The annual pot of ordinary applesauce approaches the sublime with the addition of a vanilla bean.

Active time: about three hours, depending on how long you prefer to cook the sauce.

 

Thursday is, of course, all about the food, the family and the grateful thanks, and for many of us, the highlight of the day is that giant, golden bird.  For my 2-year-old niece, however, the day might just be given over to the applesauce.

My niece - a.k.a. "the cutest thing - ever" - dove hard and fast for the jars of homemade applesauce I took her last fall. Then just the tender age of 1 and testing out solid foods, she got lots of things to try from me. The mushed up squash? She was not a fan. And the frozen green beans weren't a hit either, although she likes the bland ones out of a can. Go figure.

But before you write her off as the keeper of an unsophisticated palate, consider two things: she's 2, and she loves homemade applesauce. 

But really, how could you not? Chunky with bits of apple that haven't turned to pulp in a commercial (over)processing plant, so thick it will stand up on a spoon, and ruddy with cinnamon, it is delectable comfort in a jar. And I've got half a dozen of them to take to The Cutest Thing - Ever on Thanksgiving.

But I've got a little surprise for her too - this year's applesauce is all those things: sweet and spicy with chunks of apple, but it's also perfumed with vanilla. I don't know what made me reach for the vial of juicy vanilla beans when I opened the spice cupboard to pull down the cinnamon, but before I knew it, that pod was scraped of its seeds and popped into the bubbling pot of apples. 

And now I'll never go back to plain cinnamon applesauce.  The vanilla version soars to a floral, reminiscently creamy, flavor that compliments the sharp, warm spice of the cinnamon. So if you notice me and The Cutest Thing - Ever hunched over a jar, spoons in hand, while everyone else is gathered around the turkey, just save us a leg. We'll get there, right after we find the bottom of the jar.

The process

Applesauce is simplicity in canning terms. If you can peel an apple, you can turn it into sauce.

• Quarter, peel and core apples - as many as you like, in whatever mix of varieties you like. I go with a sweeter and a tarter apple usually, and a mixed half-bushel of Macintosh and golden delicious yielded me 15 pints of sauce.
• Cook down to your desired consistency (I like a little chew left in the apples) with apple cider, a little honey, cinnamon and a vanilla bean, stirring regularly.
• Pack in hot, sterilized jars.
• Cap jars and process in a water-bath canner for 20 minutes.

Applesauce, while quintessentially a fall food, can be made anytime throughout the winter, as long as you've got a steady supply of stored apples. I put some up in my makeshift root cellar (OK - really it's just some shelves we built into the coldest part of our basement), but I leave most of the storage duties to the growers at Way Fruit Farm, buying more from them as I need to replace our own provender. So while there's no rush to make some sauce, it does go awfully well with a turkey sandwich.

 

In hues of red, orange and yellow, sweet peppers become even sweeter with a little heat and a quick skinning.

Active time: 25 minutes for two trays of peppers

 

Have you noticed the mounds of sweet peppers at the markets lately? Their snappy, fresh greens have given way to vibrant fall tones of red, orange and yellow as they've ripened fully - a green pepper is really an unripe one. Even my curious lilac pepper I picked up at a plant sale in the spring, which starts with a purple skin and a yellow-green flesh inside, will yield to all red if I leave it on the plant long enough.

Those fiery colors also tip you off to just how sweet they'll be to chomp into.  At this time of year they're like nature's candy - delicious for sautéing and tucking into eggs for breakfast, snacking on plain for lunch, stuffing with grains and meats or stir-frying into an Asian-themed mix for dinner - but roasted they rise to smoky-sweet perfection: intense in flavor, soft in texture, and the perfect finish to a myriad of winter foods on our table. They top pizzas alongside mushrooms, brighten wild rice pilafs, drape across sandwiches of crusty bread and meats and cheeses, and at Christmas, they get processed into a robust and red spread for crackers or rolled around a cream-cheese filling into red-and-white spiral.

In January when I'm already tired of rutabagas, I can't get enough of them.

 

The process

Which is why from September to frost, amid all the other foods I'm packing away for winter, I'm also buying pecks of peppers - not to pickle, per the tongue-twister, but to roast and freeze. Given the harried month season, it's a good thing I can squeeze this easy process in between canning tomatoes and peaches and pears and applesauce and beets and.... Whew! It's been a busy couple of weeks!

