Although it’s post-Thanksgiving, and very few of you will be even slightly interested in a recipe for cranberry sauce/jelly, I didn’t really want to let it sit in my holding pen (drafts) until next year, so I’d best post it anyway! It’s SO simple – it contains nothing but fresh cranberries, port wine, sugar, juniper berries, and black pepper. It stews briefly, then you let it cool and sieve it to remove all the skins and the spices. It doesn’t catch all the seeds unless you have a really good sieve.

Cranberries have a lot of natural pectin in them. That was news to me – more food chemistry to keep in mind – not that I’ll ever need to know that again! When you make this cranberry gelée (that’s French for jelly and it’s pronounced like zhe-LEH), you know that it doesn’t have to be reduced down or any kind of thickening agent added because it just naturally “gels.”  You can see how thick it is by looking at what’s stuck to the side of the bowl in the photo above.

In our family I always make an adaptation of my mother’s old recipe for a raw cranberry relish that contains fresh cranberries, a fresh orange, an apple, sugar and powdered ginger. But we DO have a couple of family members who prefer the old-fashioned stuff – they’d probably prefer it straight out of the can – but they eat 2 T. of it and what in the world do I do with the remaining 2 cups of it? Most years it is poured down the garbage disposal once it’s languished in the refrigerator long enough to grow green stuff on it. So I just thought I’d make it this year. It’s really good. I truly liked it – most people at our Thanksgiving dinner table took some of both, and everyone seemed to like them equally. The port wine used in this isn’t so prominent that it tastes boozy. Not at all. But you can taste it.

Actually I don’t own any of the Canal House Cookbooks. I’ve read about them, though. This recipe was at Food52, which I read several times during the 2 weeks leading up to Thanksgiving in case there were some nuggets of new recipes. Under the heading of “genius recipes” I found this recipe. It looked easy enough (it was) and it sounded like it would have some really good flavor (it did). I may even make it again next year. Meanwhile, it was used in turkey sandwiches numerous days after Thanksgiving.

What’s good: the port wine-y flavor – I think I liked that the best, yet it doesn’t overwhelm it. Also how easy it was to make. Truly. Good flavor. If you go to the Food52 site (link above) you can read about all the variations people did to the recipe (like, no juniper berries? use cloves or rosemary).
What’s not: really nothing. But, it is just cranberry jelly/sauce!

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I’ve gone on and on about this stuff before. I hate to beat a dead horse, but as I was making a soup the other night I was just reminded how MUCH I use these soup bases. The chicken one the most. If I had to hone down a bunch of advice to all of you cooks out there, young, old, experienced or not, I’d tell you that after having a really good set of knives, THIS product above would be #2. They’re not that expensive, and I’m telling you true – they’re worth their weight in gold. I go through about 3 of the chicken ones a year. I just opened my last one, so I’ll be due to visit the new Penzey’s store that’s opened in San Diego this  year to buy a new stash. Or I could order online (shipping applies, obviously), but I need other things from there too.

This product ISN’T just for soups, although that’s what they call it. It’s like buying bouillon cubes, or the jars of dried stuff at the grocery store. You’ll use it so often – in sauces, stews – you won’t have to fill your pantry with those quart boxes anymore. Just use this and add water. The grocery store types don’t hold a candle to the flavor in the Penzey’s brand. Here’s the LINK – just go do it, would you? You’ll be doing yourself a big favor. As I write this, they’re $10.85 each. I’d order the chicken and beef for sure. The ham one I have but rarely use. The seafood one is also such a time saver when making fish soups or sauces for fish. These do contain sodium, but not nearly as much as the other brands. Do it, would ya?

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After Thanksgiving, for many years, too many to count, I made Turkey Tetrazzini. I switched off between it and Turkey a la King served in puff pastry cups. Nothing all that complicated about either of those. And then Tetrazzini fell out of favor. And so did Turkey a la King too. So for a couple of decades – maybe even 3 decades – I didn’t make either of them. Tetrazzini has made a comeback – I even saw it on a restaurant menu recently. I didn’t order it because I was sure it wouldn’t be as good as home made. I’d have liked to try a bite.

So when I read about it at Pioneer Woman’s website, that it’s one of her favorite ways of using up left over turkey, well, I decided then and there, that I’d make it this year.

