The Feastie Blog

For food lovers, the holiday season can be both a blessing and a curse. Spending time with loved ones and enjoying festive meals is one of the great joys in life. It's the time of year where you bake your grandma's famous apple pie, or induldge in Christmas candy and eggnog - and all those Christmas cookies! The endless cookies! Unfortunately all of the rich, heavy, decadent food can take a toll on your body after a while - at some point your body is screaming out for a pile of vegetables (hold the butter). So go ahead and pile on the veggies - now is the perfect time to get back on track with healthy meals and nutritious food. Start the new year with a healthy outlook, and try some new recipes to add to your weekly rotation for 2013. We've rounded up the top 5 healthy post-holiday recipes to get you back on track and excited about healthful eating. And don't think healthy means plates of bland salad greens without dressing - think high fiber vegetarian burgers, stir frys, even crispy kale chips! 

Spicy Black Bean Burgers from Diet, Dessert, and Dogs
Photo from Diet, Dessert, and Dogs

2012 has been an amazing year for food and food bloggers! We've seen the rise of Pinterest and the demise of Hostess. Food blogging continues to grow in popularity with more new blogs started every month and more relative newcomers rising in popularity quicker than ever. We've put together a list of the ten food blogs that were most influential via social media this past year. We looked at our index of over one thousand blogs (the largest of it's kind) to find the ten blogs whose recipes were consistently the most liked, tweeted, and especially, pinned during 2012. We've also included each blog's most popular recipe from 2012. Congrats to each of the following ten blogs!

10. My Baking Addiction www.mybakingaddiction.com Recipe: No Bake Nutella Cheesecakes
Photo from My Baking Addiction

Admittedly I did make this for our Christmas dinner dessert - but if you have any leftover cranberries and apples floating around like I do, you need to make this apple cranberry crisp from Two Peas & Their Pod. It's the perfect way to use up any leftover fruit you have laying around, and the rest of the ingredients are pantry staples. Warm apple cranberry crisp to go with your leftover turkey sandwiches - does it get any better? The first thing I thought as I bit into this crisp was, "This tastes like CHRISTMAS." The tart cranberries just scream "CHRISTMAS!!!" Mixed with the sweet apples and spiced crisp topping, the cranberries really make this dessert. I served it warm, without ice cream, but that was only because I forgot to buy it when I was doing our holiday food shopping. Oops. I highly suggest serving it warm and topped with vanilla ice cream, as suggested by Maria of Two Peas & Their Pod. However you eat it, cold, room temp, or warm, this dessert tastes like the holidays and it will definitely be on our table again next year - it's too good not to make a repeat appearance. 

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday with their loved ones yesterday! Our Chrismukkah dinner was wonderful, now I'm looking forward to planning New Years Eve! 

It's Christmas Eve! Did you know the entire day is actually called "Christmas Eve"? So it's not even Christmas Eve day, it's just Christmas Eve - all day. In any case, now's the time to cross your t's and dot your...lowercase j's (extra points to anyone who can tell me what movie that's from) before your big holiday dinner. But even before that - what are you serving for breakfast on Christmas morning? This is JUST THE THING. You make it tonight in 5 minutes, stick it in the fridge overnight, and then bake it in the oven while everyone is waking up on Christmas morning and VOILA. Perfect Christmas breakfast (or brunch).

I love hosting brunch at our house - breakfast is by far my favorite meal of the day, and there's something special about a huge breakfast-type meal shared with friends and family that just makes me really, really happy. BUT! Hosting brunch and then proceeding to spend the entire morning/duration of the meal in the kitchen flipping pancakes or french toast is a huge bummer - especially on a holiday. We've all been there - french toast for a crowd! We can do it! And then you stand at the stove flipping pancake after pancake or bread slice after bread slice and run back and forth to the table (or tree!) to attempt to enjoy the meal with your family while not burning your next batch of toast - it's just not fun. My solution is to make everything ahead of time - the night before, if possible - and then spend the entire time with my loved ones. This overnight baked french toast has become a favorite with our friends - they've even been known to request it for brunches, baby showers, bridal showers, sleepovers, etc. It's so easy it practically makes itself, and it's all done the night before - all you do the morning-of is stick it in the oven and while it bakes, mix up a pitcher of mimosas (or hot cocoa, for the little ones) and slice some fruit and you're done. By the time you're done arranging the fruit plate and pouring the drinks, your family will awake to the most amazing smell of this thing baking - trust me, it will make your entire house smell unbelievably good. Once it's out of the oven your kitchen duties are over - and you can spend the rest of the morning enjoying delish food with your family. Win-win.

If you're interested in a more holiday-esque version of this dish, try my overnight baked pumpkin french toast. 

Four days till Christmas - what are you cooking this year? We'll keep it short and sweet - there are far too many Christmas recipes out there to squish into one post, so we're rounding up the top 10 recipes for your Christmas festivities this year. Breakfasts, brunches, main dishes, sides, desserts - a little bit of everything. Whether you like a traditional feast or a vegan spread, check out the thousands of recipes at Feastie. Did you know you can search by holiday and course? You can! You can even filter by dietary restriction - so if you need to find that perfect vegan Christmas main course, we've got you covered. Simply enter your search term in the box and use the little boxes on the right to filter your results. Voila! 

Prime Rib Roast With Miso Au Jus Recipe from Steamy Kitchen
Photo from Steamy Kitchen

Okay so this recipe is waaaaaaay late - this is from this summer when I threw a baby shower for a girlfriend of mine. It's just one of those things - it got buried in my unpublished posts - so here it is now. I think it's worthy of a blog post, so I'll share it - better late than never!

