I love cranberries so much I made them two ways for this year’s Thanksgiving – in cranberry salad, and this cranberry sauce. I love the cranberry salad by itself, but I love the cranberry sauce with turkey, on a sandwich, or topping the pancakes I’ll share with you soon that I made with the leftover sweet potatoes.

Honestly, I didn’t measure anything very carefully, but just tasted it and added things until I liked the flavor. But, it turned out so well, I at least wanted to have a record for next year of what I put in. I think this kind of thing is best made tasting as you go anyway, since what it needs will depend on the flavor and sweetness of your cranberries.

(more…)

Lots of personal and work craziness… Check back on Saturday!    And in the meantime, check the blogroll.

Sorry, Daring Bakers…if you’re here looking for my post that was due yesterday, unfortunately it’s nowhere to be found.  Life has been just too crazy this month!  But by all means, everyone should check out the success of everyone else’s mallow cookies and milanos here.  Wish I could’ve joined you — they look delicious!

No we didn’t change our hair, but our site did change today.  We added a few things today in what we hope is a long line of improvements to this site, but we wanted to go ahead and show you what we’ve done so far instead of waiting to implement everything at once.  Biggest change is the fact that our site is now bigger.  The original theme to this site was created for viewing on some of the old small monitors of times past.  Since most of you have upgraded, so did we in order to take advantage of all that room.

Since we had some space to fill we rearranged and moved some items from our crowded sidebar into a brand new left sidebar.  Hopefully this makes our right sidebar at least a bit more friendly for navigating our site.

I do my best to let my beautiful wife do the writing here although I help as much as I can with the cooking.  As you are likely to be able to tell, she is much better at writing.  But if you haven’t had the chance to learn our writing styles or don’t commonly count the grammar mistakes or typos, now you can just read who authored the post.

We have done a bit of testing of this new site, but we don’t rule out that some of you will find some odd behaviors.  If you do find yourself in this awkward situation please drop us a line at admin@meltingonline.com.  If possible please let use know your operating system and browser version.

I hope you enjoy it and let us know what you think.  If you are reading this on RSS, you may enjoy what you find after the jump.

I know this is a bit redundant with the Daring Bakers post earlier this week, but I did end up making a quiche with the leftover filling, and it turned out so well, I wanted to share.  Also, I realized I’ve never shared my quiche recipe with you, which comes from Matt’s grandmother by way of my mother-in-law.  She always filled it with bacon and swiss cheese, but here I used the mushroom barley filling from the strudel instead of the bacon (though I added a couple slices of bacon, too).  Also, I usually use cream but I didn’t have any so I substituted the buttermilk I had on hand from making a strawberry buttermilk cake.  I’ll be repeating that substitution — it added a nice rich tang.

I’ll admit that the mushroom barley filling made the quiche just a tad watery, but the flavor was so good we really didn’t mind.  Matt said “I didn’t even notice I hadn’t put hot sauce on it until I was more than halfway through a slice,” and usually even his favorite quiche, from his grandmother, is drowning in it before he even starts eating.  So I considered that high praise indeed!

(more…)