Bread enthusiast. Vegetable lover. Omnivore. If the kitchen is your happy place, you're in good company. Let's hang.
What to cook for 20 people? A Favorite, Simple Festive Dinner + More Easter Favorites
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Friends, hello from Vermont, where green mountains and dogs abound! We arrived at my cousin's house yesterday evening with dinner in tow for 20 people: four baked pastas (assembled but not baked), large-batch Caesar dressing with many bags of Romaine, focaccia, and two almond tortes, which my sister, who does not like to cook or bake, whipped up yesterday morning. We baked the pastas upon arrival, assembled the salad while the pasta baked, and warmed the focaccia while the pasta rested. It was simple and got the job done, feeding a ton of people without a ton of work. When contemplating the menu, I had thought about a few other favorites, namely Yotam Ottolenghi's roast chicken with clementines with a simple salad on the side, but with a few vegetarians and lots of children in the mix, the baked pastas felt like the safest bet. It was all well received, and again, easy. Today we are celebrating Easter a day early with lamb on the spit, spanakopita, Greek salad, and orange-ricotta pound cake. To all who are celebrating, I am wishing you a wonderful holiday weekend. Gotta get back to these dogs! πππ
Review of the Week
βMy Grandmother's Mustard Sauceβ ββοΈβοΈβοΈβοΈβοΈβ "This stuff is addictive, seriously. I just made it for the first time, and when I took a little spoon and tasted it, I had to keep going back to the cutlery drawer for more spoons for more tastes. I just washed eight tasting spoons. This will be fantastic with our Easter ham and I canβt wait for our foodie son to taste it!" β Maureen β A Simple, Festive MenuβRoasted Chicken with Clementinesβ
βAll-Purpose Lemon Vinaigretteβ
βJim Lahey's No-Knead Breadβ
βOrange and Olive Oil Cakeβ Easter Menu 2025In this post, I've rounded up all of my favorite Easter recipes, from baked ham and mustard sauce to rack of lamb with tzatziki to scalloped potatoes and punch to buttermilk pull-apart rolls and hot cross buns to easy-to-peel hard-boiled eggs and more. Find all of them here as well as a few highlights below:
βHot Cross Bunsβ The dough for this recipe holds up well in the fridge, so don't be afraid to assemble your pan on the Wednesday or Thursday before Good Friday.
βBaked Ham with Brown Sugar Glazeβ If youβve ever toiled over a roast turkey β from the brining to the basting to the carving β a baked ham feels like a complete dream. This past Christmas, I made a half ham (8 lbs.), which still fed a crowd of us and gave us leftovers for days (as well as a nice bone for split pea soup): βCrispy Roasted Fingerling Potatoes, For a Crowdβ βLofty Popovers (Yorkshire Pudding)β There is nothing more magical than pulling a pan of lofty popovers from the oven just as everyone is sitting down for dinner, and making them couldnβt be simpler. The secret? Room temperature ingredients.
βButtermilk Pull-Apart Rollsβ
βOrange-Ricotta Pound Cakeβ I've included a number of desserts in my Easter post, and of all of them this is likely the easiest: orange-ricotta pound cake. What's nice about this one is that it can be made ahead β it keeps well for days β but it also can double as a tea cake or breakfast cake or really an anytime cake. βFlourless Chocolate Cakeβ
Baked Feta with Olives and Citrus
In Friday's pizza newsletter, I shared a recipe for baked feta with citrus and olives from a gorgeous new cookbook. Get the recipe here:
Thank YouThank you to all who have ordered Pizza Night. If you haven't left a review yet, I would be so grateful if you did! πππππ₯π₯
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PS: All previous editions of this newsletter can be found here. |
Hi. I'm Ali.
Bread enthusiast. Vegetable lover. Omnivore. If the kitchen is your happy place, you're in good company. Let's hang.
Friends, good morning. As I type, snow is falling, the third time this week, and while I should not at all be surprised having lived in Upstate New York for a decade now, it's still, well, I don't know: disappointing? What is not disappointing is discovering that my favorite baked steel cut oatmeal can be made eggless (pictured above). As most of you know, I don't avoid eggs, but I often receive questions about replacing them in recipes, historically for allergy reasons but more recently for...
Friends, hello. This hot cross bun recipe has lived on my site for years and as with many of my bread recipes, it has been tweaked numerous times. When I made the buns last year, I remember thinking they were a little too sweet and dense, and while my family still devoured them, I couldn't help but tweak them one last time. In sum: I've reduced the sugar from 1/2 cup to 1/3 cup (gram measurements, of course, are included). I've added the zest of one clementine (or orange) and then,...
Friends, hello. A few weeks ago, I revisited Jim Lahey's N0-Knead Bread Recipe. It was the 5th recipe I ever blogged about it, and in the nearly 20 years of making it, I hadn't strayed from the original recipe. But something I've been doing with nearly all of my bread and pizza dough recipes since writing Pizza Night is this: 30 to 60 minutes after mixing the dough (a period that allows the gluten to relax and the flour to fully hydrate), I perform one set of stretches and folds. It doesn't...