Simply Recipes Food and Cooking Blog

If you are looking for a special pound cake to prepare for a holiday gathering, consider this one! It is both dense and light, as all pound cakes should be; it’s rich with the aroma of almonds from the almond paste in the batter, and speckled with orange zest throughout. We’ve included a simple orange glaze though the cake stands perfectly well enough on its own without it.

One of the first things I learned from my mother about cooking meat is that fat=flavor. If you have lean cuts of meat, you often need to do something to introduce fat back into the meat just to make it taste better and to help keep it from drying out. Along those lines, here’s a trick you can use with a pork loin roast, a relatively lean cut, to bump up the flavor and keep it juicy. Just brown the roast first on the stovetop, then wrap it in strips of bacon to roast. As the roast cooks, the bacon will bathe it in flavor.

We’ve introduced South Carolina barbecue sauce and now here is a great recipe you can make with it, barbecued turkey legs and thighs. I grew up with plenty of meals made with turkey legs because they feed a lot, and they’re an inexpensive source of protein.

People either love turnips or they hate them. And if they love them, it was probably an acquired taste. I can still remember making a face when thinking I was biting into a yummy potato in one of my mother’s stews I had speared a turnip instead. Yet this dish is another proof point that almost all things taste better with butter and cream.

Slice the chicken against the grain into strips. Serve at once with the peppers and onions, some warm tortillas, and sides of shredded cheese,

Some items that you will almost always find well stocked in our pantry are canned beans (white beans, garbanzo, kidney) and canned tuna packed in olive oil. We also keep well supplied with onions, including at least one red onion.

Roulades, pinwheels, whatever you call them, this is a classic party dish. When I was a boy, my mum used to make these for our Christmas Eve smorgasbord, where they took their place alongside Swedish meatballs and huge plates of cold cuts, cheeses, pickles and such. Some years she’d serve them with Hollandaise sauce, which made them very, very rich even for a little kid.

Walk in to practically any taqueria in California and you’ll likely find super-sized containers of agua frescas, right next to the soda dispenser. The usual flavors are horchata (a sweet rice drink), tamarindo (from tamarind, and agua de jamaica (pronounced hah-MY-kah), an infusion of dried red hibiscus flowers.

Cabbage, the Rodney Dangerfield of vegetables. It just can’t seem to “get no respect”. While under-appreciated, cabbage really is a wonder vegetable. Not only is it relatively inexpensive, but it lasts two or three times as long as any other vegetable in the fridge. Whether raw in a coleslaw, blanched with butter, or stuffed and wrapped, cabbage is a work horse.

It’s one of those couldn’t-be-easier, how-to-impress-without-doing-much recipes. Takes 10 minute to prep, and 10 minutes to cook.