of protein, and nutritious, filling, and inexpensive ingredients, chili keeps well for days, can be made to the individual’s taste, and provides opportunities to create new meals out of it. I make this on a Sunday and actually look forward to the prep and cooking time because I know I am setting myself up for a week of good eating. If everything else gets crazy, I know I will have a homemade dinner each night with a few minutes of prep time.

See below for photo credits

Note: This recipe is vegetarian, but if you’re cooking for meat eaters, just brown some ground turkey or beef, and stir it in.

Make cooking the chili fun! Put some music on, get your friends, spouse, or kids involved, and experiment according to the flavors that you and your family enjoy. If you have kids that are old enough, let them help stir or give them a couple of bowls and spoons to play with while you cook. Once the chili is all set, you can plan out your dinners for the rest of the week. Here are a few ideas for making a simple chili into easy weeknight meals.

Monday
Rice and Beans
Mix ½ cup brown rice with ½ cup chili (per serving). Add hot sauce if you’re adventurous.

Tuesday
Hot and Crispy Salad
Serve warmed chili atop a bed of shredded romaine lettuce, spinach, and shredded cheese. Make two servings and save one for Wednesday.

Wednesday
Wrap It Up
Mix a serving of Tuesday’s salad with 1 teaspoon of plain yogurt and roll into a whole wheat wrap or stuff into hard taco shells.

Thursday
Chili Empanadas
Roll out store-bought pie dough or puff pastry dough into large squares. Spoon chili into ½ cup servings. (I would suggest using a slotted spoon to move the chili so that the liquid is as drained out as possible.)  Scoop chili into the middle of each square, fold dough, and seal around the edges using a fork to press down and create a decorative edge. Bake according to dough package directions or until golden. These empanadas not only make a great dinner, but they are also a perfect party appetizer.

Friday
Your Call
You made it! Hopefully the variations using your weekend chili have kept you satisfied. For Friday, either go out to eat… or mix a cup of chili with a cup of vegetable or chicken broth. Adding liquid will thin out the chili into a delicious soup. You may want to add additional spices or hot sauce at this point as the flavors may be diluted by the broth. At this point, you could also add leftover rice from Monday or small cooked pasta to the dish to add some more heft.

These are just a few ways you can create multiple dishes from a one pot meal. Get creative, change up the ingredients, and get cooking. Don’t forget to comment and let us know how your variations worked.

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