I went hunting for my recipe, but could not find it. Oh well, there are plenty of them out there. So I did use Ree Drummond’s version. And now that I’ve made that one, I’ve also made a few little alterations to her recipe too. You can do that with a casserole. Put your own spin on things (I added peas for one thing). I also think it could have handled even more than 1 1/2 pounds of mushrooms. Yes, really. We added more turkey than hers called for anyway, and I think it could have done with yet more of that too. And just a little less pasta – I want more meat and veggies in proportion to pasta, but that’s just me! Her recipe calls for 1 1/2 pounds of pasta. I’ve changed the recipe to 1 1/4 pounds – not a whole lot. So my recipe below is my adaptation of her recipe.

I liked all the mushrooms – they were quartered, not sliced. That gave this casserole some additional texture. I also liked the panko crumbs on top. I do love panko crumbs. I use them all the time, don’t you?

If your family doesn’t like peas, well, take ‘em out. Add carrots. Or green onion. Or chopped green beans. It’s nice to give it some green color from something. Don’t use green pepper – that would ruin it for me. But green beans are fairly neutral tasting so they’d work. This version also has bacon in it – just a bit of added richness and pork flavor.

You can’t quite tell from the photo, but the Tetrazzini was almost too dry. So I’ve altered the recipe a bit to make sure that doesn’t happen to you. The mixture needs to be almost like creamy soup when you roll it into the casserole dish – it needs LOTS of brothy liquid to soak into those noodles.

My daughter Sara and daughter-in-law Karen both helped make this. We all took on different tasks to get the casserole made and while it baked, a salad was composed using up most of the produce we had left from the weekend of eating.

What’s good: it’s as simple as can be – spaghetti (or some kind of pasta), turkey, some veggies, and a rich, tasty soupy sauce, plus cheese. It’s comfort food. Don’t expect it to be highly seasoned – there’s no heat in it. And very few herbs, either. Sometimes plain pasta is “just right.” Do season it well with salt and pepper – it needs it.
What’s not: perhaps I’d have to say this isn’t a “wow” dinner entrée. It’s good for family, and it was delicious after a weekend of plenty of eating at every meal.

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Last week, before Thanksgiving, I turned on the Food Network and watched a little of  the 3-hour Thanksgiving show, whatever it was called, with about 7-8 of the Network show’s stars. Pioneer Woman mentioned it on her blog, so I recorded it and watched about 15 minutes of it. I actually wasn’t all that intrigued. Not necessarily because of the stars themselves, but with the silliness of the way they were not acting in the beginning. It was too ad lib, and it says to me that the Food Network chefs/stars don’t know how to do that. Seemed to me like it was mostly the stars teasing one another, with a few suggestions thrown in now and then about turkey hints or side dishes, etc.

I did stick with it long enough, though, to watch Alton Brown make this cocktail. I went online to find it – nothing there that day anyway – so I had to go back on my recorded show to scribble down notes about it. Alton didn’t even give it a name, so I’ve made one up. He explained that in his house he needs to serve a “cocktail” that can do double duty – for adults and children, so he came up with this drink that can be mixed with sparkling wine (I used Prosecco) or with club soda. The young ‘uns in our household weren’t all that excited about it – I think it was the color (kind of brown) rather than the taste, but that’s just my take.

You start with a quart of grape juice. A disclaimer here – I bought light grape juice – and I’m sure it was a mistake. To make a syrup you need the sugar. So buy the real sugar-loaded type. He said to add an 8-inch sprig of fresh rosemary and a 3-inch piece of crystallized ginger. I didn’t have the right kind of ginger, so I used fresh ginger – about 4 inches worth. I cut it up into large chunks (don’t do small as it needs to be strained out later). You bring that mixture to a boil and reduce it by half. It might help if you did this in the microwave, actually, in a big glass measuring cup so you could see how much it’s reduced. I did it on the stovetop and had a hard time measuring the darned thing – it almost burned at the end! Strain out the herbs and ginger. Then add a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, and continue reducing it again by half. Cool and chill. You should end up with about 1 cup of syrup. That would make about 16 servings if you used a tablespoon per person.

To make the cocktail, pour about a tablespoon of the syrup into a glass and add either sparkling wine or prosecco. Or the club soda for a non-alcoholic version. You may want to test the proportions. We started with using less than a tablespoon and found that adding more provided a much better flavor.

