Some Quick Meals to Survive the Holiday Frenzy

By Sandy Hu

From Thanksgiving until the New Year, there are never enough hours in the day to get ready for the holidays.  While you’re trimming the tree, shopping for gifts, baking cookies and preparing to host parties, the daily cooking still must get done.

Special Fork, a mobile recipe website, was built to solve what to cook at 4 p.m. when you haven’t yet decided what’s for dinner.  While spur-of-the moment decision-making is fine most of the year, during the holiday frenzy, it’s good to have some quick meals in mind for the week so you can plan ahead and stock up on the ingredients you’ll need.

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Nicky’s Velvet Potatoes

By Andrew Hunter

Nicky was eating mashed potatoes before he cut his first tooth. He loved potatoes so much that we relied on them as a vehicle for his balanced nutrition.

We called him Picky Nicky in those days, which meant we needed to work really hard just to get him to open his mouth at the dinner table. Once we discovered potatoes, we began mixing in other goodies…mashed peas, carrots, broccoli, almost anything we ate got mixed into his. I’m sure he would have been mad if he knew, but what he didn’t know helped him.

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Pumpkin-Orange Smoothies

By Andrew Hunter

Halloween is the symbolic start of the holiday season in the Hunter household. For Marilyn and me, it’s a transitional time at the table too. Steaks and chops are on the grill less often with more roasts braised for hours on Sundays to eat the rest of the week; and our shopping trips yield fewer summer fruits and veggies and more squashes, roots and gourds.

Pumpkins this year will get carved, roasted, grilled and puréed. We like to buy small orange pumpkin, cut off the stem end, then cut in quarters, clean away the stringy and seedy insides, rub with oil, salt and pepper, and roast until soft and tender. With these chunks of soft pumpkin, we can do a bunch of things from dicing for pasta, to puréeing for soups and mashing into potatoes for an autumnal side.

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Chinese Noodles

By Andrew Hunter

There’s a Chinese noodle house east of L.A. called Din Tai Fung. Their specialty is dumplings and boy, are they special – glutinous rice shaomai, green melon and shrimp bundles, and tiny soup dumplings bobbing in clear chicken broth, to name a few of our favorites. Din Tai, as we call it, is a regular and possibly favorite stop on our weekend rotation of dim sum houses.

The place is sleek, clean and crowded with a large tinted kitchen window that gives a shady peek at cooks working shoulder to shoulder rolling noodles, stuffing discs of dough and crimping them into round, crescent and purse-shaped dumplings.

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Corn Pudding for a Harvest Moon

By Marilyn Hunter

Harvest moon is that very special time of year when a big, bright, orange moon rises around sunset. Harvest moon, sometimes known as corn moon, got its name by the light it provided farmers, which helped them work late into the night at the peak of harvest.

These nights, when moon meets sun, are a joy for our boys. For them, this time of year means pumpkin patches, corn mazes and hayrides. For the family table, it means taking advantage of the wonderful fall produce…apples, squash, sweet potatoes, pumpkin and the last few days of corn season.

There’s a giant pumpkin farm, far from the bustle of the city, where we go for all of the above food and fun. It takes all day by the time we go, spend time and come home, but it’s worth the travel.

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