I’m guessing a lot of you are, like me, trying to lighten things up after the rich treats of the holidays. I make a real effort to include lots of veggies and salads at meals from Thanksgiving right through New Years Day, but is anyone really going to fill up on broccoli when there is lox and pâté on the table? I know I don’t.

So, to get 2011 off on the right foot, I’ve pulled together a whole slew of super easy, delicious salads that use great winter ingredients. Not possible, you say? Oh ho, it most certainly is. Let go of the notion of a “salad” being lettuce based, and a wide and wonderful world opens up for you. From Endive Walnut Salad to a Radicchio Salad with Green Olive Dressing, these salads bring crunchy satisfaction to some healthful new year’s eating. See them all at 10 Easy Winter Salads.

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Each week, the Friday Food Files are deliciously brought to you by Molly Watson. Molly also writes The Dinner Files and posts tasty recipes at Local Foods. You can follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

*photos courtesy of Molly Watson.

If you don’t like anise, perhaps this Lemon Drop Champagne Cocktail is more your style?

Check out New Years Eve Cocktails for more ideas. Need something to nibble? Find something at New Years Eve Appetizers.

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Each week, the Friday Food Files are deliciously brought to you by Molly Watson. Molly also writes The Dinner Files and posts tasty recipes at Local Foods. You can follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

*photos courtesy of Molly Watson.

If I could have just one Christmas cookie it would be a delicate, lacy rosette dusted with powdered sugar that someone else fried up for me. Someday I’ll make them again, but probably not this year, at least not in time to benefit anyone here. If no one is going to make me rosettes, and I don’t think anyone is, I’ll turn to what I grew up calling Swedish Tea Cakes. You may know them as Mexican Wedding Cookies or Russian Tea Cakes or Snowballs. If you have yet another name for these cookies of a nut-flour-butter dough rolled into balls, baked, and rolled in powdered sugar, please let me know – it seems everyone wants to claim these beauties.

A few other delights I baked up recently — Bizcochitos – traditional New Mexican anise and cinnamon sugar cookies:

Chocolate Ginger Cookies – two great things now even better together:

Classic Gingerbread People (to hang on the tree or eat with coffee):

If I were someplace where Christmas shopping didn’t take place in the rain, I’d make these Forgotten Cookies, too, but I’ll have to wait until things dry out around here:

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Each week, the Friday Food Files are deliciously brought to you by Molly Watson. Molly also writes The Dinner Files and posts tasty recipes at Local Foods. You can follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

*photos courtesy of Molly Watson.

Last week it was a cake, this week it is a pie. I am a little walnut crazy. I like them under normal circumstances – something about that bitter edge they have delights my taste buds and the fact that they really are quite good for you as well (can you say “essential fatty acid”?) is a lovely bonus prize – but some walnut growers sent me a giant box of walnuts and they are from this year’s harvest and fresh and fabulous and I just want to use them all up.

Would this walnut pie (essentially a pecan pie made with walnuts and maple syrup instead of pecans and corn syrup) have been good to know about before Thanksgiving? Sure. The thing is, I didn’t have a chance to make it this Thanksgiving – my plans were upended all at once right before the big day. While I spent the weekend with family and friends (more than had been planned, in fact), I was not the host and the pies on offer were pumpkin and apple. Both were tasty, the pumpkin was particularly good, but neither were caramel-filled nut pies. That gaping hole in my annual diet has been filled, and just in time for others to include it on a Christmas menu!

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Each week, the Friday Food Files are deliciously brought to you by Molly Watson. Molly also writes The Dinner Files and posts tasty recipes at Local Foods. You can follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

*photo courtesy of Molly Watson and simond_86.

I should start with the fact that this cake is delicious. Seriously. All on its own. Second, I should mention that while it’s not exactly health food, within the world of delicious cakes it sort of is. Whole grain flour, maple syrup in lieu of sugar, and then the fresh dates, walnuts and walnut oil for moistness instead of butter.

But all I really want to talk about is the maple hard sauce (which, when you add it, pretty much negates any “health” claims this cake might be able to make). I love hard sauce. Butter, sugar, and booze. What, I ask, could be better? I first had hard sauce as a kid at my Aunt Penny’s house at Christmas. It was poured over some steamed pudding or figgy pudding or some other heavy, dried-fruit-laden traditional Christmas concoction. I wasn’t into the steamed cake, but I was seriously into the hard sauce. I scooped it all up, trying to get as few of the cake crumbs in each spoonful as possible.

The version of hard sauce in this recipe is ultra-easy, but it requires a warm dessert to dollop it on so it melts into it. Try it on this cake or any other nutty, fruity, traditional holiday fare.