Thankfully, these brilliant babies are super-simple.

• Slice them in half (or quarters if they're big), remove the seeds and white membranes.
• Flatten the halves skin side up on a cookie sheet lined with tin foil.
• Pop them under the broiler, and let the skins blacken. They'll hiss and snap, but leave them there until the skin is fully black and bubbled.
• Remove them from the broiler and place them in a sealed zipper bag for about 10 minutes. The trapped steam will soften and loosen the skins, and they'll pull right off.
• Then they can be packed in containers and frozen. I use one-cup containers, but anything will do.

There are a couple of variations to this plan - some cooks roast them over an open flame, either a grill or a gas burner. I think the broiler is easier, but there is no denying a charcoal grill gives them a smokier flavor. Others will use a paper bag, instead of a plastic zipper bag. In an interview I recently did for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Sue Paterno told me she uses a large pot with a lid. (Of course, she does them a bushel at a time.)

Whatever method you try, don't wait. The pepper harvest will last up to the first frost, but for those of us in the Northeast, that's lurking just around the corner. We don't need multi-colored leaves to tell us that, just note all that beautiful color stacked up at the farmers' markets that will soon be gone. 

An online initiative is trying to bring canning home this weekend. 

Canning is best done in bunches. Many hands make the workload light, and the chatter that will inevitably rise and mingle with the canner's steam helps to make time fly. A chore becomes a joy as basic ingredients transform into winter sustenance for everyone involved.

I'll take a canning party -- whether it's a session with a seasoned home preserver I can learn from or one with a newbie just learning the process from me -- over any solitary day in the kitchen. And that's why I'm excited about this weekend's two-day kickoff to "Canvolution," a months-old, Seattle-based initiative from a collection of chefs and food writers who hope promote safe food preservation techniques while building communities both locally and online.

At the collective's Web site, canningacrossamerica.com, new recruits to the Canvolution can learn tips and techniques, learn new recipes, upload photos of their own efforts, and find out about canning parties in their area.

This weekend's kickoff will offer classes and canning parties in cities across the nation, and Sur La Table has jumped in with a $10-off coupon good through the weekend.

I'll be joining the Canvolution on Sunday, teaching a new friend how to put up tomatoes and salsa. Plans are also in the works for a day of canning pears with a fellow long-time food preserver. While we're all feasting on tomato soup and spiced pears this winter, we'll surely be warmed with the memories of a fun day of good work and an even better one of fellowship.

So count me among the newest recruits. What about you?   

Stock your freezer full of green beans, but be sure to save some to eat now in a classic salad.

Active time: 66 minutes

 

There's been a lot of talk about Julia Child recently, with the opening of "Julie & Julia." As a lifelong devotee of the woman who brought French cooking to the American masses, I'm loving it.

There are a dozen favorite dishes that come to mind when I think of the Julia Child shows I've watched since my youth - pâte à choux (really just a fancy word for cream puffs), chocolate mousse, salmon sautéed between thin layers of potato, my go-to vinaigrette, roast chicken, leek and potato soup - but when green beans are in season, I remember Julia through her recipe for salad Niçoise, that old-fashioned, composed salad of blanched green beans, boiled potatoes, hard-cooked eggs, tomatoes, canned tuna, anchovies, olives and capers, and, if you're feeling adventurous, homemade mayonnaise. Make one for a dinner party and your guests will have a ball pulling a little of this, a little of that, off the plate.

But fresh green beans don't last forever - although they should be available at markets in our area into next month - so now is the time to be thinking about putting them up for winter. Last week I set off for the Bellefonte market and headed straight to Burd's Plants and Produce, where both green beans and yellow wax beans overflowed their bushel baskets. Seven dollars got me a peck - a quarter of a bushel - of the green ones. I tucked them into my fridge, where they chilled out until later in the week when I could deal with them.

 

The process

"Deal with them" isn't really fair to the beans. They're not difficult to put up. It's the basic freezing process outlined here, but there are a few bean-specific things to remember:

• Most beans are string-free nowadays, but the stem ends still need snapped off. If there are strings to contend with, pull the top down along the length of the bean - similar to the process with peas - to pull them out. 
• The guidebooks will tell you to boil blanch the beans for three minutes to insure any bacteria dies, but I think that yields a mushy bean out of the freezer. So here's the secret: I'll risk the bacteria (easy to do if you shop locally and trust your farmers) in favor of a bean that still retains some texture, blanching them for between two and two-and-a-half minutes, depending on the size of the beans.
•  Plunge the beans into ice water, as with anything else you blanch.
• Drain them on kitchen towels.
•  Pack them into freezer bags. My peck of fresh beans gave me five, one-pound bags of frozen beans, plus enough for dinner that night.

