One look at my grazing table and my husband’s too-much-money-spent-on-food radar went bananas.

But for such an impressive and massive spread, it’s a deceptively cost-effective way to feed a crowd. It just looks expen$ive … which is sorta the point.

It’s loaded with veggies (cheap), various carbs (cheap), dips/hummus (pretty cheap), and the pièce de résistance: fancy cheese and charcuterie (not cheap, but worth it).

I made one of these for a party a couple weekends ago and now I CAN’T STOP making and thinking about them, mostly because they save me from myself.

Old me would plan for WAY too many apps and snacks, buy hundreds of dollars worth of ingredients, mismange my time leading up to the event, scramble to get things done, eff up multiple menu items, neglect others entirely due to lack of time … and let their ingredients languish in our fridge for the next several weeks.

Yes, hi, that’s me, the food blogger. SHAMEFUL.

With a grazing table, party prep is fun again and the pressure is off—because there are no recipes, rules or forgotton ingredients. Best of all, one grazing table/platter can be home to anything and everything you would want to nosh on (as evidenced in these beautiful works of art from Lush Platters).

And they only look intimidating to put together. I promise! Just follow these loose instructions/tips.

What you need for a grazing table

• Veggies (seedless cucumber, snap peas, carrots, cherry tomatoes, celery, radishes, etc.)
• Dips (hummus, spinach dip, onion dip, etc.)
• Salads (not the green kinds—the pasta or bean variety; I used a mediterranean bean salad)
• Crackers, breadsticks, pretzels
• Toasted bagguette/pita slices
• Fruit (grapes, strawberries, apples, figs, etc.—fresh and dried)
• Nuts
• Cheese (Aged cheddar, manchego, goat cheese, brie, etc.)
• Charcuterie (I like prosciutto and salami)
• Optional: something prepared like crostini (mine had goat cheese and radish), bacon wrapped dates, prosciutto-wrapped melon, etc. 
• Craft or parchment paper
• A table (duh)

How to arrange a grazing table.

• Cover your table (or tray/board/platter) with a layer of parchment paper.
• Wash and cut your veggies. Carrots look pretty peeled and sliced in half length wise; cherry tomatoes on the stem add a farm-to-table vibe; you get the idea.
• Cut the cheese (hehehehe). Match-stick shape/style cuts are faaaancy and unexpected.
• Start with your dips, salads and anything else that needs to be contained in a bowl. If they’re store bought  (no shame in that game), transfer them out of their plastic containters to bowls to trick your guests up the aesthetic. Place them in various spots on the table/board with enough room in between them to arrange the rest of the ingredients.
• Next, place any larger cheese wedges (like the brie) on the table/platter, again, allowing for enough space between the dips and cheese wedges.
• Fill in the spaces around the dips with veggies, crackers, crostini and meats in small clusters, filling all empty spaces.
• To keep things from looking to fussy or uniform, garnish parts of the board—marmalade on the brie; dried fruits scattered across the cheeses; springs of herbs. Go nuts (literally. Nuts are good for scattering, too).

Happy grazing y’all!

I rarely cook Asian food—my inexperience with the flavors and techniques has always been intimidating. Regardless, I studied up, experiemented, sampled my broth as I built the flavors, and ended up with a recipe that got two enthusiastic thumbs up from my taste tester.

But when Bon Appetit tells you to go homemade, and to put vodka in the dough, you listen. You listen hard. And then you get the most impossibly tender, flaky, perfect pie crust of your LIFE. In addition to the recipe itself, I’m giving you a few additional directives …

Tips for a perfect homemade pie crust:

• Vodka is necessary because, well, SCIENCE. The liquid helps keep the dough pliable and workable without over-developing the gluten. It cooks off in the oven, leaving a flaky, layered crust.
• Cut the butter into small pieces, about 1/2 inch or even a little smaller.
• And speaking of butter, use the good stuff. Kerrygold is my go-to.
• Don’t use a food processor. I’ve used recipes that call for using a food processor to incorporate the chilled butter and flour, while pouring in small amounts of liquid to form the dough. From my experience, this over processes the dough and yields denser, far less delicious results. BA’s method instructs to use your hands to massage the flour into the chunks of butter.
• Don’t skip the step of separating out some of the dryer, shaggier dough, then adding more liquid to the remaining dough (steps 2 and 3 below). This ensures that, when you combine the two, you’ll maintain some big chunky pieces of butter, which makes for … you guessed it … a flakier crust.

