Breakfast & Brunch – In Good Taste

Homemade Quinoa Granola

Maris Callahan — Sat, 27 Jan 2018 00:37:18 +0000

I saw a meme this week that said “January is the Monday of months.” Even though I was born in January, it is hardly my favorite page of the calendar. January is gray, cold and coincides with the letdown that follows the holidays. You’re taking down decorations, discarding the Christmas tree and essentially undoing the festivity and joy of the weeks prior. Couple that with the fact that you’re supposed to bring to a screeching halt the cooking, baking and indulgence of December and replace it with salads and green smoothies and well, I’m not a doctor but I think we just found the cause of “Seasonal Affective Disorder.” Even though actual medical doctors might tell you that exercise and eight hours of sleep each night will help, I think baking is a much better bet. Even though there are chocolate chip cookies in my oven as I type this post, a good old fashioned baking binge doesn’t have to mean carbs and calories. I don’t make granola very much, but when I do I always wonder why I don’t make it more often. It’s incredibly easy, it comes together in minutes, and it’s a great thing to bake in […]

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Veggie Breakfast Bake with Chicken Sausage

Maris Callahan — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 22:02:07 +0000

Whenever I’m hosting a brunch, my menu generally looks something like this: a sweet pastry (chocolate chip sconesare one of my favorites); smoked salmon, a dozen bagels and at least three different types of cream cheese from the bagel shop in our neighborhood; a bottle (or three) of champagne and a carafe of orange juice; a seasonal fresh fruit and yogurt parfait bar and of course, a baked egg dish that I can make the night before and bake off in the morning. In the egg category, one of my favorite go-to recipes is this spinach and cheese strata that is rich, savory and perfect. With the holiday season in full-swing, egg casseroles always make me think of the movie, “The Family Stone.” Sarah Jessica Parker’s character meets her boyfriend’s parents for the first time and though everything is going terribly, she insists on making her family strata recipe for brunch, only to drop it all on the floor. I had a nice internal chuckle when Brad told me, shortly after we began dating, that his family always had a breakfast casserole on Christmas Day – I won’t be making the Messerveys a breakfast casserole anytime soon out of sheer […]

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How To Host a Holiday Biscuit Bar Brunch

Maris Callahan — Sun, 05 Nov 2017 18:00:32 +0000

When I have guests visiting for the holidays, I think about making dinner reservations or trying out new recipes. I rarely think about brunch, which around the holidays usually means offering guests cold cereal or leftover Christmas cookies if they happen to wake up before noon. That will all change with this holiday biscuit bar brunch idea from Chicago’s own Home Chef. When I heard that Home Chef, a weekly meal delivery company based in Chicago, is making it easier to entertain during the holiday season, I was on board. Home Chef offers weekly deliveries of fresh, perfectly portioned ingredients and chef-designed recipes for people who want to eat better at home, but want to save a little time in the kitchen. I thought their main and side dishes sounded nice, but it was the Holiday Morning Biscuit Bar that really sounded like the most awesome thing on the planet, and I can now confirm that it very much is. For $13.90, you receive the ingredients and recipe to make a dozen+ biscuits plus three unique toppings to mix and match. The Asiago biscuits in less than 20 minutes, and you serve them alongside warm apple-cinnamon butter, rich cherry butter, and a sweet onion jam. (You could even get […]

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Egg White and Veggie Scramble for the Whole Week

Maris Callahan — Wed, 03 May 2017 04:41:12 +0000

A lot of people subscribe to the idea of “cook once, eat all week” and cook a big batch of something on Saturday or Sunday, and then eat it for dinner throughout the busy work week. For some reason, I get bored eating the same dinner three nights in a row, but I don’t mind eating the same thing for breakfast. When I worked at my first job I ate the same breakfast every single weekday: oatmeal flavored with sugar-free maple syrup. It was filling, low-calorie and in hindsight…really gross. I had this routine just long to become very, very sick of oatmeal, but not enough to swear it off altogether for the rest of my life. Even so, 10 years later, I can’t seem to resort to oatmeal as my go-to weekday hot breakfast. What I do like eating are eggs. I’ve recently been trying to eat healthier and lose weight, so I’ve been buying liquid egg whites and mixing them with cheese and veggies. It’s a low-calorie, low-fat, high-protein meal that also happens to be fresh and full of flavor. It’s also infinitely customizable, and really quick and convenient. Even though I work from home, I still don’t have the wherewithal to […]

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Pumpkin Cranberry Bread

Maris Callahan — Sat, 19 Nov 2016 02:00:09 +0000

When I was in first grade, my class had a Thanksgiving party in which I was responsible for bringing cranberry bread. My mom made it with a boxed mix and I suppose it went over well with the six year old crowd, because every year thereafter, I would make cranberry bread — or pumpkin cranberry bread — for our family’s Thanksgiving dinner. At some point in my early twenties I graduated from baking cranberry bread from the boxed mix to baking cranberry bread from scratch. Over the years, I’ve come to believe that the ingredients you use in your cooking will play a huge role in the quality of the final product. That means fresh citrus juices instead of bottled, high quality herbs and spices and Bob’s Red Mill organic unbleached white flour (grab your own with this coupon from the brand). Organic Unbleached White Flour is freshly milled from Organic hard red wheat. Both the bran and the germ have been removed leaving the endosperm that is made into white flour. It is not enriched with any additives. This is the same high protein flour used by professional bakers and produces high, well-textured loaves of bread equally as well as […]

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