Just be sure to not boil down the juice too low – because then it will begin to taste like raisins, not grapes. It was different. Almost unusual. I liked it, but only if it was mixed in the right proportion. And I didn’t measure it, otherwise I would tell you exactly. It’s definitely grape juice – so if you’re not a grape juice fan, you might want to give this a pass. Will I make it again? Uhm. Maybe. Maybe not. It wasn’t a wow, but then it was supposed to be something we could use for both the kids and adults. It did fit that bill.

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Are you ready to hear about how fantastic this dish is? OM Gosh!! It was – truthfully – the star of our Thanksgiving dinner. I asked, while we were finishing up our meal, what was everyone’s favorite – and of course, the children said pumpkin pie – but the adults all said “the Brussels sprouts!” And yes, these are COOKED Brussels sprouts, not raw, even though it’s called a slaw.

This is where the recipe came from . . .

I told you about this cookbook, The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century in mid-2011. My friend Linda gave it to me for Christmas, 2010. To say that I treasure it . . . well, that’s an understatement. It has no photos in it hardly. A few for decoration, but it’s a huge tome of just recipes. With headnotes (I love those headnotes that tell me why I should try the recipe just below it). Compiled by Amanda Hesser, who has her own website, along with her culinary journalist partner Merrill Stubbs, they run Food52, an online treasure of a website if I ever saw one! And the book, in case you live in Timbuktu and haven’t heard about what it is, contains Amanda’s favorite recipes from the archives of the New York Times going back to the dawn of its known printed history!

So impressed with how the book was written and how it was researched that I wrote up 3 posts about it last year, 3 posts over 3 days – here, here and here. At that time I’d really just started reading it – that was mostly the pink post-it notes you see above. In between times I inserted some more of the yellow hue. And recently I’ve been trying to go through the rest of it (I’m not done) and I’m on to purple post-its. The bookmark at the back is where I am (obviously). When I read a recipe I think I want to try, I write an upside-down post it (meaning the sticky part is at the bottom) and I write on it a quick title then attach it as a flag. So if I’m in a hurry, I can sort-of scan the flags to see if anything suits my fancy.

There’s another view. Maybe 20% to go, do you think? And part of that back part is an index, so maybe I’m closer to the end than I think! Sometimes I do breeze on by a few recipes – at the moment I’m in the candy section, and I just about never make candy, so there aren’t many flags in this chapter. But invariably I find something every few pages.

So, when I was planning dinner for Thanksgiving Day this year, I did go look at the flags. I’d already decided to do asparagus (the crumbled asparagus – that’s not in this book – that my whole family loves) and I wanted something new for Brussels sprouts. I found it here. And oh, am I glad I tried this recipe. It is SUCH A KEEPER!

Until a few years ago I really only prepared Brussels sprouts one way – a cold Marinated Brussels Sprouts Salad. But I’ve been ever so glad that chefs ‘round the world have begun giving B.S. their just due. I love the things, and I think one of the ways I’ve made it (with cranberries) is on my “Favs” list. This one is going on there too.

Truthfully, though, my daughter-in-law, Karen and our daughter, Sara, made the recipe. I can’t take any credit other than selecting it, bringing along the cookbook (we were at our Palm Desert house for the weekend), providing the herbs, butter and mustard. Karen brought 2 pounds of Brussels, and we in the kitchen contemplated that perhaps 2 pounds was too much for one dinner (there were 9 of us including 3 children). Am I glad we didn’t listen to that nonsense. There’s about 2 tablespoons of it left over, and I can’t wait to eat it! We did make one change – we used half of the butter called for. Amanda Hesser wrote a note about it –  she halved it also, so that’s the recipe I’m including below. We used all the seasonings, but half the butter.

The most complex (read: time consuming) part was finely slicing up the Brussels sprouts. We could have used a mandoline, but many hands made fairly quick work of the pile of cleaned and trimmed little cabbages. Karen mixed up the butter – with the herbs and mustard (good, imported Dijon style) and the lot of it is cooked briefly (about 5-7 minutes) and it’s done. Do cook it to your desired done-ness. Some folks prefer a really truly cooked Brussels sprout – if so, cook it a bit longer. The recipe is a bit vague, suggesting you start with 5 minutes and cook just until it’s “done.” You can add caraway seed if you want, but we used celery seed and I thought it was a fabulous counter-taste in it. The lemon slices are also an important element – DO squeeze some of it onto each serving or serve the lemon wedges in the bowl.

