tomato risotto with frizzled red onions

Now introducing… the wintery side dish or vegetarian main dish that you didn’t know you needed! You’ll love how it comes together with one pot on the stove and one pan in the oven.
This festive green and red dish features roasted Brussels sprouts cooked to crisp-tender perfection with fresh cranberries, which become so lovely as they bake on the same pan alongside the sprouts. Add chopped pecans to the pan toward the end of baking to toast them.
Once your components are done cooking, combine them in a bowl over cooked wild rice blend. Finish it off with crumbled goat cheese, plus a drizzle of balsamic vinegar and maple syrup. The flavors remind me of my popular Balsamic Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Cranberries & Pecans, but you can eat this one as a standalone meal. It’s a winner.
Continue to the recipe...The post Roasted Cranberries and Brussels Sprouts over Wild Rice appeared first on Cookie and Kate.
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I’ve never been a huge fan of sticky buns because I find many of them teeth-screamingly sweet. That said, these dial down the sweetness in favor of flavor, courtesy of two of my favorite things: pecans and maple syrup. And having the two swaddled in a butterscotch-like caramel seems to make each one taste even better than they do on their own.
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I was intrigued by a new baking book, The New Sugar & Spice by Samantha Seneviratne, whose subtitle promises recipes for “bolder baking,” which immediately caught my interest. I don’t need to wow me with innovation – tweaking classics is often good enough. The wheel can only be reinvented so many times and no need to repair something that doesn’t need fixing.
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It’s unfortunate that I am hooked on both, and like other expats, maple syrup and pecans are two things that we tend to hoard. Sirop d’érable (maple syrup) is available in Paris, the best bottles are sold at natural food stores, and pecans are around, although I often find them not quite at their freshest by the time they’ve hit the store shelves. So I lug those back with me. Fortunately, on occasion, I’m treated to bags by visiting friends and guests. Thank goodness I now have an American-sized freezer.
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Well…to be honest, I used to hide them in the freezer, but since I’m a compulsive nibbler, I was getting tired of teething on frozen pecans. So I gave up and started keeping them in a drawer, which means easier access to these precious beauties.
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Sticky buns are very easy to make. You start with a simple yeasted dough, softened with milk. Once it rises, you strew the rolled out dough with a mixture of brown sugar and cinnamon. Then comes the fun part: Rolling them up!
The doughy roll then gets sliced into spiraled wheels. Watching them rise in the pan – then rise even further in the oven, is one of the great joys in life. Eating them, of course, is the best part. But if you’ve got kids (or even a middle-aged man, like me), this is a really fun project for a weekend or during a holiday break.
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While I was making these, I posted a live video on Snapchat, which is a fun way to share short videos that I’ve been playing around with. The downside is that I got so involved with shooting and sharing that I neglected to chop the pecans before using them, as you can see in the pictures. On Snapchat, posts and videos disappear after twenty-four hours – so when it’s gone, it’s gone! But you can follow me on Snapchat for other tips, future videos and a soupçon of occasional goofiness at davidlebovitz.
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As much as I’m freaked out by new technologies, the old ones tend to vex people, too. Folks get freaked out by candy thermometers, but if you use one, you can get your caramel precisely to where it should be. I “went rogue” and didn’t use one, and my sticky buns got a touch too dark, which I liked for the “on the edge” flavor, but resulted in a sticky bun glaze that was less-runny that what some might be used to. So if you have one, you should put that candy thermometer to use when making these sticky buns.
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The result of my morning of baking was a tray full of sticky buns that were great for a mid-morning snack but not bad for bringing to a meeting later that evening, which I did. The next day, people raved about them. I’ve got a few other “bold” recipes bookmarked from Samantha’s gorgeous book. And I’m going to make sure my stock of pecans doesn’t run too low, because I’ll be making these again in the near future.
