Quick announcement: My Apple Cobbler recipe (the one the won my husband’s heart even though I set his kitchen on fire) is among the many delicious entries in Bon Appetit’s Holiday Bake Off contest. Would you vote for it in the Miscellaneous Dessert category? In order to submit your vote simply log into Bon Appetit (or create a free account if you don’t have one) then click here to be taken to the voting page. Thank you!

Thanksgiving is right around the corner and for me that means two things: lots of baking/cooking and watching holiday movies on infinite loop. Holiday films are something of an addiction for me from late November thru New Years Eve, and luckily my husband finds it more amusing than annoying when I watch Elf or Home Alone for the umpteenth time. I can’t help it. Buddy the Elf cracks me up when he writes a note to his father that says, “I’m sorry I ruined your lives and crammed eleven cookies into the VCR,” and when he tells his dad that plans for the day involve making snow angels for two hours, ice skating, eating a whole roll of Tollhouse cookie-dough as fast as they can and then snuggling.

Do you dunk your cookies in milk? I don’t, but my husband does, and though I’ve never given much thought to this tiny difference in tastes it was all I could think about last night while we were enjoying the outrageous chocolate cookies shown here. With only 81 days left (!) until our due date I couldn’t help wondering whether our baby, once he’s old enough, will prefer to dunk cookies like his daddy or eat them separately like me. Then this morning, as I was eating cereal, I thought about how I eat my cereal right after cold milk is added to the bowl, lest I lose an ounce of crunch. My husband, on the other hand, lets his cereal sit for at least 10 minutes so that it has a chance to get mushy. Personally I think his treatment of cereal is a little scandalous – but what if our son one day shares this proclivity? I’d be outnumbered in the crunchy vs. mushy food debate that’s been raging in our household for the past eight years.

I know this doesn’t hold true for everyone, but I really can’t get enough of pumpkin flavored goodies – especially in the Fall. In fact, I’m so enamored with pumpkin that I made the Pumpkin-Apple Muffins shown above not once, not twice, but three times before the recipe was just right. When it comes to pumpkin my determination knows no bounds and I just had to have a morning like this one, where I could munch on a moist, tender, autumn-spiced pumpkin muffin while sipping on a decaf honey-vanilla latte.

I have bad habits just like anyone and two of them drive my husband nuts. First, I have a tendency to leave glasses all over the apartment because I forget where they are and can’t find them when I want a drink. He’s been trying to break me of this habit for years. We even tried picking a “special spot” …

If there’s one thing that always drives me nuts it’s produce gone to waste. There are two reasons for this: first, produce is darn expensive and throwing out plums, peaches or pears that are just a touch too ripe for impromptu snacking seems like such a waste; and second, it makes me very sad to think of all the “produce …

As far as summer fruit goes, I often feel like plums don’t get the attention they deserve. I love strawberries, blueberries and raspberries as much as the next gal, but even these succulent fruits can’t match the sheer variety of vibrant reds, purples and yellows of the plum. Plus, there’s nothing quite like biting into a sweet, juicy plum on …