This was the first recipe I tried from my anniversary present this year, Rose Beranbaum’s The Baking Bible. Though the recipe has three separate rising steps and called for vital wheat gluten (an ingredient I had never heard of before but that Wegman’s had in abundance), it felt easy due to the extremely detailed instructions Beranbaum provides. The resultant loaf was had a crisp crust and a delicate but richly flavored crumb.

I was disappointed this year when my partner talked me out of baking a sweet potato or pumpkin pie this Thanksgiving. We were hosting my parents, who were bringing a southern pecan pie from Houston, and my partner had been waiting for an excuse to cook a favorite apple cake recipe and had already called dessert duty. This savory sweet potato galette recipe let me sneak an extra pie onto the Thanksgiving table without making too many desserts.

I woke up yesterday with a strong craving for corn muffins and looked for an easy recipe that could be made with the ingredients already in my pantry. The honeys I had on hand (e.g., Tasmanian leatherwood honey) were a little too fancy to spare 75 grams of for a batch of muffins, but I did have a jar of sorghum molasses on hand from the last time I bought a Kentucky country ham.