My Dear Breadman Bread Machine, how I have long neglected you!  If only I had known how delicious your bread can be and how simple it is and the amazing aromas that would fill my house, I surely would have taken you out sooner!  This is my plea to all of my readers, take out [...]

One of my absolute favorite cake cookbooks of all times has got to be Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible.  I wish I was related to Rose so that I could cook with her, plus I love the last name Beranbaum!  I made The Cake Bible’s Chocolate Oblivion Truffle Torte recipe for my husband’s first [...]

I am usually a huge fan of Costco and their products.  One of my friends told me that their canned tuna, Genova Tonno Tuna, is imported from Italy and much better than regular canned tuna.  I heard at a culinary course at the 92nd Street Y (the Y in Manhattan) that Flott and Callipo, two [...]

I normally make chicken salad using leftover chicken that I cooked for dinner the night before.  However, Costco was recently sampling their canned chicken, something I would never in a million years have considered, but I was totally impressed.  Costco’s canned chicken is 100% white meat with no fillers or fat or gunk… it really [...]

My delicious butter bars are like a giant, thick, butter or sugar cookie that is soft and gooey on the inside.  My recipe is a variation on a recipe I read in Anne Byrn’s The Cake Mix Doctor.  Anne Byrn (or The Cake Mix Doctor) calls her recipe Gooey Butter Cake.  I tried it [...]

 I recently made chocolate forest cupcakes that were amazing.  In case you missed the post this is what they looked like:

 
Well a few days ago my husband was craving the cupcakes, but I didn’t have too much time to carefully make a full batch of cupcakes.  So I figured I would experiment with doing the same concept [...]

I like very moist and flavorful banana bread, and my top secret for making it is by adding rum. You do not really taste the rum (although if you want to taste the rum, that is delicious too, just double the rum!) but the extra flavor and moistness that the rum adds to the banana [...]

I am going to digress from the topic of food for just a moment, because everyone keeps asking me what company I use as my web host. I have tried quite a few web hosts and my favorite by FAR is HostMonster.com. For a very low fee, you can get unlimited space, unlimted transfers, [...]

They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Iran, but I will never ever pass up an invitation to a Persian Thanksgiving (or any Persian meal for that matter!).  I discovered a few new Persian dishes that taste very unique and flavorful.  I have already played around with making Fesenjan and I posted my master recipe for Khoresh Fesenjan.  I [...]

This year we had the pleasure of celebrating Thanksgiving with our own family, in addition to multiple families.  The most interesting Thanksgiving meals was our celebration in Greenwich, which was a classic All-American Thanksgiving, and our Persian Thanksgiving, which was amazingly delicious but had a totally different feel.  I love learning about different cultures (especially [...]