Cooking chicken and rice together this summer gave my son and me a little bit of structure, a shared goal, a creative playground that led to exploration and learning, time to tell stories and get caught up on each other’s lives, and some damn fine meals.

Creating a meal together is a wonderful, collaborative and fulfilling experience that transcends the food and is woven into the fabric of relationship memories.

This month’s Southern Living magazine sports several easy “recipes” for Christmas wreath appetizers that got me in the mood to revisit this simple but attractive finger food for a holiday buffet.

What to do with that leftover ham? Here are almost 50 recipes.

From Food & Wine: “This recipe offers irrefutable proof that the best dishes are often the simplest.”

A recipe from another blogger that NAILS garlic bread.

Another great recipe find: a moist and dense Pineapple Upside-Down Cake with fresh pineapple and NO MARASCHINO CHERRIES!

Chocolate Orange Pots are an impressive, decadent, and yet relatively easy dessert for a dinner party.

Baby carrots are a sham! Read all about it and check out this stunning recipe for undoctored carrots.

Sweet Potato Stacks from Cooking Light are worthy of status as a holiday classic.

Wine Spectator provides a perfect “cooking with friends” menu with duck and root vegetables. Try this at home with friends.

Spatchcocked turkey is everything you want in a turkey: moist on the inside, with crispy, savory, mahogany skin on the outside. Read about it here: Spatchcocked Turkey. Say What? This will be our turkey strategy again this year.

One reason I love to travel is the exposure to different foods, cultures, ideas and people.  A case in point is the food discovery from last night at a business dinner in Chicago:  short rib lasagne.  Wow!  It was a blustery, windy, rainy night, and […]

My Aunt-Mom turned me on to this terrific and easy recipe for remoulade a few years ago. The recipe on the McCormick’s web site suggests serving it with boiled shrimp, which is how I first encountered it, but it is good in many, many other ways.

Source: Blackberry Mint Iced Tea Lemonade – Cooking with a Wallflower I subscribe to lots of wonderful blogs written by people who are smarter than me.  They’re all different, but they have some things in common:  they either write beautifully, are super-artistic, have wonderful, creative ideas […]

Junior League Cookbooks are like war bonds or Superman or Sunday School teachers: they can be counted on. That’s why this pork marinade is The BOMB.

This lamb patty pita recipe from Epicurious.com makes a super-easy, super-yummy weeknight meal.

It’s a gorgeous spring-came-early evening here in southeast Texas and the Grill-Meister and I are celebrating it by making dinner in the outdoor kitchen. Nothing fancy, just dishes that remind us of spring that we’ve made dozens of times and have already been captured here […]

  What’s the Best Way to Boil an Egg? That question has been a debate at Glover Gardens for years, until Epicurious sent me this article in their daily newsletter and changed our egg-boiling little lives.  This article answers the question: Is it better to […]

Another Sandwich Wednesday panini: a simple goat cheese and red pepper sandwich from a new (to us) cookbook.