This is yet another baby shower recipe - more quiche! As delicious as I'm sure the quiche Lorraine was, I didn't get to try it (bacon!), so I wanted something that I could enjoy (as well as any vegetarians at the party). And you can't go wrong with goat cheese and sauteed leeks - if there was ever a match made in heaven, that's it. I adapted the recipe from Whole Foods, and it did not disappoint - it was delish. The original recipe suggests using a frozen or prepared pie crust, but I used my favorite pie crust recipe - I highly recommend making your own pie crust, if you have the time (but then again I'm all about the crust). This is a quick and easy dish that would be perfect with a salad for a light dinner, and equally wonderful for brunch. Really, you can't go wrong with goat cheese and leeks - hot or cold, breakfast or dinner, it's a yummy combination!

Just in case you're not overloaded on pumpkin already, here's another pumpkin recipe! WOOHOO! I've been on a homemade granola kick lately, trying to find a healthy version of "something crunchy to put on yogurt", as The  Mr. would refer to it. I've found a few healthy brands of granola at the natural foods store near me, but I almost dropped the bag when I read the price - $8 for a TINY bag of granola! WHAT?! When you make it at home, it's damn near free! That'd better be one EXPENSIVE plastic bag they're packing it in (or maybe it was a bag made of gold, or cashmere, I forget - that would explain the price). And before you say, "But the ingredients are organic!" I can guaran-freaking-tee you that even using all organic ingredients here at home I won't spend anywhere near that price for a teensy bag of granola. In fact I can make an entire gallon-sized ziploc bag FULL of delish, crunchy, golden homemade granola for a fraction of that. I didn't price it out this time, because everything I needed was already in my pantry or fridge (so, uh, I guess it would be free?), but that should give you a good enough indication that you don't need to be paying $8/bag for great granola. So not only is it cheaper - it's fresher, it's healthier, and it makes your house smell incredible while it's baking. This pumpkin pecan granola is free of refined sugars, dairy, or any other animal products - it's vegan and can be made gluten-free (just buy gluten-free oats). Granola is by nature somewhat high in calories, but at least the calories here are from organic rolled oats, nuts, and healthy virgin coconut oil. This stuff is amazing sprinkled on yogurt, it's great eaten as cereal with your choice of milk, but mostly I just eat it by the handfuls for a snack. Did I mention that your house will smell unbelievably good while this is in your oven? It's true. I have another batch in the oven right now and it smells like spicy sweet pumpkin pie wafting through my house. Ahhhh. 

Squash! Not only is it one of our favorite words (say it out loud a few times - you'll see what we mean), it's one of our favorite fall fruits. Yes, fruit - squash is a fruit. It's mostly treated as a vegetable in cooking, and for good reason - it's incredibly versatile, healthy, and delish. Winter squash are plentiful right now so you may as well get cooking - experiment with all of the different varieties available! We've been digging carnival squash and acorn squash lately (and they can frequently be used interchangeably) - but other popular squashes include butternut, kabocha, delicata, and spaghetti squash. And of course the ubiquitous pumpkin - pumpkin is featured in everything from savory dishes to sweet desserts this time of year; give one of these other varieties a chance in your baked goods, too. Squash can be great in sweets - muffins, breads, pies, even cakes - in other words, there's pretty much no reason NOT to go crazy on the squash this year. We've rounded up the top 5 squash recipes on the web this week - take a look around and also give our Fall Flavors board at Pinterest another look - lots of squash recipes there!

Butternut Squash Pear Soup from The Sweets Life
Photo from The Sweets Life

These are by far the most festive holiday cookies I've ever made. They even surpass all of those menorah and Christmas tree-shaped sugar cookies I lovingly glazed in blue/white and red/green icing as a kid - these taste like CHRISTMAS. Although I only started celebrating Christmas 7 years ago (when The Mr. and I tied the knot) and grew up celebrating only Hanukkah, there was no shortage of Hanukkah and/or Christmas cookies in the young Jessica household. We may not have had the tree or the stockings, but believe me, we were equal opportunity when it came to food! And the best part about these cookies is how freakishly easy they are. Have you ever tried the peppermint bark in the tin from Trader Joe's? If not, you should -it's divine. Chocolatey and minty and melty but with that crispy crunch from the peppermint bits - THAT tastes like Christmas in a tin! Even the description of the bark sounds delectable: "peppermint infused dark chocolate layered with crushed peppermint candy and white truffle fudge". Uhhhh...yum. Previously I'd considered chopping some of the bark up to put into cookies, but never really got the opportunity, as the bark disappeared too quickly for me to ever really get around to it. So when I saw these peppermint bark baking bits from Trader Joe's I squealed - these were MADE for cookies! Literally! There's a cookie recipe on the back of the bag, and it's effort equivalent of making a bag of Nestle Tollhouse cookies - easy peasy - but with the same payout - unbelievable deliciousness. Effortless. I'm sure these cookies would work perfectly well with plain old chopped peppermint bark from wherever you happen to find it, but if you're looking for the ultimate in easy baking, buy these peppermint bark chips from TJ's! 

Squashes are $1.49 EACH at Trader Joe's right now - each! They're that much per pound in most stores near me. So I picked up one of each - delicata, acorn, white acorn, carnival, spaghetti, and butternut. The spaghetti squash found its way into spaghetti squash with turkey meatballs, the butternut squash ended up in quesadillas, and the acorn squash ended up roasted, drizzled in brown butter and topped with crispy sage. Yum. I love winter squash and this recipe did not disappoint - the browned butter is nutty and sweet and savory all at once and the crispy sage against the creamy soft squash is a great texture. I didn't think I could eat half of a large squash all on my own, but with this recipe, it was easy to do - I seriously couldn't stop eating this. I made this alongside some grilled fish, but it would be delish with roast chicken or even some pasta if you're going the vegetarian route. Whatever you eat it with, just eat it - it's an easy, impressive recipe that you'll be sure to make again.