Holidays recipes

Favorite turkey broccoli casserole layers cooked turkey and broccoli under a creamy mayo-spiked bechamel, topped with cheddar and buttered breadcrumbs. Classic post-holiday comfort, baked to golden.

Cranberry pecan pie with tart fresh cranberries balancing the rich corn syrup pecan filling, brightened by orange zest. Holiday-table dessert ready in 70 minutes.

Whole wheat spice muffins with cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, allspice, and ginger sweetened with honey. A warming, low-fat breakfast muffin that smells like the holidays.

Christmas memory fruitcake steams then bakes a bourbon-soaked, dense old-fashioned fruitcake loaded with Brazil nuts, raisins, candied fruit, figs, and warming spices. Heirloom holiday recipe.

Cranberry Cocktail Meatballs, First introduced to our family for my sister's puppy shower. My daughter Lindsey can eat the whole batch and requests them for every holiday.

Traditional Jewish Purim hamantaschen with honey-sweetened ground poppy seed filling, lemon zest, and raisins folded into triangular dough pockets. Holiday cookies with deep cultural roots.

German Christmas cookies (Anisplaetzchen style) flavored with anise seeds and rolled thin for cutting into shapes. A heritage holiday recipe that scales generously for a large cookie tray.

Roll-and-cut decorative sugar cookies brushed with colored egg-white wash before baking. Almond-scented dough cut into shapes for holidays, birthdays and party platters.

Traditional Christmas fruitcake with brandy-soaked candied citrus peel, citron, currants, and raisins, deeply spiced and aged in a tin with periodic brandy basting before the holidays.

Pumpkin pie with pan-browned pumpkin for deeper caramelized flavor and a sugar-flour barrier under the custard that keeps the crust crisp. Holiday classic, reimagined.

Karen's pumpkin pie uses fresh roasted pumpkin, heavy cream, brown sugar, warm spices, and a splash of whiskey for the richest holiday pie. From-scratch Thanksgiving classic.

Rum truffles are classic chocolate ganache truffles flavored with rum extract and rolled in cocoa-sugar. A 30-piece batch of giftable, no-bake holiday confections.

I make this recipe during the holidays. It is moist, and freezes well! I bake them in coffee cans, and wrap them in colored cellophane to give as gifts

Citrus cranberry raspberry preserves: tart cranberries and sweet raspberries cooked with orange juice and zest into a glossy ruby jam with no added pectin. Holiday gift jar perfection.

Classic Christmas butter cookies are the rolled and cut sugar cookie that makes the holiday cookie tin special. Tender, lightly sweet, and ready for icing, sprinkles, or sandwich filling.

Festival sugar cookies: tender cake-flour roll-out cookies that hold any shape, perfect for cutter cookies, icing, and sprinkles. Holiday-tested recipe yielding five dozen.