In mid-December, my mother said, “This year I’m making peanut butter balls, pumpkin cookies with cream cheese icing, ginger cookies, and cranberry date bars. I was going to come up with something. Egg nog cookies.”
After the beat, she sent a follow-up message.
“I’m not talking like dozens of people each,” she wrote. “A little assortment.” (There were still dozens of readers each). Meanwhile, my maternal grandmother, her mother, had already embarked on her own batch for vacation: chocolate fudge, peanut butter fudge, sugar cookies, gingerbread, and perhaps some competing cranberries. Date bar and peanut butter balls.
If my dad’s mother was still alive, she was adding to the mix. In particular, I put a soft chocolate chip cookie like a pillow on the baking sheet, so everything looked surprisingly uniform. My brother and I were lovingly joking that she would rearrange the chocolate chips with tweezers so that the end result would be the same.
I mean, I’m from a line of women who bake on holidays, that is, really bake. I got into that habit and found myself making miniature gingerbread cloud cakes, homemade cinnamon rolls, and various breads in my lane. If you’re curious, ask about the year you made 72 miniature bubbly knots in the galley kitchen of your studio apartment as a Christmas present.
Like many, the holidays were a season of sugar spikes and declines. I’m not trying to equate food with guilt or shame, but politely but quickly unfollow anyone who posted about jumpjacks and abs counts. You’ll have to do to “get rid of” various holiday treats — it’s not 20% royal icing as it provides time to rebalance my diet at the beginning of the year.
January is when I rely on beans and greens, so here are some of our favorite recipes and stories from the Salon Archive that really make those ingredients shine. This list was first published in Salon Food’s weekly food newsletter, The Bite. Subscribe to special recipes, essays, and how-tos that arrive directly in your inbox each weekend.
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Kale this holiday season
Earlier this week, I made a variation of Molly Buzz’s crispy chicken salad. Mary Elizabeth Williams featured in her weekly column “Quick and Dirty” this summer. Recipe usually uses Chinese head as a base and flavors with Brinnie Cotija cheese, radish, Silantro, garlic, lime, shredded rotisserie chicken, and a healthy crunch from crushed corn nuts and fritos.
In my version, I took the farmer’s market kale out of the fridge and topped it with goat cheese, the wrong handful of pepper arugula, corn nuts, rotisserie chicken, clementine segments and juice. Although not completely faithful to the original, this version was incredibly flavorful, packed and served as a green-heavy kitchen cleanout recipe.
Use Molly and Mary Elizabeth’s recipe as the base for a winter salad, and use a guide to dig up the rutting of Maggie Hennessy’s next salad (and her Panzanella recipe is perfect for a hearty lunch). ..
Bean pie, gratin, love letter
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Francis Moore Lape’s Diet for a Small Planet, Mary Elizabeth Williams presents an autumn bean pie with a pleasing mix of corn, green beans and grated cheddar cheese. I visited again. It’s not too heavy and is perfect for a cool winter night.
To make it a little more decadent, David Kinchi’s beans and green gratin blend a healthy amount of melted cheese with canellini beans and torn kale, all topped with crispy breadcrumbs. Jackie Freeman’s cauliflower and lima bean gratin have similar recipes. Use it as a starting point, based on what you have in your fridge and pantry.
Read Maggie Hennessy’s love letter to green beans while you wait for the pie and gratin to bake.[es] Poetic about this special bean that is often overlooked in many homes. “
