Fabulous desserts for the holidays 70 Recipes
Life is uncertain. Make dessert first.
Dec. 20, 2020
Remember how, as a kid, you would painstakingly eat every last carrot and pea on your dinner plate only to have your mom give you a slice of cantaloupe or a banana at the end of the meal and call it dessert? Don’t get me wrong. I love fruit. But fruit is not dessert, even when eaten at the end of a meal. As I child, I had difficulty articulating the argument, but some years ago, my friend Zvi laid out his dessert rule for me. For something to qualify as dessert, at least two of three ingredients must be present: flour, sugar, chocolate. If it does not meet the criteria, it is a sweet treat, but it is not dessert.
Nothing says holiday meal like a beautiful roast 42 Recipes
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Not feeding 25 this year? Serve a smaller roast. Something on this list will surely feed your yen.
Dec. 18, 2020
With or without a crowd, a roast is a great centerpiece for a meal, if for no other reason than roasts are easy. Throw the meat in the oven and you don’t have to think about it for a while. You can turn your attention to side dishes, desserts and setting the table, or leave the kitchen altogether and take a shower or catch an episode of “The Queen’s Gambit” or “The Crown.” With the right size roast, once you’ve shut that oven door, you are free for a good two hours, often more, to do whatever is on your list.
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For Kiano Moju, cooking on Christmas Day is a high-stakes affair. She cooks for her entire family, presenting a menu for approval before preparing a feast fit for her relatives’ very particular requests.
“My whole life, we’ve done it this way,” says Moju. “Every holiday meal, we always have two different meats, because if we just have one, someone will feel slighted or upset. It also just seems like a normal day if we have one. And no, chicken doesn’t count.”
Moju lives in West Hollywood and is half Kenyan Maasai and half Nigerian. Her cooking reflects both sides of her heritage, plus where she lives now, in a style of cooking she calls “Afri-Cali.” Nowhere else can you see that in full effect than in her family’s Christmas feast, a blend of East African dishes customized with California ingredients and touched with flavors from West Africa.
Toast your fortitude in this unprecedented year with a bubbly cocktail
A trio of bubbly cocktails is perfect for an end-of-the-year celebration for one.
(Silvia Razgova / For The Times; prop styling by Kate Parisian)
By Rebekah Peppler
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If you’re thinking, “A piece on sparkling wine for the year-end holidays, how original,” same. But nothing about this year has been familiar and, as 2020 extends into its final month, there is a strong case for seeking comfort in the traditions we can safely keep.
Enter bubbly-based drinks. While it’s not the year for bathtubs filled with ice and bottles of wine, shared noisemakers or lack of personal space, the practice of raising a fizzing glass to cap the year’s finish stands. These sparkling cocktails aren’t intended to reinvent the holiday wheel but rather to retain a celebratory feel while upping the ABV alcohol by volume because, well, 2020 has earned it.
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Hanukkah started just a couple days ago, and I’ve taken the opportunity to follow our recipe tester Julie Giuffrida’s advice of eating latkes every day. As Julie notes in her roundup from last week, “At Hanukkah time, potato latkes fried in oil are center stage. To many, eight days of potato latkes may not sound so bad one or two or five or six are never enough. My family of four could easily put away a 5-pound bag of potatoes’ worth of latkes in one sitting.” Check out her curated list of L.A. Times’ Hanukkah recipes to keep you cooking with new ideas throughout the holiday. Or do like I do and make one batch of Jonathan Gold’s favorite potato latkes and just keep re-crisping them in a skillet to eat with each meal.