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Each week, the Friday Food Files are deliciously brought to you by Molly Watson. Molly also writes The Dinner Files and posts tasty recipes at Local Foods. You can follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

*photo courtesy of Molly Watson.

If Thanksgiving is a warm-up for Christmas or, as a friend calls it, “Christmas Junior,” then sign me up for preferring the dress rehearsal. I love the focus on food instead of gifts, hanging out instead of decorating. Yet I’m going to go against that very thing here by offering you a gift: spiced butter squash.

Seriously people, this is a keeper. And so easy! Roast squash, mash it, top with spiced melted butter. Voila!

Not quite right for you? Looking for something else? Check out this list of 20 Thanksgiving side dishes — they’re easy, seasonal, fabulously delicious.

I’ve also pulled together Everything Thanksgiving. It has turkey info, pie info, salads, soups, apps and more.

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Each week, the Friday Food Files are deliciously brought to you by Molly Watson. Molly also writes The Dinner Files and posts tasty recipes at Local Foods. You can follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

*photo courtesy of Molly Watson and romanlily.

Liqueur is simply sweet, flavored booze. Very sweet and highly flavored booze. If you start now, you can have this homemade coffee vanilla bean liqueur in time to give away (or entertain with) at Christmas. I’m just saying.

Are you freaking about Thanksgiving? Just excited to get that menu planned? I’ll be posting all about the big feast next week, but if you can’t wait check out the Tday offerings over at over at Local Foods.

*photo courtesy of peacefulbean.

I forgot to tell you all about the new addition to my home (this is a design blog, after all!): a ristra! Yes, a thread of dried red chiles now hangs from my San Francisco kitchen ceiling. I tried making one myself once – starting with fresh red New Mexico chiles and everything. It turned gross and moldy before you could say “San Francisco Giants win the World Series.”

This one, though, this one I have hope for. You see it’s already mostly, almost all the way “cured” as they say, in the arid climate of New Mexico, where the chiles were grown. It should last, I’ve been assured.

And so now, whenever I get a hankering, I’ll just pull down some dried red chiles, grind them up in a blender or spice grinder, sift them through a sieve, and get a pot of carne adovada going.

This ristra was given to me on a recent trip to New Mexico. The ristra would have been the highlight except for the fact that it’s still chile roasting season. Everywhere I went – farmers markets, farm stands, grocery stores, Walmart – people were buying crazy amounts of chiles and having them roasted on the spot. They would then take them home, peel them by hand, and freeze them for the coming year. To a gal like me, who loves the local, the authentic, and the tasty as I do, it was the most charming and heart-warming sight I’d seen in a long time. Of course, there aren’t any roasters where I live (how about you?), so I have to roast and peel them at home if I’m going to make green chile stew.

I like roasted pumpkin seeds more than candy.

There, I’ve said it. My son, my best friend from high school, and my own mother will call me nutter butters, but it’s true. Scooping out the goopy guts of a giant pumpkin and separating out the slim seeds from the slime is my favorite part about Halloween (a dislike of Snickers and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and a Minnesota childhood in which Halloween costumes had to be strategized with a parka and snow boots sucked a lot of the fun out of the holiday for me).

Here’s a quick guide to roasting pumpkin seeds. And, as long as I’m sharing secrets, I’ll tell you my favorite seasoning for roasted pumpkin seeds. You think I’m going to say smoked paprika or Hawaiian sea salt or Tellicherry peppercorns, don’t you? While I’m sure those are all delicious, I prefer the old-school option of Lawry’s Seasoned Salt. A bowl of seasoned salt roasted pumpkin seeds? Takes me right back to childhood, sitting on the floor, watching The Great Pumpkin.

What makes you feel like a kid again?

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Each week, the Friday Food Files are deliciously brought to you by Molly Watson. Molly also writes The Dinner Files and posts tasty recipes at Local Foods. You can follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

Sweet pears, crispy fennel, and crunchy walnuts are, to me, the trifecta of delicious fall salad ingredients. This super simple Pear Fennel Walnut Salad can be made more and less complicated – use a variety of pears, use a mandoline to slice the fennel ultra-thin, toast the walnuts (in a dry pan on the stove or in a hot oven, in any case watching carefully – they burn in a flash), add a sprinkle of chopped herbs (flat-leaf parsley is particularly tasty) – or serve just as simply and easily as it is pictured here.

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Each week, the Friday Food Files are deliciously brought to you by Molly Watson. For more on Molly and her delicious recipes, you can visit her in one of many wonderful places:
Writer: mollywatsonwrites
Blogger: the dinner files
Recipe Wizard: localfoods.about.com
Radio Girl: eat that radio
tweeter: twitter.com/mollywatson
teacher: mediabistro.com/courses/cache/instr404.as

[ Photos courtesy of Molly Watson and espion. ]