TIP OF THE DAY: Strawberry Wreath

No matter how many pies, cakes and cookie platters were served at Christmas dinner, our mom always put out one more dessert: fresh fruit salad. It always had takers, from calorie counters to healthy eaters to people avoiding lactose, gluten, refined sugar, whatever, to people who were too full to eat something rich. But as…
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RECIPE: Christmas Peppermint Hard Candies

Use your holiday cookie cutters to make these fun mint shapes from conventional peppermint candies. Photos courtesy Reynolds Kitchens.   We love the recipe developers at Reynolds Kitchen, who often surprise us with their creativity. Just by looking at the photos, you can see what they’ve done with an everyday bag of striped peppermint candies.…
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RECIPES: Cranberry Cheesecake

We [heart] cheesecake. Every October, we switch to pumpkin cheesecake in its many forms. But as soon as the Thanksgiving leftovers are gone, we start baking cranberry cheesecake recipes. Because cheesecake is such a rich and heavy dessert, we usually don’t serve it following a big dinner, but as a “tea time” snack (and honestly,…
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TIP OF THE DAY: Make Leaf-Shaped Veggies For Thanksgiving

You can be very artistic with vegetables. It just takes a bit of planning. While it takes some dexterity to make this “rose tart”, here is a simple alternative. It comes from one of our favorite creative cooks, Vicky of Stasty.com. She cuts up vegetables with a leaf cookie cutter before roasting them. She then…
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TOP PICK OF THE WEEK: Blossom Water

For two years we’ve had our eye on Blossom Water, an innovative beverage in a crowded field that has not yet gotten the distribution we think it deserves. We keep checking the store locator, hoping for something near us. We drink it at the trade show where we first discovered it; and we do buy…
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