What’s good: everything about it. The just mild crunchiness of the leaves. The celery seed. Well, the butter of course. The mustard, you might think, would overpower the Brussels sprouts, but it truly does not. The herbs are lovely too, and the lemon juice squeeze over the top. I loved every single bite I had, and I’ll definitely be making this again. For guests or not.
What’s not: nothing, whatsoever. DO make this dish!

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It’s the season for ginger snaps. Yet there was a special reason I made something with ginger . . .

My best friend has breast cancer. It’s been several months and she’s been through chemo hell. Her surgery is this week, then she’ll have radiation next year. After she had her first chemo infusion she felt great for the first couple of days, other than a bit of fatigue. But then she got really sick. The doctors have ways to help the nausea – everyone is different – so what happens for one person may not happen for the next. Let’s just say she was awfully sick. She said a neighbor had mentioned eating ginger in different forms helped with the nausea (tea, cookies, candy or even nibbling on crystallized ginger). Ginger has that property – it helps with seasickness too. So I told her right away that I would make some ginger cookies for her. (That’s the link to the original ginger cookies.) Her only request was that they needed to be crisp. No problem – I had just the recipe. My friend ate them all. I did make some other cookies too – for her husband – because I knew if he knew there were cookies in the freezer – he’d eat them. He was forbidden to eat her ginger cookies. During the most difficult part of her chemo (4 times, 3 weeks apart) she was down hard for almost a week. Couldn’t eat. She ate some spoons of vanilla instant pudding, which seems to keep the metallic taste out of her mouth (caused by the chemicals), and every day she tried to get down something – and some days it was just a cookie and some hot tea or iced tea.

It was nice to dig out the Kitchen Aid from the cupboard and cream some butter and sugar since I hadn’t made any cookies in quite awhile!  I turned to the crispest ginger cookies I know, from a good friend – Ann N – and thought I’d tweak the recipe just a little bit – to make it more gingery. It’s a very simple, straight-forward recipe as it is – some brown and white sugar, molasses, powdered ginger plus the usual butter, flour, leavening, etc. I knew right away what I would do to make it even more gingery. I had a jar of Trader Joe’s Ginger Spread in the refrigerator, with just about a tablespoon of the jam left. That went into the batter. It’s a delish jam – very spicy, gingery if you eat it straight away. It’s thick – it’s not like the Sainsbury’s ginger preserves I buy in England every time we visit – that has a thick syrupy quality and chunks of ginger. This Trader Joe’s stuff is smooth and thick – sort of soft homogenous peanut butter. You need but a thin layer on a piece of toast to give it a lovely covering. But I also wanted to add some crystallized ginger to it too – it’s so perfect in cookies. So, I poured out about 3 T. of crystallized ginger onto my cutting board, sprinkled about a T. of sugar on top and chopped and minced and minced some more until it was about as tiny as I could make it (see photo at left). I used the sugar because otherwise the sticky ginger pieces cling to any knife you’d use, and the pieces stick to each other too. If you add the sugar IT sticks to those sticky edges and it’s ever so much easier to chop. You can remove a T. of sugar from the creaming batter if you want. I didn’t, but am sure it would be fine if you’d like to make it less sweet.

Anyway, the dough is shaped into small balls, rolled in granulated sugar and you can press them down with the a fork, or the bottom of a glass if you want – I just used my hand – or you can skip that step since the cookies spread out in the oven anyway. They’re very very thin cookies – I like them this way. If you’re expecting some chewy consistency – well, there is a little bit. But I freeze all of my cookies and when eaten from a frozen state they’re very crispy. If you defrost them, they have a little bit of chewiness rather than so much of the crispy.

What I liked: well, I like – no, love – these cookies already – and adding the ginger spread and the minced crystallized ginger just made them better yet! They’re very spicy (I like that part). And very, very crisp.

What I didn’t like: nothing at all.

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I know, I can hear it now – Carolyn has lost her marbles. She thinks we don’t know how to make cheese bread or cheese toast? No, that’s not the case. But it’s never been quite so easy or so flavorful as this one made with a cheddar cheese powder you can buy. Read on.

