Sweet 'n Spicy Barbecue Sauce

I have a confession to make.  As much as I complain about my grandmother's habit of handing down recipes that use vague quantities like "some" and "a bit", I'm often guilty of cooking the same way.  There are some recipes that I have perfected, but a lot of times I play around with the proportions of ingredients while I'm cooking.  This is especially true when I'm making sauces or marinades.  Sometimes I'm in the mood for something a little different, or sometimes I have to make up for an ingredient that I've suddenly run out of, both of which happened to me the night I came up with this barbecue sauce recipe. 

1/2 cup ketchup
1/3 cup turbinado sugar
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon onion jelly
1 tablespoon yellow mustard
1 teaspoon hot sauce
1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Mix all of the ingredients together and let the sauce site for half an hour to allow the sugar to dissolve.  Great on chicken, ribs, or any other way you like to use barbecue sauce.

If you don't have any turbinado sugar you can use the same amount of packed brown sugar.  And if you don't have any onion jelly or don't know where to get some, I suggest my favorite favorite, Sacheli's Franjo Farms Onion Jelly.  It comes from a third-generation onion farm in Middlesex, NY in the Finger Lakes region and they make some really great jellies and sauces with their onions!

Honey Cookies

Nothing is quite as wonderful to me during the Christmas season as Christmas cookies.  They have this magical ability to take me back to my childhood.  On my mom's side of the family we usually had two kinds of cookies: the usual cut-outs that so many people know and love, and these honey cookies.  The recipe came from my mom's mom, who is Finnish.  This is the only Finnish food I can ever remember my grandma making, but if the rest of Finnish cuisine is like this then maybe I should invest in a Finnish cookbook!

There is only one problem with these cookies:  You have to let them cure for about two weeks after making them before you can eat them.  And trust me when I say that once you've had them you won't want to wait two weeks!  Lucky for you that there's still 16 days till Christmas so there's plenty of time for you to make a batch of these honey cookies for your family.

Turkey Potato Salad

One of my favorite foods to have as leftovers after Thanksgiving is turkey.  Between turkey soup, turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce, and turkey salad there's a lot of options, but this year we had so much turkey leftover that I was almost getting tired of it, as hard as that is to believe!  Luckily inspiration struck and I came up with this twist on turkey salad that also helped me get rid of those pesky leftover mashed potatoes.  It may sound a little weird at first, but trust me, you'll like this.  It's also a great way to stretch out your last bits of leftover turkey into several sandwiches.