(Note: Giveaway rules appear right under the recipe.)

Friends, the gods are totally smiling upon me today, for today is a double holiday. Not only is it Thanksgiving, but it’s also (Drumroll! Fanfare!) Furey & the Feast’s first birthday. Which means there’s turkey, pie AND birthday cake. I might add that it’s not just any birthday cake, but it’s a chocolate cake.

A microwave chocolate cake. (Are those crickets I hear?)

Normally I’m not too keen on using the nukebox as a cooking method, but this is a special case.

I was 9 or 10 years old when I bought my first cookbook, which I ordered from the pages of that Scholastic book club newsletter you get every month when you’re in elementary school. “Hershey’s Fabulous Desserts” had this beautiful chocolate cake on the cover, all done-up with chocolate curls and strawberry garnishes. What a cookbook was doing in an Scholastic newsletter I have no idea, but I remember thinking something along the lines of holy crap, I can make that?

Among the 140 recipes in this cookbook, there were only a handful of them that a child could make without parental know-how and knowledge. One of them was this cake. My mom had banned sweets from the house long ago, so this cake was, in my eyes, the greatest of mankind’s achievements. I could have cake every single weekday of  summer while my mom was at work, thanks to the ease of the microwave. She’d never know.

So in honor of these childhood and blog firsts, I wanted to “bake” this cake again. Back then, each forkful of cake laced with deviousness was especially delightful. Without that element, would it taste the same after all this time?

(Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe and giveaway)

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My column ran today in The Orange County Register print edition today. It’s not available online, so I’ve posted it here. Thanks for reading!
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Every year, we look forward to the annual holiday eating rituals: A golden, grand dame of a turkey, savory sides and a sweet finale with pumpkin pie front and center. (And if you’re household is like mine, the obligatory post-feast nap follows soon after.)

Though there’s nothing wrong with these traditions, why not mix it up a bit? This year, you may want to surprise your guests by serving pumpkin pie at the beginning of the meal instead of at dessert. How? By turning it into a soup. The transformation can be made even easier by using canned pumpkin instead of fresh, yielding fantastic results.

Canned food often gets a bad rap for being, well, canned. And rightly so; fresh ingredients are almost always better in recipes. But there are few exceptions to this rule, and canned pumpkin is one of them. For one, the canned variety is way easier to use. When you’ve got your hands full with roasting a bird and preparing sides to go with it, chopping, boiling and mashing fresh pumpkin isn’t making the best use of your time. Tip: When buying canned pumpkin, make sure you’re getting “pumpkin puree” instead of “pumpkin pie mix,” which is offered in similar-sized cans with almost identical labels.

This recipe yields a spicy soup that’s just reminiscent enough of a pumpkin pie to seem like a before-dinner treat, but packs enough savory ingredients to warrant it a place as a starter or first course. And with the welcome addition of bacon, cream and butter (necessary ingredients for happiness, in my opinion), everyone’s a winner.

The following long list of ingredients may look intimidating, but I promise the procedures are quite simple: You simply cook everything in one pot. If you have a formal party and want an elegant soup, you can puree it for a soft, velvety texture. But it’s just as good when left as a hearty, rustic soup.

When I make this soup, I like to serve it with pie crust “crackers” on the side. Take some ready-made pie dough (or homemade, if you have it), roll it out and use cookie cutters to cut rounds from the dough. Bake rounds on a baking sheet according to package directions.

Another fun way to serve this soup is in shot glasses. If there are appetizers before dinner, you can easily slide a tray of these onto any table, and guests can help themselves to pumpkin soup shooters. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

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Dear readers, I am in a funk. And not the good kind that allows you to wear a sequined gold dress and your sunglasses at night. The kind where everything you cook burns or tastes weird and everything you write reads cliché. It’s not a good place to be.

But onward we go, because cooking and writing is what we do here, however cringeworthy or awesome either turn out.

In the span of one week, four out of the five dishes prepared by my hands ended up as spectacular trainwrecks – ones that made microwaved frozen meals look like five-star food. The sole saving grace was this pasta with meat sauce, which is made annually at the first sign of winter’s chilly weather. It’s a hearty sauce thicker than blood, like an Italian chili almost, that goes well with garlic bread and even eaten alone in a bowl with a large spoon, should you be so bold.

In this case, it’s paired with a fresh pasta recipe adapted from Michael Ruhlman’s “Ratio,” using just the basics: flour and eggs. Nothing else.

I’ve been making this meat sauce for years, and thus it’s a recipe built on intuition. It’s a sauce that does its job and does it well, and with all of the flops I’ve been cranking out lately, it also helps to remind me that success, however little or large, is very, very sweet. And filling. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipes)

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