Speaking of dinner, those green beans will be good defrosted and dropped in some boiling water to re-warm, or mixed into soups or curries all winter long. They'll be softer than fresh green beans, so don't overcook them when they defrost, but they'll have far more chew than canned ones.

In the meantime, enjoy the in-season ones as much as you can. Salad Niçoise, anyone? If the answer is yes, be sure to thank Julia. 

The concept of eating locally shouldn't stop at home. 

As we ease - slowly - through the laziest month of the year, travel becomes top priority for many of us. And travel means food. Who hasn't picked a vacation destination because of a great restaurant at the end of the road, or scheduled the trip around your beach town's weekly farmers' market day?

OK, maybe you don't take your road food considerations to that extreme, but I do. Local eating doesn't have to stop at your state line. Local is wherever you are at the time, so as you map out your pit stops, eschew gas station snacks for another sort of roadside sustenance. Driving through Maryland's Eastern Shore on the way to the beach? You're sure to find sweet corn or an even sweeter cantaloupe at a roadside stand. Maine in August? Don't leave without sampling the wild blueberries in season now. Seek out the local ice creamery, the local brewery, or the dockside fishmonger who will sell you something right off the boat and know you're taking your food politics on vacation too.

It's a concept I routinely embrace while traveling; I pack little food, knowing I'll probably find all the car snacks and dinner ingredients we'll need while getting wherever we're going. On a recent trip through Vermont, my husband and I made stops at several small-scale creameries to sample their cheeses. The Vermont Cheese Trail (think wine trail, but with bovines, not grape vines) offers visitors an opportunity to drop in at creameries large and small, meet the cows or sheep or goats (and their farmers), sample their cheese and buy some for the drive home.

It's a great concept, but go forewarned: these are actual working farms spread throughout the state, so even if the trail brochure notes farms are open daily, be sure to call before driving the back roads to get there only to find a locked tasting room. We dropped in on several to find no one around to introduce us to Bessie or sell us some cheese.

But those we found staffed with flocks and farmers more than made up for the disappointment at others. We stuck mostly to sheep dairies because of my husband's lactose intolerance, and at Woodcock Farm between Weston and Londonderry, we met Mark Fischer and his flock of East Friesian sheep - referred to as the Holstein of the sheep world - and sampled an aged, alpine-style cheese and a soft, Camembert-smooth wheel he calls "Summer Snow." We spent the next several days spreading the unctuous creamy goodness on crackers we found at a farmers' market the day before while driving the back roads of New England.

But we didn't get to those roads before we dropped in on Willow Hill Farm in Milton, mostly because locals told us we had to try the sheep yogurt there. We found farmer David Phinney tending to a newborn calf - Willow Hill raises both sheep and cows - but he sent us up to the cheese-making room to have a look around and help ourselves at the self-serve coolers there. The declining economy had halted yogurt production for now, but we happily came away instead with a pyramid of the farm's buttery, bloomy rind Alderbrook and a half-round of its Summertomme, a soft sheep cheese coated in herbs. More road snacks.

So many, in fact, I got really good at balancing a cheese board, a knife and the bag of crackers on my lap in the car. With all that cheese, it really was a lap of luxury. 

It's not summer until there's corn, but a couple of minutes with some leftover ears after dinner will guarantee you'll be transported back to warm evenings on the deck all winter long.

Active time: Five minutes to husk, three minutes to boil, five minutes to cut and package.

 

I ran into a friend at the market on Saturday. She was buying her annual bushel of corn to put up in her freezer. It's a multi-day project for her, but one that her foursome family will indulge in all winter.

A freezer stocked with the golden kernels is almost better than money in the bank, but my friend's method is a little maddening. A bushel of corn is a lot of corn, easier tackled in short spurts. And sweet corn's lengthy season - beginning in the mid-Atlantic states in late July and lasting into September - offers options to the food preserver other than my friend's marathon days.

