The first thing that caught my attention about Kerry’s recipe on her blog Me and My Three is the peanut butter! What a neat ingredient :). Her Satay Chicken Pies combine some of the tastiest ingredients in the most unique ways. Normally, when we think of a chicken pie, we imagine a heavy creamy or milky filling that’s primarily savory in flavor.

Of course, we also expect to sink our teeth into a crust of some sort. Kerry’s pie crust is a flakey one, she used frozen puff pastry but whipped up the rest of the recipe from scratch. What gives Kerry’s pie filling its creamy texture is the coconut cream! Sweet chili sauce and soy sauce are the other secret ingredients that will have everyone asking for the recipe!

Peanut butter isn’t the only ingredient that makes this pie high in protein. Kerry’s pie also contains chicken and a few veggies. Kerry uses onion, but this is a recipe that can easily be adapted. Add as many veggies as you want! You can also make it vegetarian by not adding the meat…the possibilities are endless!

Most of us are all too familiar with holiday sales. Some of us wait until right before the holidays to purchase our gifts, while others purchase gifts for the following year right after Christmas! Though I’m not always very good at planning ahead, especially when it comes to Christmas presents, it’s always the perfect time to ’stock up’ on good recipes for the next big festive occasion.

Niki’s Potato and Stuffing Croquettes recipe is the kind I’m always hoping to come across. It would make a flavorful appetizer and it would also make a unique side around the holidays. In her blog Big City Cooking, Niki talks about making these with the leftovers! Another ingenious idea. It takes my two favorite sides, stuffing and mashed potatoes, and combines them into a delicious and lightly fried side dish that resembles a savory pancake.

Honestly, this recipe is worth celebrating on its own! Now that we’ve told you how tasty it is, you probably won’t even be able to wait until turkey season to prepare these original and mouthwatering Potato and Stuffing Croquettes topped with cranberry sauce!

When I think of comfort food, so many things come to mind. Chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal, chicken soup…and warm cheesy Italian-inspired dishes. Erika’s Spinach and Three Cheese Stuffed Pasta Shells fall into that category. I don’t have to say much about this dish because the photo speaks for itself! Erika also mentions that this is a great make-ahead meal.

She also suggests making this for your next party. You can serve the pasta shells like a casserole, in one big dish, and even if you’re not a meat-eater, or your friends aren’t, this cheesy vegetarian meal can still be enjoyed. Plus, Erika’s dish heats up beautifully, and I personally think dishes like these make the tastiest leftovers!

In her blog Sweet Pea, Erika mentions that her Spinach and Three Cheese Stuffed Pasta Shells recipe was inspired by an old friend’s, and like the rest of us, she didn’t have the exact measurements for the recipe because she made it up! So Erika came up with her own version, including her recipe for the delicious homemade tomato sauce that goes along with it!

Like many people you probably overloaded on goodies and treats over the holidays, and now your guilt has settled in and convinced you to resolve to never eat sugar again during 2009! Just 2 weeks after that resolution your spouse caught you stashing chocolate in the back of the cup towel drawer, so now you are busted and your resolution has already collapsed (or was that just me??). Let’s be realistic here. We need sugar! It is detrimental to our happiness to go without!

I know that Amy from Delicious By Nature agrees with me! Just because we are weak beneath the persuasion of the almighty sugar, doesn’t mean that we have to give in completely. Amy has concocted this amazingly delicious hot chocolate recipe that is free from dairy, artificial flavors, and those dreaded calories. Her recipe is the perfect base for any flavor combination you can come up with. Some of the flavorings she suggests are vanilla extract with a sprinkle of cinnamon, a tiny dab of peppermint extract stirred in with a candy cane, a bit of coconut extract or even using coconut milk in the base, or maybe try a splash of almond extract with a coconut milk base for an almond joy inspired hot cocoa! Yum! What flavors can you come up with?!

Most of us have those ‘backup’ canned foods that we keep in the pantry, but what happens when our favorite one literally makes us sick! At this point, we either vow to never eat it again…or we make it from scratch, so that we know what goes into what we’re eating!

WokkingMum from Let’s get Wokking wanted to make her husband a meal he would always remember, but not for gastrointestinal reasons :)! She took one of his favorite foods and made it from scratch. Fermented black beans top her steamed snapper. If you’re not familiar with fermented black beans, you might be a bit surprised to find out that they’re actually black soy beans that have soaked in a salty solution, giving them a distinctive salty flavor.

WokkingMum’s dish let’s the fermented black beans shine; you won’t find too many exotic spices in this dish, just garlic, ginger, and soy sauce. WokkingMum also cooks the fish by steaming it, as the title suggests, in only 8 minutes! This is a recipe to try when you’re looking for something new, healthy and not too complicated!

Things don’t always go as planned, but sometimes the results are more than you could have ever planned for. Maggie, from Dog Hill Kitchen, had an abundance of cranberries left over from unfinished holiday baking, and was anxious to find a new recipe to incorporate them into. After catching up on her food magazine reading (don’t we all wish we had time for that!) she stumbled across a recipe for a cranberry-cherry lattice pie in the Whole Foods magazine.