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Ingredients for American Baking in Paris
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Who doesn’t love a special little beverage? As spring has slowly gotten warmer I’ve seen more and more people posting themselves making at-home iced tea concoctions, fruity syrups for seltzers, and even ‘loaded’ flavored waters. What has stood out to me from the bunch is a “homemade Gatorade” recipe by the creator @healthylittlepeach, which has gotten millions of views and tons of recreation videos. The allure lies in its “electrolytes” and health benefits. It looked deceivingly simple, and I was curious to see if it actually tasted good or refreshing.
Here’s how I made my own homemade “Gatorade:”



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It’s that time of year again. And that only means one thing: time to start thinking about the holiday baking. In Paris, bakery windows fill up with Bûches de Noël (Yule log cakes) and bourriches (wooden crates) of oysters are piled up at the markets. The chocolate shops are crammed with people, buying multiple boxes as gifts, and people splurge on caviar and Champagne, one of the few things that go on sale in France during the holidays.
One thing you don’t see is the use of pumpkin in desserts. A tart or pie (or ice cream) made of squash might sound funny, especially to non-Americans, but helps to remember that pumpkins, and other squash, are technically fruit. One could also point out the classic Swiss Chard Tart from Provence (which is in a whole other category), and Melanzane al cioccolato, eggplant with chocolate sauce, which I like. (Which one could argue is good because it’s smothered in dark chocolate.) But I don’t think everything goes with chocolate: A friend tried the hot chocolate with oysters at a famed chocolate shop in Paris, and after her description, I wasn’t rushing over there to try a cup.
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To get that last image out of your mind, I present pumpkin cheesecake with a pecan praline sauce, that has nothing not to like about it. Cream cheese and sour cream, a buttery cookie crust, and a brown sugar and bourbon-tinged sauce loaded with crunchy pecans. I’m in.
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DIYers may raise an eyebrow at using canned pumpkin. I’ve got a few reasons for using it. (And as many of you perhaps know, it’s not made from pumpkin, but a variety of squash similar to butternut squash.) One, is that when writing a recipe, it’s easy to get consistent, similar results when we’re all using the same ingredient. And two, it’s a heckuva lot easier, which is appreciated around the holidays when all of us have enough on our plates, and in our ovens, and it’s fewer dishes to wash to boot.
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If you want to go the other route, you can also make your own cream cheese and Graham crackers, grow your own pecans, churn up your own butter, and make your own cake pan. If you do go that route, let me know when your cheesecake is done ; )
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In the meantime, I’m standing over my stove, stirring warm, just-toasted pecans into my praline sauce before lacing it with a dash of bourbon.
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The praline sauce is decidedly on the sweet side. But that didn’t stop me (like, at all…) from dipping my spoon into it over and over and over again. Be sure to toast the pecans before using them. My pet-peeve in restaurants is when they don’t toast nuts. Toasting any nut usually improves it by at least 99%, if not more, so if you’re not consistently toasting your nuts before using them on salads, sauces, and in ice creams, start doing it now. It’s not too late.
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But I can’t imagine this cheesecake being served without it. Although I could imagine eating the sauce without the cheesecake. And if you’re anything like me, you might find yourself spooning it over ice cream, ladling it over pumpkin pie (without the marshmallow topping), or even spooning it right into your mouth, like I do.
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Related Recipes and Links
Ingredients for American Baking in Paris
Homemade Graham Crackers (Smitten Kitchen)
Homemade bourbon (Bourbon of the Day)
Homemade salt (Ruhlman)
It’s easy to forget about Thanksgiving in Paris. There are no bags of stuffing mix clogging the aisles in the supermarkets. If you asked a clerk where is the canned pumpkin, they would look at you like you were fou (crazy). And if you open the newspaper, you won’t come across any sales on whole turkeys. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; a friend saw a 5 kilo turkey, an 11 pound bird, at the market the other day for €68kg, or €340 ($424).
(Although I think if you spent over four hundred dollars on a turkey, you wouldn’t forget it for a long, long time.)
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I suggested that the turkey vendor perhaps forgot a comma because whole turkeys are, indeed, available in Paris, and they actually excellent since most are fermier, not the plump whoppers you see in the states. The only thing you have to be careful about is that one turkey might not be enough if you’re feeding a large crowd, say, a group of over six people.
