Yes Danny N. – I do have a "dream job". Developing thousands of recipes every year for cookbooks and magazines is a lot of work but it is a lot of fun too. After I taste them in our test kitchens and decide they are delicious enough to publish, I type them in the Betty Crocker Kitchens style. For example, when I want to use garlic, I would type: 1 clove garlic vs. 1 garlic clove.  Both are correct but we editors choose one way to write every ingredient and every technique in order to keep our style consistent....

Tags: book, chile, recipes

In my job it’s important to keep up with food trends. There are lots of ways to do this including watching the food network shows, reading recipe magazines and food sections in newspapers, dining at restaurants to see what the chefs are up to and of course, walking up and down the supermarket isles to see what's new on their shelves.Our readers tell us that they want traditional recipes with a new twist, and so I use trend information to update favorite recipes. This week in the Test Kitchens, we are working on recipes that use chicken and ground beef. How does Raspberry Chipotle Chicken Salad so...

Tags: Kitchens, recipes

Last week, I came down with a bad cold--the kind that really slows you down. In fact, I stayed home from work one day since I didn't have enough energy to get dressed, much less drive to work. As I lay in bed, (I wasn't hungry at all, mind you) I thought about food because that's what I do. I would have loved to have had someone drop off a steaming pot of chicken noodle soup at my front door but I knew that wasn't going to happen. So, at around 2:00 pm in the afternoon, I finally got out of bed to heat up a can of ...

Tags: Chicken Noodle Soup, leftovers, Progresso, recipe, sick, turkey

The petits fours I brought to French class last night were delicious. After eating thee of these bite-size layer cakes with butter crème filling and frosting, I looked at the nutrition facts only to discover that each one had 130 calories and 7 grams of fat. C'est la vie! ...

Tags: desserts, French class

My friend Audrey and I have been taking French classes for more years than I care to admit, since we still can't speak French. One class tradition is that we celebrate our birthdays with a sweet treat. This can be challenging because we meet right after work on Wednesday nights. Anything that I bring to class has to sit in the trunk of my car all day or I have to haul it into my office.  ...

Tags: birthday, dessert, French, petits fours

My refrigerator drawer was bursting with apples after a visit to an orchard in Bayfield, Wisconsin. I wanted to use some of the apples in a dessert last weekend and remembered my favorite recipe from French class, La Tarte Normande, which is basically an apple pie with custard.  ...

Tags: apple tart, apples, dessert, Julia Child

My husband Jack and I have been members of a not-very-serious wine group for the last several years. One couple in the group owns a farm in southern Iowa and they invited us for a wine-group weekend. There are four women in the group, including me, and we all like to cook so when it came time to plan the meals for the weekend, we were far more concerned about the food than the wine. When I volunteered to make breakfast on Saturday morning, Car...

Tags: biscuits, Breakfast, recipe

Jennifer, the daughter of a good friend of mine is getting married next August. She recently asked me if I was familiar with any cookbook-writing software because she would like to make a cookbook for her bridesmaids. I haven't used software of this kind. Does anyone have any advice?...

Tags: cookbook