Earlier this year I visited a local Savory Spice Shop, and among lots of other things I bought and saw, they had this little packet of bright orange powder – cheddar cheese powder. Since I’d not too long before needed some of the little packets out of a Kraft macaroni and cheese box to make a replica of a particularly tasty bread called Smoke House Garlic Bread, I was intrigued and bought some. So the other night I decided to try it – I mixed the powder with some butter and fresh chives from the garden and made something similar. Unlike the garlic bread linked above, this one doesn’t have garlic in it (it would have overwhelmed the Soupe au Pistou I’d made) and it also didn’t contain any fresh, grated cheese. Just butter, the powder (which is cheese, but it’s so fine it’s almost like talcum powder and will go puff and disappear) and chives.

It was really simple to mix up. I mean EASY! All I did was toast some thick-cut Italian bread on one side, turned them over and spread the cheese mixture all over and broiled again just long enough to get the bread hot and bubbly. I served it immediately. I mean immediately. It will cool off so fast – so do have everything else ready. The Savory Spice stores also have a Romano cheese powder, a nacho flavored one, and yet another with blue cheese. All powdered.

What’s good: it’s just SO easy. Quick. And delish. Cheesy.
What’s not: nothing – maybe just that kind of artificial orange color – it’s really bright. It’s a vegetable dye, I suppose.

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This recipe I’ve had for about 6 years, and just hadn’t ever gotten around to making it. What a shame, since I know I’d have fixed it several times in the interim had I just known how wonderful it is. It could be a completely vegetarian meal if you make a few little tweaks. There is pancetta in it, and I added chicken, although that’s definitely non-classic to pistou.

The original recipe for this came from Paula Wolfert in an article in Food & Wine (August 2006). It has 2 components – the soup part which has white beans, oodles of veggies and a small amount of pasta – and the pesto (pistou) part that is slightly different than the traditional Italian pesto. The pistou uses basil and garlic and oil, but it has you add an aged Gouda, not Parmesan.

The basil pistou is buried in the bottom center of the soup bowl. I asked each person at the table to just stir it in. I could have put it on top – it would have been more noticeable that way.

You could – if you’re pressed for time – use canned white beans. But, I’d urge you to make the beans from scratch because of the wonderful flavors used in it (onion, garlic, bay leaf and pancetta). I soaked the beans overnight in cold water. In the morning, I drained them, then added more fresh water and the add-ins, and cooked them in 13 minutes in the pressure cooker. So easy! Kalyn of Kalyn’s Kitchen gave me the idea in a recent post about pinto beans and how easy they are to make in the pressure cooker. Indeed!

The most labor intensive thing about this soup is probably chopping up the fennel, onion, and the veggies. I used my Alligator 11-1/4-Inch Dicer with Collector
for the fennel and onion. I don’t ever put a whole onion in this thing (as you can see from the photo). But I love it because it makes uniform dice. If I’m chopping more than one thing, I will dig this out and use it. It does cut down on a lot of time spent chopping.

Anyway, you sweat the fennel and onion in some EVOO, then you add the potatoes (which almost totally disintegrate during the simmering). Water is added (and I spooned in some Penzey’s chicken soup base to boost the flavor. Green beans and zucchini are added toward the end. Once they’re nearly cooked, I added in the already cooked beans and brought the mixture up to a simmer again (important). Then you do one more step – kind of like a step in making pilaf – you brown the raw (dry) pasta in butter. See picture at left. That is poured into the soup and you turn off the heat, cover the pot and set it aside for 25 minutes.

In that time, the pasta cooks completely. Sometime earlier in the day you will have made the pistou – it’s like a pesto except that this one calls for an aged Gouda instead of Parm. The recipe said you could also use Mimolette cheese (I’m not familiar with it). If you’re in an all-fired hurry, you probably could use bottled pesto in this. You’re supposed to make the pistou in a mortar, but that was taking the authenticity just a bit too far for me – I used a food processor. I just didn’t scrape it all down to a complete mush, so there were a few basil leaves that were left in shreds. My mortar isn’t all that big – I just decided it was easier altogether.