And some more general pie tips: 

• BA recipe calls for halving the strawberries, but I quartered them because I like a more jammy filling (vs. bigger chunks of fruit).
• After the pie is done cooking you MUST let it cook for several hours. I know, I know. I actually ended up breaking off a small piece of crust and dipping it into the filling that was oozing from one my top-crust flour cut outs … #sorrynotsorry. BUT, waiting to cut the pie allows it to set, which not only results in better presentation, but also better flavor and consistency.
  

  The BEST strawberry rhubarb pie

  

  Adapted from Bon Appetit recipe. 

  Dough

  • 3 1/2 cups flour
  • 2 tbsp granulated sugar
  • 1 1/2 cups butter
  • 1/4 cup vodka
  • 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
  • 1/2 cup ice water
  • 1 egg for brushing on crust
  • granulated sugar for sprinkling

  Filling

  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 3 large stalks rhubarb, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
  • 1 lb strawberries, hulled and quartered
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1/3 cup packed dark brown sugar
  • 5 tbsp flour

  1. Cut butter into 1/2 inch pieces and chill for 5-10 minutes in freezer. Mix, in a large bowl, with dry dough ingredients to coat the butter. Quickly massage mixture with your hands to flatten pieces of butter into the flour. You should have a mix of flat, shaggy bits of butter, and some large fatter pieces. 

  2. Add about half of the liquid ingredients and incorporate into dough with your hands. You’ll have a shaggy, dry dough. Remove about half of the dough and put on a floured work surface. 

  3. Slowly add more of the liquid mixture until the remaining half of the dough in the bowl is more moist and pliable. Quickly combine with the dryer dough on work surface and press down to flatten; fold over and press down again; divide the dough in half and form into 2 equally sized disks (an inch or so thick). Wrap tightly in plastic wrap and chill for 2 hours or longer.

  4. After chilling the dough, preheat the oven to 425°. Let the dough sit out for 5 minutes. Sprinkle your work surface with flour and roll dough out, one disk at a time, to about 1/8 inch thick. Press the first rolled out dough into your pie dish and trim the edges.

  5. Combine all filling ingredients in a bowl and pour into the pie crust. Use the other rolled out dough to cover the top of the pie. BA’s recipe calls for scoring the top pie crust, but I recommend something a little more Pinterest-worthy 😉 I used these little cake decorating tools to cut shapes out of the top pie crust before laying it on top of the pie.

  6. Beat the egg and brush it onto the top pie crust. Sprinkle with sugar.

  7. Bake for 5 minutes, then lower the temperature to 375°. Keep an eye on the pie–if the crust seems to be cooking to quickly, lower the temp another 25 degrees. Cook for 75-90 minutes total.

   

Anyway, the point is, it’s been a long and intense search for inspiration to fuel my dive back into recipe creation, food styling and photography. So imagine my delight when I stumbled upon AlphaFoodie’s breathtaking smoothie bowls. I did not know this was a thing, but I’m fairly certain it’s part of the #grazingtable / #avocadotoast / #ramen conspiracy designed to keep us all wide-eyed and drooling at the alter of foodstagram.

At first, there were so many questions …

What are smoothie bowls?

(Smoothies. In bowls. With impossibly photogenic and decidedly unrealistic garnishes.)

Ok, so how do I make a smoothie bowl?

(Make a smoothie and pour it into a bowl.)

How do you eat a smoothie bowl?

(With a spoon. Duh.)

SIGN. ME. UP.

And go over everything …

They said I’m supposed to blog …

But I ain’t done much bloooooggggging.

Better With Butter has been in existence for almost a DECADE, ya’ll. But after a brief (*cough* 4 years *cough, cough*) hiatus, I’m realizing that a lot has changed in the food blogging world. In fact, the term itself is revealing my lack of with-it-ness. “Influencer” is now the preferred nomenclature thanks to that new-fangled insta-whatever that all the kids are using.

Unfortunately, the only thing I’ve influenced in the past 4 years, food-wise, are the snack choices of a of couple tiny dictators. (See exhibit A)

Cheerios fly while I pine away for long, uniterrupted days cooking, photographing and blogging (er…influencing). Occasional peeks at Google Analytics reveal a steady flow of incoming traffic despite a lack of posting, all while time-on-page metrics dip into depressingly low territory … *sigh*.

What does the food blogosphere (oh dammit, now I’ve really date myself) even look like in 2018? What am I up against? How can I rev this engine? BUT SERIOUSLY IS THIS ALL TOTALLY A LOST CAUSE?????

(It’s fine. We’re fine. I’m fine.)

