The Beckyan Deli
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Gingerbread House Stained Glass Windows
This was the first year that I tried to make stained glass windows for the gingerbread house. And it was a lot easier than I had feared … and they look great! I used a variation on this stained glass recipe. They’ve gone through all the trouble over many years perfecting the method. Fantastic! Gingerbread House…
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Gingerbread House Royal Icing
The final component to a gingerbread house is the royal icing. This is literally the glue that holds everything together. My favorite royal icing recipe is adapted from here. It uses cream of tartar, which apparently has some magical property to help stabilize the egg whites (along with being the other half of baking powder). It really…
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In Memoriam: Doc “Doctor” Rykoff, 1999-2013
At the end of August 2000 I bought a house. Labor Day weekend I went with my friend Oksana to the Huron Valley Humane Society to adopt a dog. She pointed out this adorably cute black lab in one of the cells. He was very quiet — he was probably the only dog in the place not…
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Buttermilk Pancakes
I’ve been making pancakes for years. I regularly made them in Tanzania (with whatever ingredients I could get my hands on), and have tried various recipes over the years. For many years now I’ve been using the Joy of Cooking for a standard buttermilk pancake recipe. But they weren’t always as fluffy as I wanted…
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Peanutty Peanut Butter Cookies with Peanuts
Who doesn’t love peanut butter cookies? Other than those who are allergic, of course… In the past year, I expanded my cookie repertoire to peanut butter cookies. Sam loves them, Becky loves them, and my sister Amanda loves them. In honor of Auntie Amanda’s upcoming visit, I’m finally blogging the recipe that I use. Of…
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Curried Butternut Squash Soup with Cilantro Yogurt
A couple of years ago we were looking for a good butternut squash soup recipe to take advantage of the beautiful squash we find at the farmers’ markets around fall and winter. Becky found an old Cook’s Illustrated recipe that somebody else had reposted online. It purported to extract the most flavor out the squash…
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Roast Turkey
Okay. So I haven’t posted to this blog since January. And Thanksgiving was last Thursday. But that doesn’t mean I can’t post my roast turkey recipe now! And if I do it now, it’ll be written down before I forget it again next year. There are many schools of thought on cooking a turkey. But…
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Pumpkin Bread
Some time ago, I posted a recipe for courgette (zucchini) bread, inspired by a particularly successful loaf of pumpkin bread that Mike V. and I baked in Tanzania. And I’m sure everybody has been wondering…but what about that pumpkin bread? Well, at long last, here is a fantastic pumpkin bread recipe, adapted from an article…
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Want To Make Bread? There’s No Knead!
In November of 2006, Mark Bittman introduced the world to Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread. This recipe totally rocked my world, and demoted the bread machine to a sad, unused corner of the kitchen. And it wasn’t just me…everybody I knew who baked was talking about it. Four years later, it came up at lunch, which…
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Black Bean Veggie Burgers
Back in Ann Arbor, Becky and I would grill all through the summer grilling season. And one of our favorite things to grill on short notice were the Morningstar Farms Spicy Black Bean Veggie Burgers. These are exceptional veggie burgers because they don’t try to taste like fake burgers. (Becky doesn’t eat meat, and I…
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