Good Press

It doesn't happen often that I search my own blog for one of my family's favorite dinner recipes and not found it. This one, it seems, I haven't posted. We love the flavors of this breakfast-for-dinner recipe. Rachael Ray says it's good for breakfast, lunch or dinner. I have taken it -- minus the eggs -- to work the next day for lunch. We especially like the addition of Manchego. If we don't have it, grated Parmesan isn't a bad substitute. I usually skip the salsa. CHILI SWEET POTATO HASH WITH FRIED EGGS & FRESH TOMATO SALSA 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, 2 turns of the pan 1/2 pound bulk breakfast sausage, such as maple sausage 1 medium sweet potato, scrubbed clean, cut in 1/2 lengthwise, thinly sliced into 1/2 moons 1 large red onion thinly sliced, divided 2 teaspoons chili powder, 2/3 palm full 1 teaspoon ground cumin, 1/3 palm full 2 teaspoons ground coriander, 2/3 palm full Salt and pepper 3 yellow vine ri...

When I was in my middle-school home economics class, we got recipe boxes. I was so excited to fill mine like my mom's and grandma's. When I started seriously cooking as an adult, it was obvious a box wasn't going to cut it. For a while, I printed recipes from the computer or tore out magazine pages and slipped the papers into page protectors and stored them in binders on a bookshelf in my kitchen. That worked to keep the recipes clean while cooking and all in one place. But I got busy (lazy) and started just stuffing recipes in there out of order or just keeping whole magazines. It wasn't very organized and more than once I bought the ingredients to make something and couldn't find the recipe! Frustrating! When I got really busy, I would stash the magazines I got from gift subscriptions in tote bags, boxes and shelves until I had a chance to read them. There might be something in there that I needed! Well, three people and two dogs live in this little house and thes...

Having Italian heritage I'm proud that I can make sauce and gnocchi from scratch, but I learned it on my own from cookbooks, not from family. Gnocchi is an Italian potato dumpling. If you have made noodles, this is very similar. My daughter prefers these sprinkled with just grated parmesan cheese and she could eat almost a whole box of the storebought kind by herself. It's handy that I know this recipe. Mixing the dough is not hard but the slightly time-consuming part is forming the gnocchi into rounded shapes and marking them with the tines of a fork by pressing them against the fork with their cut ends out. I work ahead by cooking extra potatoes and mashing them without butter or milk or seasoning when I make mashed potatoes for one dinner. Then I have them for the next day when I start to make gnocchi. To cook them, you drop them in boiling water. They are done when they float to the top. POTATO GNOCCHI 4 cups mashed potatoes (without added milk and butter) 2 cups al...

This is a perfect fall recipe using fall flavors. I made it as soon as I brought home my 50 pounds of Kennebec potatoes and 50 pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes from the family farm of my childhood friend, Debbie (Davis) Crawford. I wrote about the Davis sisters at the Davis Bros. Farm last year and reprinted the story here . The cider makes the beef incredibly flavorful. I'm sharing this so you can savor it too. I also like how the stew is served in a bowl of mashed potatoes. This is food for meat-and-potatoes men, but the cider and white-cheddar potatoes give it a gourmet flair. My business partner told me her husband would love it. I have to plan to have them over for dinner. ELSA'S CIDER BEEF WITH CHEDDAR SMASHED POTATOES 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) 3 tablespoons butter 2 pounds top sirloin, trimmed and cut into 2-inch cubes Salt and freshly ground black pepper 1 large onion, chopped 2 medium carrots, peeled and chopped 1 pound turnip...

Well, I don't cheat at all cookies, but close readers will see my Chocolate Peppermint Sandwich cookies from an early post start with a boxed cake mix. And this Christmas cookie, rugelach, which I have never attempted to make from scratch, starts with a storebought pie crust. I saw it on the Rachael Ray TV show and had to try it. If I ever make it again, I'll try different jams for the filling or use Nutella chocolate-hazelnut spread instead of fooling with the melted butter and cocoa. This isn't bad tasting but it's not spectacular either. But it's a good way to get a little visual variety on your cookie tray, which is what I was going for. For Rachael Ray's recipe and a video demonstration, click here .

I have long made country ribs in the oven covered with a thick, rich, spicy sauce from a recipe in an old The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook. YUM! But when I read a new recipe for Sweet 'n' Spicy Country Ribs in Taste of Home's Simple & Delicious Sept./Oct. 2008, I decided to try it. I had everything for the recipe except apple juice. I could've bought it but I already had apple cider so I decided to use that instead. It caused no problem as far as I could tell. The big change I made was in the preparation method. The recipe is for the grill. I have no desire to fire up the charcoal grill, especially on a day when my house could use the warming from the oven. I have a cast-iron grill pan but no desire to cook two ribs at a time for 45 minutes per batch. So instead I used the grill pan at an extremely high heat to sear each rib and get sexy grill marks, then I finished the meat off in the oven. Oven roasting is the method used in my preferred recipe, which follows. I...

Before Rachael Ray brought her cooking show spots to daytime TV on a network station, before the TV chefs became a celebrity phenomenon, the Taste of Home Cooking School's home economists and culinary specialists were taking their cooking shows on the road. They still are. One week from today I will be sitting in the audience at one in Morgantown, WV. One year ago I was onstage, helping make the show happen. Newspapers and other sponsors bring the shows to venues in their cities. This one happens to be in a concert theater at a university arts center. National food makers sponsor the shows too so their products get plugged in the recipe demonstrations. The home economists that present the shows travel a particular several-state region of the country. They come to town and an advance team of workers from the sponsoring newspaper help unpack their equipment, shop for ingredients and prep all the recipes they'll be presenting at that night's show. They chop, measure and sort s...

I do this thing -- well, I used to do it more often, when I had a bigger grocery budget and reason to be near a big-city grocery store -- where I see an ingredient that I consider hard to come by in rural parts. Rose water, for example. I used to snap up the hard-to-find ingredient -- one time it was haluski noodles -- and bring it home only to find that I had misplaced the recipe I'd been saving to try if I ever found the elusive ingredient. The ingredient would spoil or go stale and I'd toss it, never having found the recipe I wanted to try. That's why I never bought the rose water when the nearest Kroger opened its ethnic section a few years ago. I was tempted, but I knew that recipe would be nowhere to be found at home. But that fear and reasoning didn't stop me from snapping up a package of chorizo, a Spanish link sausage, at a fancy Giant Eagle a few months back. And it stayed in my freezer until I found a good recipe to try. But to try that recipe required some s...