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Cranberry sauce is a must for a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, to my mind anyway, and also very tasty

I know Christmas is past, but we happened to have a turkey in the freezer, so we decided to roast it. I received Salt Fat Acid Heat for Christmas and read through the food science part.

During the 12 days of Christmas Cookies last year, Day 5 was Chestnut rings (" on the fifth day of Christmas (I know, I know, Christmas cookies in September?

They are a seasonal must for me around Christmas, and I absolutely love them. The smell of them roasting conjures up images of Christmas markets, hot chestnuts in paper bags, burnt For Christmas, we usually have pumpkin pie and mincemeat pie, but this year we decided to add in a new

We decided we wanted to do some Christmas baking, with a little flavour experimentation, as well as making old favourites (like Cinnamon Stars, Basler Christmas Cookies, or Christmas Butter Balls). One of the Christmas flavours we wanted to play with was cranberry, After some playing with ideas, we

Last week was American Thanksgiving, "Big Feast" as Little Bit excitedly calls it, and we had people over for dinner. We made rather a big batch of cornbread stuffing, knowing there would be leftovers, which is always a good thing. Five days into eating said leftovers though, I figured I'd jazz it up a bit. This is inspired by one of my mother-in-law's dishes but made my own. Ingredients: 1/2 small pumpkin, sliced 2 onions, sliced 4 tbsp butter 1 c milk 1/2 - 3/4 c mushrooms 4 carrots, grated about 3 c cheese, grated 1 tsp thyme 1 tsp rosemary 1 1/2 tsp - 2 tsp sumac 1 tsp dried orange peel 3 1/2 c stuffing 3 tbsp carrot top pesto 1 1/2 tbsp cranberry sauce Salt and pepper 1) Melt 1 tbsp butter in a deep frying pan, and sauté the onions and pumpkin. add about 1 c water and stew for 10 minutes until beginning to go tender. 2) Add the carrots, mushrooms, milk, herbs and spices and all but about 1 c of the cheese. Cook on medium heat until combined and beginning to reduce, about another 10 minutes. 3) Melt the remaining butter and mix with the stuffing. Spread about half the stuffing on the bottom of an oven-proof dish. spoon the pesto over the top. Layer the pumpkin mix over that, and then cranberry sauce. Mix the remaining cheese with the rest of the stuffing and place it on top in the casserole dish. 4) Bake at 180°C for about a half-hour, uncovered for the first 20-25 minutes, then uncovered until the top is crispy. This came out beautifully, but is definitely better on the first night (odd, given how many dishes improve with a little time). In future, I will try to bear this in mind and make only the required amount. Hubby and Little One both loved it too, and despite post-Thanksgiving resolutions, we all had seconds. It was good served up with a little extra cranberry sauce or mustard, but it was a very moist dish and so didn't need it in the least.

Fall is here! And with it all those deliciously autumnal fruits like plums! What better way to celebrate the season on still-warm days than a plum smoothie, a marriage of the end of summer with early fall? Cool but warmly spiced, this smoothie hit the right notes. I don't usually share smoothie recipes as they are so basic, but I really liked the flavours in this one and couldn't resist! Ingredients: 2 c whey 1/2 c hazelnut yogurt 1/3 c raisins 1/2 c oats, 6-8 plums, pitted and roughly chopped 1 fig, quartered 1 tsp cinnamon 1/2 tsp Aloha Spiced Cacao A pinch of fenugreek 1/4 c chia seeds Place ingredients in a blender and whiz until smooth. Serve with gingerbread and enjoy! Enjoyed by all of us, although Little Bit was too busy sucking on his gingerbread to finish his smoothie until later...

and taking as little time out from decorating the Christmas tree with the family as possible. I also liked that, completely by accident, the colours were Christmasy.

Thanksgiving was last week, and unfortunately - mid-November not being considered part of the festive season here, and there being, therefore, no reason for them to be available - no turkeys were to be had, even for ready money. We discovered the day before the Big Feast that we could have ordered one, but this required a few days' notice. Instead, we decided to have a Thanksgiving Ham. We modified our standard cornbread stuffing recipe by adding a little orange zest to it, then bedded the ham down on that. Smothering it in a gingery apple sauce, and then blanketing everything in bacon, all elements came out moist, basted and richly delicious. Paired with sweet potatoes, broccoli, basil carrots and baking powder biscuits, this was truly a Big Feast (as Little Bit calls it), enjoyed as a family. Ingredients. 1 smoked ham (ours was roughly a kg) 8 - 10 rashers of bacon 1 - 1 1/2 c apple sauce ~ 1 inch fresh ginger, peeled and finely grated 5 c stuffing 1) 3/4 fill an oven-proof dish with the stuffing of your choice. Make a small hollow in the centre and nestle the ham in it. Smother the ham in the apple sauce and grate ginger over the top. Lay bacon over the whole. 2) Roast at 165°C for about 3 hours. Allow to rest for 15 minutes before carving. Enjoy with trimmings! We all agreed that the ham stood in nicely for the turkey at our Thanksgiving dinner and that this was a cooking method to be added into the rotation. The apple and ginger imparted a subtle but discernible and tasty note to the ham, which matched well with the orange note in the stuffing. Bacon was bacon, and therefore not to be argued with. Everything was moist and delicious. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

In early December, a very good friend of mine was visiting us and we made Christmas Butterballs to celebrate A lot of our Christmas Cookies require almonds, but how much difference do these make to the actual taste