It’s fall. We need comfort food, and apparently my English ancestors have taken control of the editorial calendar because Shepherd’s pie is on the menu tonight. Shepherd’s pie is absolutely at the top of my comfort-food list. There’s a rich, savory filling underneath a thick layer of creamy mashed potatoes, then I cover the whole…
You know those cold winter days where your goosebumps just don’t go away and you can’t warm up to save your life. That’s pretty cold. And then there is Ukraine-in-the-middle-of-winter cold where the goosebumps seem bigger and the feeling of warmth just seems to be getting further and further away from your reality. I was…
When I lived in Ukraine, it was freezing cold! And I don’t mean Utah in January, dry, better grab a coat cold. I mean a kind of cold that I still remember twenty years later. My very first night there, I was overwhelmed, far from home, and so cold that I cried myself to sleep. I swear…
Apparently the first recipe in Sips, Suppers & Stories is a dirty chai that contains neither coffee nor caffeinated tea, which feels like an appropriate way to begin. I love chai. Warm, creamy, spicy chai is one of those drinks that makes me want to put on a sweater even when September is still pulling…
The First Chicken Pot Pie I Ever Ate I vividly remember sitting at Marie Callender’s with my family after a funeral of some sort when I ordered chicken pot pie for the first time. I don’t remember whose funeral it was, which feels like information I should probably know, but I DO remember the pot…
Okay, homemade mayo. I put this off for way too long because it sounded like one of those things that requires too much from me. It does not. It takes about two minutes, and once you do it once you will feel a little silly about how long you avoided it. I know I did….
My family has eaten basically the same meal every Christmas Eve for as long as I can remember. And when I say the same meal, I mean THE SAME MEAL. If you have a copy of our family cookbook, you’ll already know the menu. But for those of you who don’t, let me introduce you….
I’m giving you my mom’s Christmas Stuffed Mushrooms because these deserve to escape the confines of the Taggart family cookbook. They’re filled with sausage, cream cheese and Swiss cheese and have been part of our Christmas Feast for as long as I can remember.
Nut in the Pudding is one of our favorite Taggart Christmas traditions, although there is technically no pudding involved, so let’s get that cleared up immediately. Every year my dad makes this poppy seed Bundt cake, slices it up, and secretly hides an almond underneath one of the pieces. Then everyone chooses a slice. Whoever…
My dad served his mission in England and came home loving Brussels sprouts, which was not a thing anybody in Utah was doing in the seventies. My mom started making them sometime in the eighties, and they were terrible. Boiled. Gray. Just that smell that really never goes away. We ate them because that was…
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