Sweet and spiced glazed mixed nuts

Sweet, salty, crunchy, with a touch of fresh herbs and warm spices, these glazed mixed nuts make a delicious holiday gift or party snack.

Sugar plums

These old-fashioned homemade sugar plums will be dancing in your head this holiday season! Full of warm spices, dried fruits, and toasted nuts, sugar plums are a festive and delicious treat to add to your cookie tray or homemade gifts.

Date-walnut bars

Dates are one of those food items I buy every year at Christmas. I like to eat them whole just as a snack. This year I wanted to add them into one of my holiday baked goods or cookies. I found a recipe for date bars and knew that it would be the winner. These bars have a filling of stewed dates and walnuts sandwiched in-between two layers of a buttery oat crust. They are delicious, sweet, and full of holiday goodness. If you like dates, I guarantee you will love these bars.

I modified the recipe, mainly to cut down on the amount of sugar that it uses. Dates are already so sweet, I didn't want to them to be over-powering with sweetness. Even though I cut it down in the below recipe, I think you could still cut it even more (maybe only 1/4 cup in the date mixture or 1/2 cup in the crust). Depending on the size of your bars when you cut them, you will get about 20 bars. 

Guinness gingerbread

If you have Nigella Lawson's cookbook Nigella Kitchen and you have not made her Guinness gingerbread yet, well, after you read this post, you should do so immediately! If you are looking for a holiday treat that is different from the usual cookies, look no further. This gingerbread (which is really a cake) is so good - it's moist, sweet, spicy, and just all around good. Plus, it gets better as it sits for a day or two - so try not to eat it all on day one! I served up a piece with some vanilla ice cream while it was still warm, but I thought it was better plain (for breakfast) the next day after the flavors continued to develop.

I did change the recipe ever so slightly so what I've posted below is a little different than in the cookbook. For one, I added molasses, so mine is a bit darker. I combined the molasses with the golden syrup that Nigella has in her recipe because I like my gingerbread to have that molasses flavor in it. The golden syrup is nice because it is made with cane sugar rather than corn syrup that is made with corn sugar. I found it in the European section of my grocery store (if you can't find it though, I would use a combination of molasses and corn syrup). I also added a bit more ginger because I knew her two teaspoons wouldn't be enough for me. There were a few other changes I made including adding some salt and decreasing the brown sugar. It was splendid. Depending on how small or large you cut your gingerbread, you should get between 16 and 24 pieces.

Roasted butternut squash with baby spinach and pomegranate

When pomegranates appear in the grocery store, I am always trying to come up with ways to incorporate them into my cooking. 

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Pomegranate seeds are crunchy and tart and they make a great topping for salads, vegetables, oatmeal, etc. Pomegranates can be messy and a little time consuming to get out all the seeds - and, you don't want to lose the juice and just let it run out all over your cutting board. You want to save it to use in the recipe. Here are some pomegranate tips if you've never tackled one before or if they still give you some trouble. I like to seed it over a bowl and then use a colander to separate the seeds from the juice.

I made this side dish utilizing the bottom half of a giant butternut squash I had saved. This squash came from my father-in-law's garden and it was so big. I fed eight people with the top half at Thanksgiving and still had more than enough! 

I really like to pair sweet winter squash or sweet potatoes with a bitter green. I generally use dried cranberries and or some toasted nuts to add tang and crunch, but this time I went with the pomegranate seeds. 

The result is an easy, healthful, and colorful side dish that is full of complimentary flavors. The colors would make this a lovely dish to serve as a side to a holiday meal, too. The recipe is very forgiving and can be adjusted to feed more people by just eyeballing the amounts of vegetables so that they look to be in a good ratio to one another. 

The recipe below made enough to feed about three people as a hearty side.