The party's off, but the celebrating is on

I love a good party and I love to be the center of attention, so you’d think that I’d eat up hosting a big shindig.

Yes and no.

I love creating a great environment for friends to mingle. I love multi-tasking. But between answering the door, introducing guests to each other, and mixing tasty drinks, I sort of forego any meaningful or lengthy conversations.

So instead of throwing a kick-ass open house for the holidays, I decided to kick it with smaller groups of friends. I’m having micro-parties, gatherings of a few pals at a time. And because times are tough, I’m making them a potluck of sorts: I supply the main dish and happily accept apps, snacks, desserts, and drinks. The important thing is not the food (although my spicy lasagna is something to write home about), it’s the friends. And by taking the focus off being an impeccable hostest (that’s the hostess with the mostest combined), I don’t have to: clean the entire house from top to bottom, decorate like I’m Buddy the Elf, shell out hundreds of dollars for booze and artfully arranged cheese plates, send and monitor the evite, and create playlists from my current favorite music (is it just me, or is Bruno Mars dreamy?). By changing up my holiday experience, I’m buying back hours of my time, time that could best be spent in the company of others.

How are you downsizing the holidays? I'd love to hear.

Alternative gifting

This year, time and money are in short supply so a couple of friends and I got together on Sunday to make a boatload of Christmas cookies for gifting. Laurel brought boxes and tissue, not to mention the dough for sugar cookies and thumbprint cookies. I brought my cowboy cookie dough. And Kerry and Piper had a grand time helping us embellish the cookies with all sorts of frostings and sprinkles.

We made about 12 or 15 boxes but the real gift was the fun afternoon spent together in a warm and fragrant kitchen with great friends. I highly recommend it.

Beans revisited

July 4 weekend usually means a lot of barbecues and potlucks. If you are in need of an awesome side dish to go with your fancy-pants or down-home grillin', consider this recipe for my mom's baked beans. They are sublime.

I'll be making them for a cookout tomorrow night. Yum. Savory candy.

Bundt cake love

A few months ago I attended the Midwest Booksellers Association meeting in Minneapolis, where I met Susanna Short, author of Bundt Cake Bliss. We discussed handing down recipes amongst women in a family; she had to really quiz her mother to get the quantities down for each ingredient. Somehow our generation lacks that gene that just automatically knows to add a quarter cup of softened butter to the mix.

Anyway, it got me to thinking how much I love Bundt cakes and how I didn't have a Bundt cake pan.

So I asked for one for Christmas and my brother Chris came through. Here's my third attempt in four days. The first was a cinnamon strudel cake with a cinnamon glaze I made for a baby shower. Yum. The second was a lemon cake for New Year's Eve. It was so-so, but the fresh raspberries elevated it. This is a double chocolate cake with a vanilla glaze and sprinkles.

Next up: rum cake.

Best. Baked. Beans. Ever.

With Labor Day looming, I reach for my mom's tried-and-true baked beans recipe when bringing a dish to a cookout. With a pound of brown sugar, they are a guaranteed crowd pleaser. I like to think of them as savory candy and with a scoop of these baked beans on your plate, your dessert is taken care of as well (unless of course, someone brought pie).

Preheat oven to 300°F.

• 1 One-pound box of dark brown sugar
• 6–8 strips of bacon, fried and crumbled
• 1/2 cup ketchup
• 1 Tablespoon yellow mustard
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• Approximately 4 pounds of Bush's Baked Beans (I use the Original or Homestyle variety and drain most of the liquid out of the cans before adding to the mix)

Mix the above ingredients together in a glass cooking dish or metal pan (a cake pan works well). Bake at 300°F for 3 hours, or until the liquid cooks down and sort of caramelizes the beans. A low, slow oven is the secret to perfect baked beans.

I just hope there is some Polish sausage at today's barbeque to go with the beans. That's my idea of a perfect meal.

Apple of My Pie

The most memorable experiences involving me and a piece of pie:

Alison baked a blueberry crumble pie for my birthday a few years back. It was sweltering in Philadelphia, and after having drinks at a fancy white bar, a group of us piled into Mary and Ron's car to go get Tony Luke's pulled-pork hoagies in South Philly. We capped off the night by returning to my Trinity House and busting out Alison's pie and milk. A glorious nightcap to a night of eating and drinking with good friends.

Alison roadtripped to Michigan with me a couple of months later and made a variation on this recipe. Since it was peach festival time, she whipped up a couple of peach pies in the kitchen with my mom. Since it was raining, we ate them in the garage on a long picnic table covered with a plastic red-and-white checked tablecloth. It was just the thing to eat while listening to my stepdad Jim talk about dousing a wasps' nest in gasoline. "That sucker burned for four days." Yeah, yeah, whatever. The memory of that pie will keep me warm for a whole lot longer.