The prospect of corn-on-the-cob for dinner is hard to resist on Saturday mornings when farmers present crates of freshly picked bread-and-butter ears at the market, and I usually come home with at least eight. Hubby and I dig into about half of them, dripping butter and salt - and in Hubby's case, Old Bay seasoning - down our chins in a deliciously messy summer ritual.

What to do with the other four?  Those are destined for the deep freeze later in the evening. And, after a month or two of weekly, or even bi-weekly corn dinners, we're also set for winter, and it only takes a couple of minutes at a time.

Maybe I'll even make my corn companion a convert with this plan. Of course, she can take pleasure in knowing her freezer is stocked this week -- but I'll get there soon too. Just give me a few more weak moments in front of the corn crates on Saturday mornings.

 

The process

Corn is a low-acid vegetable, so in my kitchen, that means it's destined for the freezer, not the canner (see my thoughts on pressure-canning in the previous post). But that also means the process is pretty easy.

• Bring a large pot of water to a boil while you husk the ears, making sure the silk is completely removed.
• Boil the ears for three minutes and let half of them cool while you eat the other half.
• Holding a leftover ear upright, run a sharp knife along the kernels lengthwise. I stand the ears up in a wide dish or an 8-inch baking pan to catch the kernels and the "milk" as I cut.
• Don't cut so deeply the fibrous shell of the kernel comes off - you want the flesh and the milk only.
• You'll probably find yourself cutting on four sides of the cob, which leaves some uncut edges. Just run the back of your knife along the corners to draw out the last of the kernels. 

It takes about four ears to fill a two-cup package of corn, which I freeze in vacuum-sealed zipper bags. Later this winter, each of those bags will become a corn side dish to fried chicken, or maybe, with the addition of some (also frozen) hot peppers, a diced avocado, a little cumin and some lime juice, a zippy corn salad for Mexican night. Or corn fritters... or chicken corn soup... It almost makes me yearn for winter.

Almost.    

 

A ruby root becomes a lip-puckering treat with the addition of vinegar, sugar, salt, and some time in the water-bath canner.

Active time: two-and-a-half hours, but with an hour free while beets cook.

 "What is that?" my husband asked years ago, looking at the quart jar of magenta eggs I took out of the fridge like a prize.

"Pickled eggs and beets," was my matter-of-fact answer, as if to say, doesn't everyone eat these?

I should have known - four years of college away from my predominantly German part of Pennsylvania had taught me that no, everyone does not eat these. Or many of the other quirky, Pennsylvania Dutch foods I grew up with.

Count my New York City-raised husband among them. Already not a fan of beets, he thinks anything pickled is not worth eating. (I've never figured out how someone raised in a city of delis does not like dill pickles, but I've resigned to it.) 

Just as he's resigned to the recurring jar of hard-boiled eggs and beets hanging out in a purplely brine in the fridge during the summer, because pickled beets are truly a thing worth eating, despite what my husband says.

And so, in the summer, when the beets are bursting out of their row in my garden, I put up about a dozen pint jars to keep me going through the winter as well. You may be able to take the Dutchie out of Pennsylvania, but she'll always come back for the food. Her husband will just come along for the ride.

 

The process

Yet unable to bring myself to pressure canning, in which you can process low-acid foods like beets and many other veggies, but during which process you can (I irrationally believe) also risk blowing up your kitchen, I stick to the water-bath canning method outlined in the jam post. To do that with most veggies, you also need to pickle them, adding enough vinegar to stave off bacteria growth during the long winter months on the shelves. Happily, adding vinegar to beets turns them into what I'm after in the long run anyway.

Beets will be plentiful at the markets from now until well past the first frosts, so no rush to pick some up. But when you do, buy a couple of bunches - a six-quart pot of whole beets will yield about seven pints of quartered beets in brine. Any type will do - most people grow the traditional red type, which makes for a darker brine, but I think these golden beets have a better flavor. 

Cook the beets for about an hour, then cut the tops off and rub off the skins. Save the water from the cooking pot. Quarter or slice them into sterilized jars, filling them to within a quarter-inch of the top.

Bring two cups of the beet water, two cups of sugar, a quart of cider vinegar and two teaspoons of salt to a boil. Cover the beets with the brine, leaving a quarter-inch headspace in the jars.

