Southern cooking – Luv Cooks

Easy Holiday Dinner Tips with Hormel

WOW.

Umm- are you guys busy these days? I mean- is your holiday season flying by like Santa on a jet ski? Yep, #sameboat. I actually just had to practice some deep breathing a bit ago to calm down about ALL that awaits me on my to-do list between now and December 25.

But you know what? There is HOPE. That’s right, there is a beacon of light that lies across that sea of gift wrap on your living room floor. It’s going to simplify your life, take one MAJOR requirement off of your shopping-bag laden shoulders, and allow you to breeze through the most pressure-filled of Christmas feats- the holiday dinner.

That’s right. The once-a-year celebration that involves your family, your friends, and those relatives that you haven’t seen in years but somehow arrive at your doorstep hungry and ready for ALL the egg nog. The people that you truly love and want to feel special around your table. The people you text on the daily. That dinner. The solution? Hormel is here to save the day- and help you feed everyone on your gift list with no host-stress. Pun intended:)

This season I had the chance to partner with Hormel for these easy holiday dinner tips to utilize all I’ve gleaned from my work as a food and prop stylist to create a holiday menu that is both easy to do and will formally establish you as the Holiday Hosting Queen or King. These dishes make simple, fresh tweaks to Hormel foods that are sure to please your fave people. It’s a menu that includes:

Orange and Rosemary Glazed Hormel Cure 81 Ham: This ham is already cooked, and our glaze only has two ingredients! All we have to do is glaze and bake.

Golden broccoli and cheddar rice cups: Perfect for portioning out your buffet- especially when your relatives really love the sides; as in, ahem, maybe don’t leave much for those people behind them in line.

Fresh Sautéed Asparagus with Lemon Zest: Fresh trimmed asparagus + butter+ lemon zest. Voila!

Salted Maple Butter Sweet Potatoes: Utilizing ready-to-go, mashed potatoes takes the boiling and the pulverizing out of the equation for you. Save that bicep strength for unwrapping presents later!

Sautéed Apples with Vanilla Bean Ice Cream and Candied Pecans: Sweet apples with creamy ice cream and candied pecans. Yessss pleeeassee!

To see the WHOLE menu and all of the how-to tips, click here: Hormel Holiday Ham Dinner Hacks!

Oh AND surprise!! The Hormel team also took some sweet behind-the-scenes photos I thought you guys would dig.

Let the film roll begin!

Broccoli Cheddar Rice Cups — Our broccoli-cheddar beauties baking up in the oven.

Our Cherrywood Cure 81 ham and glaze ingredients awaiting their glorious debut. — Our Cherrywood Cure 81 ham and glaze ingredients awaiting their debut.

Warm cinnamon apples with vanilla ice cream melting into the fruit, topped with candied pecans for our dessert. Yummmmmmm. — Warm cinnamon apples, vanilla ice cream and candied pecans for dessert.

Fresh sautéed asparagus with butter and lemon zest deliciousness.

Sweet, caramelized glazed ham in all it's glory. — Sweet, caramelized glazed ham in all it’s glory.

You guys, my amazing readers and watchers- I couldn’t be more thrilled to share this video, and this season, with you. You and my friends and family- you guys are the ones that make holiday food special for me. And the fact that Hormel has made an effort to make this easy for all of us- well, I’d say that’s Luv Cooks style: having a blast, cooking delicious food, and making the people around us feel special.

So, from my kitchen to yours, may your table be full of the food, sparkle and loving warmth of a hope-filled season. I can’t imagine anything more delicious.

Luv Cooks Southern Cooking Video Episodes!

Hi all my amazing Luv Cooks readers! Have I told you lately HOW MUCH it means to me that you read these posts? You are cooking rock stars and to that I say, rock on friends, rock on.

Also, EXCITING news to share with you! As many of you know, I have been wanting to incorporate Luv Cooks video content for eons now. Pretty much what feels like a half century of my lifetime, which means I probably felt this way in about the time period Brooklyn was being filmed. Ok, back to the task at hand….

The official FIRST EPISODE of our Luv Cooks series is about to be arrive. That’s right- Southern recipes, straight from The Nashville Cookbook, live and on Luv Cooks You Tube!. Which means any time you are craving a dose of Luv Cooks kitchen shenanigans, you can tune in. Night or day. You get the picture.

So, here is our teaser video, getting you primed for this month’s recipe- which, if you like sweet potatoes, pecans, butter, and marshmallows, you are going to be over-the-moon about.

So check out the video, and I’d love to hear what else you’d like to see me cook! Luv y’all!

Sweet Potato Drop Biscuits

It was the biscuit disaster of 2012.

A sticky, lumpy orange mass had attached itself to my cutting board. Flour was smeared on my fingertips and was causing everything I touched to stick to them, including the bag of flour I was desperately trying to pour more of onto my board. The scene from Christmas Vacation where Clark Griswold fought with tree sap and lost flashed in my mind, and I began to feel the panic rise in my chest.

“Please Lord,” I prayed. “Please salvage these biscuits.”

Truthfully, the reason why these biscuits meant so much to me was because I was born, raised, and still live in the South. Around here there in an expectation- no, unwritten rule- that if you are Southern, then you can make biscuits. They are on the same table as staples like black-eyed peas and fried okra. They are what you eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I had them with the ham station at my wedding reception. And I felt like NOT being able to make them somehow disqualified me from my heritage, and how I was raised.

Real heavy, real fast. Hope returns!

Anyway, and while we are being brutally honest, this recipe I attempted was not for drop biscuits. It was for fluffy sweet potato biscuits. What resulted was what happens when you can’t make fluffy biscuits. (Side note: I added too much liquid to the dough. My brilliant sister helped me solve this one. If you choose to make regular biscuits instead of drop biscuits, just make sure you are light-handed with the milk. You should have a sturdy, sugar cookie-like dough, not a wet one.) But for me, this is what the dough became. And you know what? They were delicious.

What I uncovered with this recipe is that actually, I don’t think it mattered that I made a mess. They were light, rich, and slightly sweet with a buttery crumb. And with a bit of powdered sugar on top, I would be proud to serve them at any Southern luncheon-or table.

So join me in what might be the first recipe I have posted that you really can’t mess up. If you are like me, then you might make lots of mistakes in your kitchen. But sometimes mistakes can be our greatest cooking triumphs. That is the beauty of cooking- it turns lemons into lemonade, plain milk and eggs into ice cream, and biscuit dough into, well, drop biscuits.