To celebrate her father-in-law’s birthday Maggie volunteered to make her new-found recipe to go along with a chocolate cake she was making as well. Maggie claims she would “almost always pick pie over cake.” To give this recipe her own touch, she used a super easy oil crust, swapped the lattice for a sweet crumb topping, and added fresh ginger and cinnamon. Yum! This tart sounds like the perfect marriage of sweet, tart and warm flavors. Since she was also bringing a cake Maggie decided to baked the tart in a 7 1/2 inch tart pan; the perfect sized pan for 4 or 5 people. If you want to bake this in a regular sized tart pan or pie dish you may want to double this recipe.

Maggie’s tart is perfect for any occasion, and is a great excuse for cleaning out your holiday leftovers! Maggie tells us to “favor the pie lovers in your life and make this!”

Dana introduced me to a delicious carby concept in her blog Proof of the Pudding. She says it perfectly; when you want a snack, you’re gonna want to nibble on something that’s “more substantial than a coffee cake, less sweet than a cupcake but less wholesome than a granola bar”. I couldn’t agree more, in fact, it’s a few hours before dinner and that’s exactly what I’m craving!

Dana’s Chewy-Banana Oat Snack Cake will put snack bars to shame! Even chocolatey candy bars will be jealous of this snack cake that provides some nutrients, fiber, and just the right amount of sweetness. Dana combined her three favorite ingredients, banana, coconut and oats to create a treat that also doubles as a dessert. Even though it’s a cake, I can easily see this served around brunch; I’d even call this a tasty midnight snack.

Dana also uses one of my favorite baking ingredients, yogurt! It’s sure to moisten up any cake, and because she added the yogurt, she only had to use 4 tablespoons of butter for the rest of it! If you can make a basic one layer cake, you can whip this up in no time!

Travsgoneglutenfree has a great recipe for Pumpkin Spice Cookies posted that I just had to make! I don’t know about you, but my love for pumpkin doesn’t disappear as soon as the leaves fall off the trees and the last slice of turkey vanishes from our plates! This is why I always keep at least one can of pumpkin in my pantry.

These cookies were delicious and aromatic. I tweaked the recipe just a bit, but found that the cookies came out as delicious as Travis’ photo in the recipe card depicts them. How did I tweak it? Well, I basically decreased the amount of flour down by 1/2 cup, and then decreased the amount of spices by 1/4, to match the new flour quantity. I left the pumpkin amount the same (because I really love the flavor) and just added a bit less butter instead!

If you’re like me and want to make these hearty Pumpkin Spice Cookies but don’t have any Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-Free flour around, have no fear! Here is the flour combo I came up with; it’s an all-purpose mix that worked great in this recipe: 1/2 cup white rice flour, 1/4 cup sweet sorghum flour, 1/4 cup brown rice flour, 1/4 cup corn starch, 1/4 cup tapioca flour. I also added 1 teaspoon of xanthan gum, so that the cookies don’t crumble (I believe Bob’s Red Mill GF flour already contains this important gluten-free baking ingredient, though.)

You can easily make these with all-purpose flour if you aren’t on a gluten free diet, too :)!

It is so difficult to keep up with the food trends these days… cupcakes, frozen yogurt, macarons… Just when I’ve mastered one it is suddenly phased out and replaced by something better, cuter, and sweeter. Along with a few other cutesy treats, macarons seem to be all the rave as of late. Thousands of new flavor combinations, colors, and methods pop up every day. I must admit that I am a sucker for these things. I’ve not abandoned team cupcake just yet, but these cute little cookies are so persuasive!

Carly caught the macaron buzz not too long ago and jumped on board! She confesses that she “kind of has a macaron obsession right now. She is so intrigued by their cuteness!” After carefully reading through Dessert Magazine’s macaron tips she made the necessary adjustments and employed their suggested techniques. One of the biggest tips she read was to allow your macs to sit for about an hour to form a nice shell. This will keep them from cracking in the oven.

To test out her newly acquired pastry knowledge she made a batch of white chocolate macarons, and was thoroughly pleased! She chose to make this batch pink, and I couldn’t agree more! These are precious! Carly’s Kitchen has been busy trying out new macaron flavors, so be sure to go by and check out her newest creations.

Doughnuts are the timeless treat that many of us love, because, whether they’re covered in chocolate, come with a berry or lemon filling, are dipped in glazed, or decked out in sprinkles, they’re always delicious. But what if the doughnut shop ran out of your favorite doughnut? Or what if you’re just curious and want to make your own batch?

Odette shares a recipe with us for Baking Powder Doughnuts that’s perfect for those times. In her blog, Odette’s Recipes from Zimbabwe, she talks about finding comfort in this classic treat. Her recipe for Baking Powder Doughnuts will yield 12 donuts that you can sprinkle with powdered sugar… or top with your own unique glaze or candy.

You’ll like that the recipe only calls for a few tablespoons of butter. The butter won’t mask the flavor of the other delicious ingredients, like nutmeg and cinnamon. With Odette’s easy-to-follow instructions, I’m sure many of us will bake doughnuts from scratch more often! I bet it’s safe to say that frying these up is faster (and cheaper) than going out and buying them!