Pantries

Chocolate is an essential part of any Valentine’s meal, so why not surprise your dinner companion by using it in this savory dish? A roasted lamb rack is perfect for two, and the chocolate enriches the pan juices, making the perfect sauce to accompany it. This recipe shows how you can use chocolate to enrich a sauce. Cold butter is often whisked into pan juices to create a sauce, but here, the chocolate thickens and adds a touch of bitterness, as does the black pepper.

When I was a child, there weren’t a lot of sweets in our house, but come Christmastime, little teasing bits of my mom’s holiday toffee would show up in my normally sugar-starved lunch bag during the week before school let out. Then, during our annual Christmas Eve tamale party, huge platters would appear, with piles of the stuff stacked high like poker chips Though I moved across the country almost twenty years ago, she hasn’t missed a single season of toffee.

Need an ice cream topping that is both easy and mind-blowingly good? Have some spare candy on hand? This creamy ganache, made using an assorted bag of fun-sized chocolate bars, is guaranteed to be your new favorite junk food splurge. But watch out, it’s addictive! I was obsessed with candy bars as a teenager, even more so after I gained control of my lunch money and succumbed to the powers of my high school’s vending machine.

Fall is my favorite season for spending time in the great outdoors, because it means steaming hot cocoa and hearty chili cooked over an open flame. But if you don’t have a campfire nearby, this s’mores pie is the next best thing. A graham cracker crust holds sweet chocolate custard and light-as-air marshmallow cream. After a quick toast with a kitchen torch, you may never bother with original s’mores again!

This past weekend was a big football game for my boyfriend and me. Our respective colleges happen to be old rivals, and once a year our love for each other is compromised only by our love for the game. We surround those four treacherous quarters with friends, family, and good food. It just makes the tension seem a little bit more bearable. It just so happens that my boyfriend’s family is famous for their tailgating skills. I’m not joking here; these guys are pros.

There are hundreds of different pies in the Southern arsenal (and almost as many cookbooks on the subject), so choosing a pie to make for National Pi Day proved to be quite difficult. When I finally narrowed it down to chocolate, my decision didn’t exactly become easier. There’s chocolate fudge pie, chocolate cream pie, chocolate pudding pie, chocolate chip pecan pie… Well, you get the drift.

Here is one of my all-time favorite desserts: It looks and tastes like a dessert casserole, but it spends no time whatsoever in the oven. It is an icebox cake composed of layers of graham crackers and fresh, homemade vanilla pudding, topped with fudge frosting. When it sits together in the fridge overnight, it melds into a luxurious cake-like texture. So yummy, and easy, too!