You’ll want the soup bowls at the ready, and at that magic 25-minute mark, the pasta is cooked just right and you spoon into each bowl a bit of the pesto and ladle in the soup. DO stir the pesto into the soup. The object is not to cook the pesto – otherwise you would just add the whole mixture to the soup pot. The pistou flavor is marvelous – you’ll notice it at the first bite. As I mentioned, I did add chicken (that I’d steeped in water to cover for about an hour – bring water to boil, add chicken – bring back to a simmer, cover, turn off heat and allow to “steep”). I chopped it up and added it to the finished soup – it did not sit in the 25-minute rest. I served the soup with some delicious toasted cheese bread. Recipe to come on that.

What’s good: well, I could go on and on. I absolutely LOVED this soup. Very hearty. Really, quite healthy too – it’s relatively low in fat. The only fat in it is the little bit of olive oil added at the beginning and the butter used to sauté the pasta. I LOVED the veggies. I LOVED the textures. LOVED the pistou swirled through it. It was marvelous.
What’s not: I couldn’t find a thing I’d change. If you would prefer to make this a vegetarian entrée, use vegetable stock, don’t add the pancetta to the bean mixture, and don’t add chicken.

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I hope each and every one of you has a very special, fun-filled Thanksgiving holiday. I’m counting my blessings. And I’m going to try to eat just one piece of pumpkin pie.

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Do you read foodgal? It’s a great food blog by Carolyn Jung. She lives in the Bay Area, and often writes about restaurants and foodie activities in her region. And she regularly shares recipes too. She’s a food journalist in her own right, so she must get sent dozens of cookbooks for review. I assume that’s how foodgal acquired this recipe, from Pastry Chef Joanne Chang, who owns Flour Bakery + Cafe in Boston. Apparently there, this cake is a top-seller. The recipe is from her cookbook, Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston’s Flour Bakery + Cafe.  And the first time I made it I stuck to the recipe exactly. But in thinking about it I decided to change a few things. I added more spices (just more quantity, not different ones) and I reduced the sugar, as I thought the original was just a bit over the top. It was good – it was excellent, in fact – but too sweet for me that first time. So I changed it.

It’s only been in recent years that I’ve read any recipes that call a cake a “snacking” cake. Now, my idea of such a thing is something you’d make on a blustery fall afternoon and it would be ready for your 5 children when they tumble in the door with snow flurries around them. And the cake would be something sturdy and easily picked up in hand and gobbled down with a glass of cold milk. But maybe a snacking cake just means it doesn’t have frosting. Does anybody know? Do enlighten me if you do!

The description of this cake hooked me, though. It’s loaded – and I mean loaded – with minced-up apple (Granny Smiths). And it has some fragrant spices added, some golden raisins and nuts. As I explained I made this cake twice in 3 days. The first time to test it, the second time with my changes and it went to a dinner party. The first time it was made with walnuts, and the 2nd time (with a few tweaks) with toasted pecans. Both were good. We were going to a potluck gourmet dinner with friends (a new group we’re in), and I’d chosen to make dessert. Since it’s certainly apple season, I’d already decided I’d make something with them. I just didn’t know what. But spotting this recipe, and reading the headnote that said this was hereby the very last apple dessert recipe foodgal was ever going to use forevermore, that got my attention.

The first time I made it with Truvia mixed half/half with sugar so my DH could have some. He loved it. And I did too. But the next time I reduced the sugar and I used pecans (and I toasted them).  It was still plenty sweet. So the recipe below is my slightly adaptation of the original recipe. I served it with maple syrup-sweetened whipped cream (see photo below) for the dinner. I just drizzled heavy cream over each slice on the first one (see left photo).

What’s good: the wonderfully fragrant spices mixed in with the multitude of apples and a little bit of the cake part. If you like more cake then you might not like this recipe. It’s mostly apple with some of the cake batter to hold it together. It definitely IS a cake, but it’s just loaded with apples. It was best with the honey-sweetened whipped cream. We also ate it with heavy cream drizzled over it too.
What’s not: really nothing at all – it was a delicious cake. It’s not difficult to make, though you do have to peel and finely chop several apples. And that has to be done JUST before you add it to the batter because otherwise the apples will turn brown. Have everything all ready – the oven at temp, the cake batter ready to go, then cut the apples and finish making the batter. And as for the superlative about it being the best and last cake foodgal will ever make, I don’t think I’ll attach the word to this. It’s really good, but the Teddie’s Apple Cake is by far my favorite apple cake. And my Mom’s Crisp Apple Pudding is my all-time apple crisp type dessert.

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