So, if you’re still there dear readers (any of you?) …

… Stay tuned for good things to come 🙂

So imagine my delight when I had the opportunity to pair up with May van Millingen—an artist who takes as much pride in documenting a plate of food, in all its fleeting glory, as I do—to work on a photo/illustration collaboration.

I loved the colors and simplicity of these Greek salad sticks, and May did them proud.

You can see more of May’s beautiful work on here website, mayvanmilligen.com.

Oh yeah—and the recipe isn’t too shabby either.

Greek Salad on a stick with homemade tzatziki sauce

Makes about two dozen skewers

You’ll need:

1 head butter lettuce

1/2 of a red onion

1 hothouse/English cucumber

4 oz. feta cheese

toothpicks

For sauce:

7 oz. plain, full-fat Greek yogurt

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

1 teaspoon dried dill

1/2 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1/2 tablespoon lemon juice

3 tablespoons minced cucumber

salt and pepper to taste

Tear lettuce into small pieces (about the size of a business card); cut cucumbers and feta into 1/2-inch cubes; roughly chop onions into 1/2 inch pieces. Assemble skewers with a piece of lettuce, a cucumber piece, a piece of feta, another cucumber and a piece of red onion.

Mix all ingredients for tzatziki. Chill skewers and sauce for 10-15 minutes and then serve immediately.

So when it came to testing out my Grill Master Kit and Dryglazes, courtesy of the folks at Urban Accents, I took the stovetop route—with a little help from my trusty grill pan, of course. In spite of my grilling aversion, my wings—coated heavily in the Caymen Citrus Dryglaze—were fantastic. Moral of the story: Grill or no grill, Urban Accents makes the good stuff.

The Dryglazes couldn’t be easier to use—throw two pounds of meat or fish into a freezer bag, add the packet of Dryglaze and two tbsp. of olive oil, shake/massage the bag to coat the meat, marinate for 20-30 minutes, throw it on the grill and VOILA—caramelized glaze-y deliciousness.

Upon investigation a few years back, I discovered that recreating these diabetic-coma-inducing treats seemed like way too much work, so I abstained from homemade in favor of the overpriced coffee-shop variety. But after my macaron-baking adventure, I gained some newfound patience in the baking department and decided to give it a whirl. Just like the macarons, royal icing sugar cookies are an art and a science—and almost every recipe out there completely oversimplified things, especially when it came to the decorating. Wing it without the fine-print instructions and you’ve got a surefire Pinterest Fail on your hands.

So before you flit off to AllRecipes.com for the highest-rated generic sugar cookie recipe, keep these tips on hand.

1 ) Use a good sugar cookie recipe. I like this recipe from Sweetopia.

2) Learn how to make cookies that hold their shape. The aforementioned recipe includes instructions on making cookies that hold their shape. Here they are, plus more from Sweetopia:

• • Roll the dough out between two pieces of parchment paper and then chill in the fridge for an hour. If you’re like me and always look for a shortcut (freezer!!) be careful—there’s a fine line between perfectly chilled and frozen to the point that the dough cracks when you cut it. Cut the chilled dough into shapes immediately and then re-chill the cut cookies for at least 10 minutes. Re-roll the excess dough and repeat.
  • Don’t over-mix the butter and sugar. Over-mixing can cause excess air, which will cause fluffier cookies that spread easier.
  • No baking powder.
  • Use the correct amount of sugar and higher quality or European-style butter. Too much sugar and low-quality butter can both cause spreading because the sugar becomes liquid when it heats up and cheaper butter has higher water content.
  • Use thicker cookie sheets and parchment paper.
  • Thinner cookies spread less (Sweetopia recommends 3/4 to 1 cm-thick cookies)

3) Start with thick icing. Many of the icing recipes I found were too runny for outlining or detail work. My advice is, start with less water and add more as needed. I went with:

4 tablespoons egg white powder

1 lb confectioner’s sugar

1/4 – 1/2  cup water

Mix all ingredients, starting with 1/4 cup water and adding more veeeeerrrry slowly as needed (one tip I saw recommended adding water via spray bottle—genius!). Mix on low in a stand mixer for several minutes. The icing you use for outlining should be about the consistency of toothpaste. Here’s where the next step comes in …

4) When it comes to decorating, plan ahead. Once you’ve got your big batch of royal icing (which should be the proper consistency for outlining at this point) partition it out in bowls. This is where you’ll have to make some decisions and (gasp!) commit to a color scheme. For example, if you’re making Christmas trees, you’ll want a lot of green icing for the tree, a little brown for the trunk and an even smaller amount of a few other colors for the tree decorations. You’ll likely need an outlining icing and a flood icing (the icing that fills the cookie in) for each color, EXCEPT the colors you plan to use only for detailing (the buttons, nose, eyes, etc. on a snowman, for instance). For those detail colors, you’ll only need icing of an outlining consistency.