Whenever I make the trek over to Whidbey Island, I stop at the Whidbey Winery, which sells all sorts of island-produced wines. But it also sells a magnificent marionberry pie. Tart and sweet, it's just the thing you want after a long day in the car. Some (Kerry, Rob, and Laurel: I'm talking about you) prefer to heat up pie for a few minutes, but I like mine chilled with a cold glass of milk or a dollop of ice cream on the side.

I don't know what's in shoo-fly pie, but I can tell you, after flea marketing in Shipshewana all day, a thick slice of this buttery, sugary pie hits the spot. Find yourself an Amish restaurant in Indiana and order some up.

I love Dutch apple pie and I made a variation on this last Thanksgiving. Armed with a dough recipe from my new book (The Prairie Girl's Guide to Life), I made a granny smith apple pie but included dried cherries in the filling. Since we were all so full, I plated it by serving tiny slivers on white dessert plates with some French vanilla ice cream. Top Chef, eat your heart out. Or rather, eat this pie.

When I was a kid, Grandma Worick used to pop in around once a week. "Woo hoo, Jenny, John, Chris. I made some chocolate pie!" she'd exclaim in her thick German accent. Chocolate pie was a flaky pie crust with a whole lot of chocolate pudding dumped into it. We didn't complain. We just shoved it down our pieholes.

A lovely boy (who obviously knows me very well) sent me a cherry pie (shipped all the way from Iowa!) for my birthday (which is tomorrow). Breakfast this morning, as you can imagine, consisted of pie and milk. It's going to be a good day. Pie and affection are part of it, after all.

Poached eggs on toast

I'm under the weather today (literally, as it just hailed outside my window) so I'm hunkering down and taking care of myself. For some reason, however, I still lay in bed and moan, hoping my mother with materialize to take care of me. That's what I did as a kid and it worked like a charm.

Today, however, the only response I get to my wailing is in the form of my unsympathetic cat, who has more important things on his mind (namely, his next feeding). Sadly, one of the things I miss out on as a single gal is someone to take care of me. (Mac Daddy, I love you but you are a bit selfish.) As a self-employed person, I don't get a sick day either. I just take a quick tub, all the while fretting about the work that's not getting done. Boo hoo, right?

When I was sick as a kid, my mom would make me poached eggs on toast with a glass of 7-Up or cup of Lipton tea to wash it all down. I still seek out the same comfort food when I have to fend for myself. I don't know if I like any of it; it's just that I like the memories of love and caring that accompany it.

I've gotta go; the tea kettle is whistling.

Cooking and crêpes

I just made smoked salmon and goat cheese crêpes for lunch. They were delicious. I have to say, I am rather astounded that I can make a crêpe at all. I never even had a bagel until I went off to college. I grew up eating hearty steak and potato suppers, strange concoctions in the pressure cooker, tuna casseroles on Fridays during Lent, and sandwiches of the Jif, Smuckers, and Wonder Bread variety.

When mom steamed white rice and topped it with a dollop of butter aside a pork chop and some lima beans, we felt downright exotic.

I don't actually cook much these days. I have my few staple dishes—lasagna, baked beans, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, fruit crisp—and I rarely stray from them. But a couple of years ago, my friends Mary and Ron gave me a crêpe kit for my birthday. I looked at the tag on the gift, and then I looked at them as though they had lost their minds. Yes, I'm a foodie in that I like to tie on a fancy-pants feedbag at high-, low-, and no-concept restaurants. But as a single gal who doesn't like to waste money (on anything other than shoes and video poker), I don't experiment in the kitchen. I don't whip up a Barefoot Contessa entrée like my friend Jared, who served me a gorgeous cold beet soup a couple of weeks back. I don't concoct new and daring dishes by melding four recipes like my best friend Alison.

I follow recipes.

So I followed the instructions for seasoning my crêpe pan and whipping up light-as-air crêpes and I started filling them with all sorts of sweet and savory combinations: ham and swiss, salmon and chevre, strawberry and chocolate, classic lemon and sugar. I even hosted a brunch with crêpes as the main attraction. I wowed my friends and myself.

But if truth be told, I still prefer grilled Polish sausage or my mom's pot roast or perfect mac and cheese to coq au vin and its bon amis. Hmmm, I bet leftover pot roast would be pretty tasty wrapped up in a crêpe. That sort of experimentation I can totally get behind.