Here's where the process slightly deviates from jam: any time you have veggies or fruit floating in a brine or syrup, you should tap out any trapped air bubbles in the jars before cleaning the rims and capping them. I use the plastic "bubble remover" that comes with the Ball utensil kit on the company's Web site, but any rubber kitchen spatula will do. Just run it down the side of the jar, tapping out any trapped air as you go. 

Process the cleaned and capped jars in a hot-water bath for 30 minutes.

Enjoy them all winter cold on salads, warm next to roast meats, or room temperature straight out of the jar. But let them bathe in the vinegar for at least two weeks before opening them. Until then, I'll be waiting with my fork. 

Buying chickens fresh from the farm means delicious dinners, but first you have to cut up the chicken.

Active time: 35 minutes, for two chickens

 

Boneless, skinless chicken breasts are the ultimate convenience food. Defrosted in minutes, they become a blank canvas on which the creative cook can work her magic - or at least quickly get a nutritious meal on the table.

But the breast is just one part of the bird. Local eaters - myself included - tend to look for ways to consume most the animals we choose to eat. It's cheaper if you buy the whole chicken and cut it up. But I think it's also a more responsible way of eating -- if an animal is going to die for you to chow down (and trust me, plenty have died for my daily diet), eating the majority of its parts are a way of honoring its sacrifice.

Our CSA offers fresh, whole chickens every couple of weeks through the summer, and I order five to ten more for a fall delivery from a couple of other local farmers - some from Vic Russo of Mountain View Farm and some from Lisa Diefenbach at Setter Run Farm (both in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania). Getting them from whole bird to those convenient, single-meal packages requires a little quality time with my chef's knife, but it really isn't complicated.

 

The process

Classically trained chefs can turn a chicken into parts so smoothly it can look like one motion. Watching me will remind you more of a horror movie. But in the end, the whole chicken is still rendered into parts, no matter how ugly the process was in-between.

Start with the appendages, and the key here is to look for the joints. Bend the wing backwards and find the joint attaching it to the body. Your knife will slide neatly through at that point, cutting the wing off.

Move on to the legs, bending them back from the thighs to find the joint again and slicing through.

With the legs gone, disconnect the thighs from the main body at their joint and then again along the backbone. You can also cut the thighs with the legs still attached, as I have in the photos, to create chicken leg quarters ready for some BBQ sauce and the grill.

Slice down the center of the breast, and pull the skin off the meat. Cut each breast away from the rib bones and off the wishbone at the top, pulling the meat off the carcass as the knife releases it.

The breast will come off with the "tender" still attached, but cutting that off will give you a breast closer to a single, four- to six-ounce serving. The tender has a tough piece of white sinew that needs removed by holding the end in one hand and running your knife flat between the sinew and the meat.

A quick, B-rated, horror flick later, and you're done. I freeze the breasts in pairs in waxed paper between, while thighs get packed four to a zipper bag - each the start of a quick meal. I continually add to a big bag of wings in the freezer, and when I have enough, we have Buffalo wings. I do the same with the legs, occasionally stewing six or eight of them down in the crockpot to shred and season for chicken tacos. I save the tenders in a separate bag for oven-frying and topping salads or cutting into pieces for kabobs on the grill.

The carcass usually goes directly into my stock pot along with carrot tops, an onion, some herbs, two or three garlic cloves, a handful of peppercorns, a pinch of salt, and maybe a lemon. Cover it all with water and simmer for a couple of hours. Strain the resulting stock, skim the fat if you're fat-conscious, and freeze it in pint containers.

A word about the innards - most birds come stuffed with a liver, heart and gizzard, and here's where I deviate from my "use the whole animal" sermonizing. I invite you to offer ideas for the gizzard - or even tell me what a gizzard is. Until then, I'll continue to throw it away, along with the heart. But the livers go into the freezer and later into a pâté that will land on my buffet at Christmas. Convenience it is not, but it is truly decadent, holiday food. 

Photos by Genaro C. Armas

Read about a fledgling farmers' market in the Watts section of Los Angeles in this blog post on the Los Angeles Times' Web site. Its mission goes beyond those of many other markets.  

With new summer fruits appearing weekly at the farmers' markets, it's time to make some jam - a surprisingly easy process that promises a sweet and fruity winter.

Active time: Twenty minutes to make jam; about 40 minutes to process it. 

