30 Minute Stovetop Applesauce (Small Batch)

This quick and easy stovetop applesauce comes together in under 30 minutes (including the time it takes to peel and dice the apples!) It’s a small batch recipe perfect for when you just need a few servings, and don’t have time to sit around watching a pot simmer for hours.

Lightly spiced and subtly sweetened (but also very flexible if you want to adjust the sugar and spices to taste), this applesauce is perfect by the spoonful, and also as a topping for your next batch of latkes, dolloped on french toast or waffles, or as an accompaniment to a juicy seared sirloin or pork chop.

Homemade applesauce in under 30 minutes? Sign me up!

I love just how superbly simple this recipe is. And it’s not one of those tricky recipes that claims to be 30 minutes but in reality requires 25 minutes of prep time before you even start cooking.

No, this recipe is truly a 30 minute recipe. In fact, even accounting for the time to snap photos of the process along the way (which always slows me down), my applesauce was done in exactly 27 minutes (yes, I timed it!) That includes peeling and dicing the apples, cooking them, and running it all through a food mill.

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Pistachio Butter Blossom Cookies

A classic cookie gets a pistachio twist, made with a triple dose of nutty pistachio flavor. The dark chocolate kisses pressed into the centers are melty and molten right out of the oven (my favorite way to enjoy them), but firm up again after an hour or so, making these cookies perfect for shipping or sharing.

These wickedly green cookies are buttery and tender, with a kiss of luxurious dark chocolate in the middle that would please even the grinch. I’ve packed as much pistachio flavor as I possibly can into these two-bite cookies, with pistachios in three forms: pistachio butter, pistachio flour, and pistachio extract.

The classic peanut butter blossom, now with 100% more pistachio (green is the new beige, after all).

These cookies are a result of having a glut of homemade pistachio butter leftover from my recipe testing experimentation last year. It felt too indulgent to use for something as menial as an afternoon snack (although apple slices + pistachio butter is sublime), so I was saving it for a special occasion (and by special occasion I mean a recipe as fabulous as this one).

Mission: accomplished! I just know you’ll love these cookies as much as I do.

Pistachio is such a nuanced flavor, much less in your face than peanut butter or even hazelnut, and even using pistachios in three forms (butter, flour, and extract) these cookies are still not in-your-face pistachio like, say, pistachio gelato; rather, they are more like a soft and buttery sugar cookie with an undertone of earthy, nutty pistachio and a hint of fragrant almond.

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Flourless Hazelnut Cake with Whipped Chocolate & Nutella Ganache

Nutty, fluffy, and fully flourless (and by flourless I mean there’s no wheat flour; it’s made with naturally gluten-free hazelnut flour), this tender and flavorful hazelnut cake has a soft, supple and satisfying texture and a swirl of fluffy whipped Nutella ganache on top, with candied hazelnut spikes for a showstopping finish.

Hazelnuts have a distinctive, earthy and nutty flavor compared to other nuts, and this cake showcases a triple dose of it, with a tender cake base made with hazelnut flour (or very finely ground hazelnuts), a cloud of whipped milk chocolate and Nutella ganache, and a sprinkle of candied hazelnuts on top for a little extra crunch and pinache.

Finally, my flourless cake trifecta is complete: pistachio, almond, and now hazelnut!

I topped this stunner with a swirl of fluffy whipped Nutella ganache and a sprinkle of candied hazelnuts for added texture and crunch (and also a few hazelnut spikes because, why not?)

There’s a reason I keep returning to to this kind of cake, where the magic of nut flour (in this case, hazelnut) combines with eggs, sugar, and butter and miraculously bakes up into a fluffy, tender cake with a texture unlike anything you’ve ever had before (unless you’ve made one of my other flourless cake recipes, of course!)

I feel like most other flourless hazelnut cake recipes out there are heavy on the chocolate, more a flourless chocolate cake with an undertone of hazelnut. This recipe, on the other hand, while it does bring in some chocolate in the topping (hazelnuts and chocolate do go oh so well together after all), it is, first and foremost, a hazelnut cake, and that’s the flavor that shines.

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Creamy Sun-Dried Tomato and Italian Sausage Pasta

Satisfying and saucy, this perfect-for-a-weeknight pasta dish features Italian sausage (you can use chicken OR pork) and baby spinach in a creamy pink tomato sauce, with chopped sun-dried tomatoes for a tangy kick.

The showstopping sauce is surprisingly creamy, especially considering there’s only 1/2 cup of cream in it. The secret is to use mostly chicken broth and white wine and thicken it with flour, and then add just a little bit of cream added at the end—resulting in a luscious, creamy sauce that’s not overly rich or heavy. A few tablespoons of tomato paste make for a pretty pink hue and an extra layer of complex, umami flavor.