Savvy Americans know to order a whole turkey in advance from their butcher and – get this: You can ask them to cook it for you. Yes, since the butchers usually have spits with roasting chickens on them, it’s usually not a problem for them to slide a turkey on there. That’s especially nice because most people in Paris just have one oven and it’s hard to tie it up for the entire day with just a bird roasting in it when you’ve got so many other things to bake and cook off.
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The reason I am sharing this recipe today, rather than days ago when everyone was in a tizzy posting recipes, shopping and preparing their menus, is that I kind of forgot that it’s Thanksgiving. Actually, I didn’t quite forget, but wasn’t swept up in the frenzy because this week, and today, are just like any other week or day in Paris.
People go to work and school, banks and stores are open, and no one is setting their alarms for le vendredi noir (Black Friday), although that’s starting to happen in France ever since the government loosened their restrictions on allowing sales more than the government mandated twice-yearly ones, as they did before the economy took a dip. (Tomorrow, I suspect at least one vendor selling an expensive turkey in Paris is going to have to offer a serious mark-down if he wants to sell that bird.)
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So we’re celebrating tomorrow night with some friends who are making dinner. I’m pitching in and doing some baking, as well as bringing a nice bottle of Sauternes. I also happened to have a few cans of cranberry sauce that I had brought back from the states, that I was planning to bring, just for fun.
I sent my hostess a photo and she wrote back right away, threatening to blackmail me by making my canned contraband photo public. I beat her to the punch, posting it on Instagram. But when I noticed that of the four ingredients in the can, two were industrial sweeteners, I decided to take matters into my own hands.
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Fortunately I had a stash of fresh cranberries in my freezer, since if a turkey was €68 a pound, I’d have to dig deeper into my pockets if I was going to have to buy fresh cranberries in Paris on Thanksgiving Day.
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I candied some organic orange slices (which were normally priced), simmered up a syrup with the sharpness of cider vinegar and a hit of dark rum, then added my precious canneberges, cooking them ’til they popped. I stirred in the candied oranges, then packed it up, ready to go – getting a recipe in just under the wire.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Related Recipes
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Recently I started reaching for my bottle of Vermouth Blanc more and more. I had opened it to make an El Presidente cocktail, but during an interview on my IG Live channel with Pierre-Olivier Rousseaux, owner of Dolin distillery in France, he remarked that their Chambéryzette apéritif, made in the French alps, could be made at home, anywhere, with fresh strawberries and white vermouth. So I took the plunge and made a batch myself.
It’s very easy to make. Just slice or quarter a few fresh strawberries and within 24 hours, you can be enjoying your very own batch of strawberry apéritif!
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White vermouth (vermouth blanc) is different than dry vermouth. For one thing, the botanicals used are different. Dry vermouth leans into its bitterness with wormwood, quinine, or other flavorings that keep it decidedly dry. White vermouth celebrates its sparkling-clear color with floral aromas, which can include elderflowers and citrus. While you could make this with dry vermouth, I do prefer it with the white vermouth, which in Italy is referred to as vermouth bianco.
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When I took a sip of the strawberry-infused vermouth the next day, it seemed like it’d be a perfect candidate for a summery Spritz. So I mixed it with a splash of tonic water, and found it was just perfect as-is, with a handful of ice and some berries and maybe a slice of citrus in it. If you want to go full-on summer, you could replace the citrus with a slice of peach or nectarine, or maybe a few other types of berries.
Tonic water has become more of a topic of conversation lately. Brands like Schweppes are popular and readily available (and you can make your own tonic water, too), but some like to fine-tune their cocktails and apéritifs with a premium brand of tonic water. Fever-Tree, Q, and Fentimen’s are popular, but I kept mine French using Archibald, which uses gentian in place of quinine, to keep it resolutely Made in France. (Quinine doesn’t grow in France, but gentian does.) As far as I know, it’s not available outside of the country but feel free to find your own favorite where you live, and use that.
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