Here’s where some people make the rookie mistake of dividing the uncolored icing into separate bowls for outlining and flood, diluting the flood icing appropriately and then trying to match the colors to each other after the fact. Nope. Start with one bowl for each color, mix in your food coloring as appropriate (for extra-saturated colors, use powdered dye so as not to dilute the icing too much) and THEN divide it into two bowls and dilute one for flood icing. Add water slowly to one bowl of each color to create the flood icing (which should be about the consistency of hot fudge sauce).

5) Have the proper tools. Don’t panic—there’s no need for expensive baking tools. I use gallon ziplock bags for the icing (although, you can purchase these or these if you want to get fancy.) and toothpicks to spread the flood icing. Put the bags in a cup/glass and pull the bag over the edge of the cup (as if you were lining a trash bin … lovely!), then fill it with the icing and cinch the bag closed with a rubber band. Snip the corner of the bag when you’re ready to begin icing. To decorate your cookies, outline each one with the outlining icing, then fill the cookies in with the flood icing. Use a toothpick to gently push the flood icing around to fill in any holes. I let my outline icing harden before flooding, but it’s become clear to me, thank to this Sweetopia tutorial, that you’ll get a smoother, more seamless result if you flood immediately.

I made the bear cookies you see above using a bear cookie cutter and then folding the arms around cinnamon-sugar almonds before baking.

Now all I need to do is find a way to use all 101 of the cookie cutters in the massive kit I impulsively bought on Amazon …

Happy icing!

Knowing that every ounce, every roll, every dimple comes from my milk makes me prouder than anything in this world. Even in the sleep-deprived stupor of a 2 a.m. feeding, I’m bursting with love and joy. With every gulp, his little hand rhythmically opens and closes on my chest—and tugs at my heartstrings. More than mastering the most complex recipes and techniques, these are the best meals I could ever offer, and the best person I could ever hope to feed.

Now before you reach your threshold for saccharine-sweet mushiness, allow me to introduce baby Leo, the best thing I ever baked :).

And speaking of sappiness and baking, I have a ridiculously adorable cookie recipe to share with you all soon (sneak peek above!), inspired by my little baby bear and some maternity-leave Pinterest browsing. It will be part of a larger post about tips for royal icing sugar cookies—cookies that hold their shape, flawless decorating tricks, etc. Stay tuned.

Good thing I have this little fall-themed gem of a post in my back pocket from last year. In a sea of pumpkin pies, pumpkin breads and pumpkin lattes, these pumpkin pork enchiladas are a refreshing change of pace.

Pumpkin pork enchiladas

You’ll need:

Enchiladas

One batch of carnitas (recipe here)

4 cups pumpkin

24 small corn tortillas

3-4 cups shredded quesadilla cheese (I like La Chona brand, but anything in similar packaging will be good)

1/2 tsp cumin

1/4 tsp chili powder

Salt and pepper to taste

Seasoned baked pumpkin seeds and queso fresco for garnish (optional)

Enchilada sauce

1/2 cup liquid from carnitas

1 cup pumpkin

1/8 tsp chili powder

Salt and pepper to taste

Prepare your carnitas and harvest 1/2 cup juice toward the end of cooking. Set aside or refrigerate if you’re preparing in advance.

For the pumpkin filling, you can use the canned stuff or pie pumpkins. I went the difficult route because I’m fancy like that. If you’re inclined to do the same, cut the pumpkin in large chunks, remove the seeds, drizzle with a little butter or olive oil and bake, covered, at 375 degrees for about 45 min, or however long it takes for the pumpkin to be fork tender. After it cools, remove the meat and discard the skin.

Mash the pumpkin with the spices and salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

Prepare the enchilada sauce by combining all sauce ingredients in a blender or food processor. Set aside.

To assemble your enchiladas, place a dollop of the pumpkin mix in the middle of a corn tortilla and some carnitas on top, and roll up the tortilla. Place each enchilada seam-side down in a casserole dish. Arrange the enchiladas tightly in the pan so they don’t fall apart during baking. Once you’ve filled the pan, drizzle the sauce (and spread with a spatula if necessary) over the enchiladas and sprinkle generously with cheese.

Bake enchiladas at 375 degrees for about 15-20 minutes—until the cheese is bubbly and golden and the insides of enchiladas are hot.

Garnish with pumpkin seeds and queso fresco.