This creamy, comforting pasta has become our new go-to weeknight dinner, using our tried-and-true method for making creamy, saucy pasta dishes with surprisingly little cream.

The secret to the sauce? A white-wine-and-chicken-broth base thickened with flour, and a mere half cup of cream at the end to finish it off. This variation has a few tablespoons of tomato paste added, which provides acidity and depth of flavor as well as a pretty pink hue to the sauce.

It’s not quite a one-pot meal (you still cook the pasta in a separate pot—don’t forget to set aside a bit of pasta water!) but it’s darn close and still a very quick and simple dish to throw together with minimal mess. That is my kind of comfort food!

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The Best of 2024

Farewell, 2024 (or as I like to call it, 2020 version 4.0). Hard to believe another year has come and gone, and yet here we are again looking at the yearly roundup of the best recipes published this year!

TLDR: this year was the year of kittens and pistachios.

We published only 28 recipes this year, even less than last year. Why so few? Well, as in previous years I’ve been focusing more on quality over quantity, testing recipes more times and spending more time writing in-depth, helpful posts with detailed process images (and also a few videos!)

But let’s be honest… the real reason(s) there hasn’t been nearly as many new recipes this year? Kittens. Blame the kittens.

It’s true, we started fostering kittens through our local animal shelter this summer and have since had 9 kittens (and 1 cat) come through on their way to their forever homes, including a litter of three 10-day old bottle babies (whew boy that’s a lot of work!) and a mama cat and her 5 adorably stripey babies who we named after mushrooms (ahem—Meowshrooms). Be sure to check out my dedicated kitten instagram account @loveandlittlecats for more cuteness, and while we don’t have any kittens at the moment there will definitely be more come spring.

The Meowshrooms

Bruce Stringsteen

Mama Bella, Shiitake & Oyster

Colby Jack

Daisy Mewchanan

Button & Oyster

Oyster & Shiitake

Enoki (Bah Humbug!)

Bruce and Lucy

(Psst! That adorable little grumpy santa up there is Enoki, and if you want to get a head start on next year’s Christmas cards you can purchase them—plus one of the whole gang—in the L&OO shop!)

Anyway. I’ve done a best of post every year for the past 15 years, and want to continue that tradition, if only just because it’s fun to look back and reminisce.

These year-end posts are always interesting, seeing which recipes you all loved the most and how they differed from the ones I was most excited about (although to be honest, I don’t usually post about recipes I’m not excited about.)

(Click through to see which recipe came out on top!)

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Chewy Chocolate Molasses Cookies

Chewy, chocolatey and perfectly spiced, these chocolate molasses cookies are the perfect addition to your holiday cookie boxes. With a deep chocolate flavor and chewy, fudgy texture with a delicate crunch of granulated sugar on the outside, they are sure to become a fast favorite!

The secret to extra chewy, fudgy cookies that stay soft for days is threefold: brown sugar instead of white, an extra egg yolk, and melted butter instead of creamed—melted butter also means no electric mixer is required (though you can certainly use one if you like!)

Soft, chewy molasses cookies are some of my favorite holiday cookies, but I always lament the lack of chocolate. Personally, I love the combination of gingerbread and chocolate (it’s a combo I’ve used multiple times before with delightful results). So I figured, why not take the perfectly chewy, crinkly molasses cookie and make it chocolate?

The result is nothing short of decadent: an intensely flavored, satisfyingly chewy cookie spiked with sultry molasses flavor, fragrant ginger and cinnamon spices, plus a intense hit of cocoa powder. Oh, and a pinch of instant espresso powder to enhance the bittersweet flavor of the chocolate even more (it’s such a small amount that the cookies don’t actually taste like coffee, I promise, though you can certainly leave it out if you wish).

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Spiced Persimmon Bread

Moist and flavorful and perfectly spiced, this persimmon quick bread is made with extra ripe Hachiya persimmons for a unique fall bake that can be enjoyed morning, afternoon or night!

Everyone is familiar with banana bread and pumpkin bread, but have you ever had persimmon bread? It might taste a little like you snuck a banana into a loaf of pumpkin bread, but the unique autumnal flavor of persimmon plays beautifully with seasonal fall spices (dare I say that persimmon spice is the new pumpkin spice?)

Would you believe I’ve been working on this recipe for 5 years?

Indeed, it’s hard to test a recipe whose star ingredient is only available a few weeks every year (and can sometimes take a few weeks to fully ripen at that).

For the past 5 years, I’d buy a dozen persimmons as soon as they appeared in the grocery store, then wait patiently for them to ripen to be baked into lush, fragrant persimmon bread. Unfortunately, by the time I’d baked them all into loaf after loaf of good-but-still-not-perfect persimmon bread, the short season would be over and I could not get any more for further tests. So I would dog-ear that page in my recipe notebook to try again the next year. And the next… and the next… and, well, now you see why it’s been 5 years!

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