5 Ingredients or Fewer

If making the candy ahead, let it stand at room temperature for 20 to 30 minutes before serving.

This recipe comes from Chef Barry Maiden, of Hungry Mother Restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's wonderful with any pie filling, but do try it with his scrumptious Hungry Mother Spicy Peanut Pie. His piecrust uses a combination of butter and shortening. The butter delivers flavor, while shortening provides a flaky texture. The soft texture of this dough makes it best for single-crust pies.

The Shakers, an early nineteenth-century religious group who knew that good things like lemon pie were worth waiting for, lived and worked in communities throughout New England, and established a vibrant Shaker fellowship in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. Preserved as a living history museum, today's Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill illuminates their traditions and creations, including woodworking, farming, spinning, and stonework. Their restaurants serve this signature confection, Shaker Lemon Pie.
For those of us who adore lemons, it is magnificent, and if you simply appreciate thrift and culinary creativity, you'll admire its unique approach. The issue is its pithy-ness. Shaker lemon pie uses the entire lemon, from yellow peel through white pith and all the way to the interior seeds. This means slicing two whole lemons absolutely paper thin, and macerating them for hours in sugar. The resulting pie includes a subtle sharp flavor from the pith, and the texture tends toward the chewy side, but it all works for the aforementioned lemon-lovers like myself. For my version, I chop the thinly sliced lemons coarsely, so that despite my uneven slicing, the lemon pieces are bite sized. I also add a little flour, to thicken the juices a bit. Plan ahead, so that you can set the mixture of very thinly sliced lemons and sugar aside for at least three hours and ideally, overnight. This makes for a softer texture and profoundly lemony flavor in your pie.

This sweet-tart relish has 7 fewer grams of sugar than the canned kind, and it supplies disease-fighting antioxidants.

They're flakier and lighter than your usual biscuits because we've replaced some of the butter with the carotenoid-filled root vegetable. Stash any extras for a hearty Black Friday breakfast.

After Thanksgiving, serve the sauerkraut with kielbasa and mashed potatoes—or try it in a Reuben sandwich or as a hot-dog topper.

The technique: Braising (sautéing, then cooking low and slow in a bit of liquid) is most often associated with meat, but it's also a great way to cook veggies.
The payoff: Fibrous vegetables like butternut squash are the perfect candidates for braising. The braising liquid infuses the squash with flavor and makes it very tender.

This is a lightning-fast way to make scrumptious little cookie bites. You simply dab marmalade onto a tray full of vanilla wafers and then cloak each cookie in melted white chocolate. For a fittingly elegant garnish, you can top each one with a tiny piece of candied orange peel (available in specialty food stores and by mail).

Walkers Shortbread comes as close to a homemade cookie as anything you'll find in a supermarket aisle. It's made with the same pure ingredients—flour, butter, sugar, and salt—that you would use yourself. And when you dip these cookies in chocolate and coat them with nuts and toffee, well, you can imagine how tempting they are. Sometimes you can find Walkers Shortbread discounted at the warehouse clubs or at Target. If you do, grab as many boxes as you can (Walkers says its shortbread will stay fresh, unopened, for more than a year). That way you'll be prepared for any cookie swap invitation that comes along.