 

If you invite me to dinner or for an overnight visit, chances are the contents of my hostess gift will contain a jar or two of homemade jam. Strawberry-orange jam, spiced blueberry jam, apricot jam, peach butter, and  cherry-almond jam - they are all staples in my pantry, the products of a summer partially spent stirring pots of boiling, sticky fruit into chunky, sweet spreads. And since I process my jam in a water-bath canner, they stay fresh for at least a year.

But they don't last forever, and I make far more jam than my husband and I could ever finish in the year between one summer to the next, so the little jars of sunshine are the perfect thing to tuck into a bag of goodies to say "thanks for your hospitality." Jam is quite hospitable, especially when it's offered with a loaf of homemade bread.

The process

I make so much because I get bored with one flavor to the next, and frankly, it's really easy to make - something you can whip out in an evening after work. The key is to follow the process to the letter - jam may be easy, but for all of its sweetness, which hints recklessness, it is a thing of precision. Deviate from the timing or the quantity of fruit to sugar and you may wind up with several pints of ice cream topping rather than jam. Which, in reality, is not a total loss.

Start by gathering your tools and ingredients. The fruit, of course, and a box of pectin. I use Sure•Jell, because, well, that's what my mother uses, but there are other brands. The instructions inside the box will tell you how much fruit to buy - although I always err on the side of buying too much. Making half-batches of jam is an iffy process that only sometimes works. So buy the pectin first, or keep an instruction sheet handy. You also need canning jars and their two-piece lids - I use the tiny, half-cup jars and half-pints, but you can preserve jam in any size jar. And you'll need a canner or a big stockpot to run the filled jars through a water bath. But make sure you also have another big stockpot - at least six quarts - for making the jam in. This could require borrowing an extra from a neighbor.

Cleanliness is crucial to canning, so jam starts with sterilized jars, which are easy to do in a dishwasher that can reach a high temperature. Make sure to load both the jars and the metal rings that make up half of the two-piece lids. The flat lids go into a barely simmering, non-reactive pot. I use a CorningWare casserole for this. Fill your canner with cold water and set it to boil. When the jars are ready, you're ready to start the jam, which really only takes a few minutes, so don't start it before your dishwasher is finished.

My basic recipe comes from the Sure•Jell box, and the process detailed there is a good one. I'm doing more and more jam lately with Sure•Jell's low-sugar pectin, but no matter which you use, the basic process remains the same.

The fruit goes in the bottom of your stockpot - whole if it's berries and roughly chopped if it's peaches or other stone fruit. Crush the berries with a potato masher. Add the pectin, lemon juice if needed, and a pat of butter, which old-timey grandmothers say keeps the jam from foaming. Stir that together. Do not add other ingredients unless you're using another tested recipe that calls for something - the jam might not turn out. Measure the required amount of sugar into a separate bowl - do not change the amount. Bring the fruit mixture to a rolling boil you can't stir down, add the sugar all at once, and bring it back up to a rolling boil, stirring constantly. Boil for exactly one minute and remove from the heat. Skim off any foam with a spoon. 

Pull your jars out of your dishwasher and fill them - I use a funnel for this process that I got as part of a canning kit from Ball. You can order one using this link. Fill the jars to within a quarter-inch of the rim - the liquid needs some headspace to expand into in the canner. Using a clean paper towel dipped in the simmering water the lids are hanging out in, carefully wipe down the rims of the jars so they're free of jam or other debris that could interfere with the seal. Place the lids on the rims and fit the rings over of them. You want the rings screwed tight, but not so tight the jam can't expand in the canner.

Place the jars in the rack of your canner - or, if you're using a stockpot, use tongs to lower them in the boiling water. If you don't have a rack, place a towel on the bottom of the pot to give the jars a little cushion. The water should come at least two inches over the tops of the jars.

Jam gets a 10-minute steep in the water bath - begin the timer only after the water comes back up to a boil. After ten minutes, use tongs to lift them out, and set them on a dish towel overnight. Do not touch them for at least twelve hours, during which time you should hear a loud pop each time one of the lids clamps down and seals its jar.

The next morning, test the seal by pushing down on the lids. If the lid has any give, it's not sealed. No worries. Just pop that one in your fridge and eat it first. The others are ready for your pantry shelf. And your next hostess bag. People will be begging you to come to dinner.

Photos by Genaro C. Armas