As we are officially halfway through December, I plan to get into the kitchen and make some sweet and savory gifts to give. Do you have a tradition of gifting something homemade for the holidays? Here are my favorite ideas to get you started, along with 3 recipes for your meal plan this week!
Looking for more recipes? Check out Recipe Club!
Follow Kelsey on Instagram (@KelseyNixon) for more great content!
Hi everybody.
I'm Kelsey Nixon and this is Kitchen Prescription, the podcast you listen to when you don't know what to make for dinner. This is episode sixty three Gifting from Your Kitchen. So we're officially halfway through December.
How are you holding up?
This month has been so crazy for me that I've genuinely had to take things just one week at a time. So early this morning I sat down and did like a status check in on gifting. What do I still need to buy? I had to acknowledge that I still have to every like, has anyone rapped anything? Are there people out there who have shopped and wrapped? At this point, I have wrapped a thing. What parties do we still have left to attend? How many days do my kids have left of school where I can actually get stuff done because you know, when they come home, it's over right, like it's done. I also made a game plan for gifting from my Kitchen because I really like doing this and I want to acknowledge that it does take some effort, especially during a very busy month, like to carve out a couple of hours to bake or to make salsa or barbecue, sauce or pickle that, whatever it is your you want to gift neighbors, friends, colleagues, teachers.
It takes some.
Time, but I'm not willing to give it up because it's also woven into our family traditions each year, and if we didn't do any gifting from our kitchen, I think I kind of feel sad. So in the midst of everything we still have going on, we will bake. We're going to do it, and it's actually what we're going to talk about for the last half of the podcast is how you can actually make this gifting from your kitchen happen. And I'm excited to chat about it. But before we do that, let's discuss just a few recipes you can throw on your meal plan this week. And as you know, it's December, which means it is our winter five ingredient monthly meal plan, meaning that all of the recipes in Recipe Club this month are five ingredients because it's the craziest freaking month of the year. All right, First up, chicken pesto soup. You guys could not be easier. It kind of reminds me of the five ingredient tortilla soup we have a little bit because it uses some of those same like core building block ingredients. You've got some chicken broth, You've got a shordded rotisserie chicken. You obviously have pesto. There's some noodles in there to really, you know, kind of beef it up a bit. In fact, I also made this with tortellini as well. It's got some lemon that you finished with it. It's got some spinach in there. It's just really good. And for all of these five ingredient recipes and Recipe Club, I always include optional extras because if it's just crazy and you just need to feed your people and you do not want to drive them through taco bell, these five ingredients will provide a delicious meal and it's gonna be fine. But if you have it in you to drop some cilantro and throw a squeeze of fresh lime in there, it might take it to the next level. So I always include the optional extras so that you feel like you can elevate that five ingredient dish just a bit should you want to. The next one is one of the most popular recipes in Recipe Club. It's and so surprising to me, but it is so good. It's the Trader Joe's Steak sandwiches. So Trader Joe's sells like a little mini roast of this.
It's actually so good.
Like I am never one to buy like cooked meat, like I mean, other than a rodtasttery chicken, but typically I am I'm not doing I buy it raw and I cook it and whatever. This you're just gonna have to rewarm. But it is so so good, and we turn it into these delicious sandwiches with the bores and cheese. And in fact, I have one person in particular who's like, this is hands down my favorite recipe in all of Recipee Club.
It's so good.
It's so good, So we're gonna do the Trader Drias steak sandwiches. I'm headed to Trader Drowse today to pick this up because actually my son was asking for it anyway.
It's such a funny little recipe, but it's so good.
And then finally Veggie for Tata is on the lineup. I love this and the thing that makes this so good are also some staples from Trader Joe's. You certainly don't need these to make this recipe. You can make this recipe with any cheese, but I'm going to get the shredded unexpected cheddar, which is next level. And I love the cube panchetta I can get that goes in there. And this is just I'm telling you we did breakfast for dinner last night because I could have sworn that I had chicken for dinner and I didn't, and so I had to improvise. Breakfast for dinner is kind of awesome, especially if you're not in a place where you've overdone it, because we've gotten there.
But really, don't forget about breakfast.
Breakfast for dinner, and even if you're going to go beyond like pancakes, waffles, bacon and eggs, a veggie for tada like this five ingredient veggie frittata is so easy. You literally throw the eggs in a bowl, you throw some cheese, and you throw some salt and pepper. You got some veggies like some sliced cherry tomatoes or some spinach or carrots or brocola, whatever. You just throw it all in, you mix it up, you pour it in the pan, and you bake it off. Like it could not be easier. So don't forget about the fritada. This is one of those things that is now becoming like a tradition. Anytime I travel to see family, would always make this because people love it and it's so simple. So there are your recipes for the week. You can find and print them all in Recipe Club individually or in our weekly meal plan that has an easy to follow shopping lists broken down by recipes, so if you don't all make all of the recipes, it'll show you ingredients per recipe. You'll also get the five new recipes plus our entire winter five ingredient meal plan. And don't forget there's a library of over two hundred recipes in there that's just the new stuff this month, so check that out, especially if you're looking from some super simple recipes to help you survive December. And I also wanted to tell you guys, we are offering, just for the next couple weeks, a giftable three month mini membership that is perfect for last minute gifts.
And it's only twenty four to ninety nine, so.
It's the first time we've ever had a price point this low for Recipe Club, but we wanted to offer it for the teachers, the neighbors, the in laws, whoever you've got that twenty five dollars price point for.
We wanted to offer something, so.
That'll be available through Christmas and then it's going away and we probably won't bring it back until next December. So if you wanted to purchase a three month mini membership to gift, and let's say you don't want to gift it till Mother's Day, you can do that. Get it now and it doesn't activate until they actually activate it after they've been given, so it'd be a good time to stock up on just have a couple of those on hand. All right, let's jump into the back half of the podcast and discuss gifting from your kitchen.
Please.
Some of my favorite holiday gifts to give are thoughtful, homemade, and most importantly edible, right And the fact that they're edible is what makes them seem thoughtful. And I really love I really love it if I can find a couple of hours to carve out in the kitchen so that I can yield the batch of homemade gifts that are easy on the wallet and also its super heartwarming for people to receive. So if you have the right recipes in hand, I think that's so critical. I think that they almost always beat storebot food gifts, especially like if you've got a little ribbon and a few handwritten labels or notes, or maybe you attach your family holiday card with it, I feel like you can transform even the most ho hum of condiments like salsa or barbecue sauce into charming little packages.
So I thought we'd discussed this.
If you're wanting to pull off a few gifts from the kitchen in the final weeks of December, let's just take a few minutes to chat about my favorite easy to make, easy to give, sweet and savory crowd pleasers. So we're gonna discuss punchy pickle onions to an easy homemade artisanal bread and sauces, and of course we're gonna discuss my favorite cookies. So before this is really important, before you decide what you're going to get from the kitchen the year, I think it's very important to look at your bandwidth and be honest with yourself.
Do you have, you know, a significant.
Amount of time to dedicate to this project. Are you gonna make salsa from scratch?
I've done it. I've done it before.
It's really fun, it's really appreciated, but that takes a lot of time, or if you have less time than usual, you know, just let's talk about a few things I suggest considering. So if you can, and if it's not too much trouble, try to include the recipe. My favorite food gifts to receive are ones.
Where the recipes attached.
So attaching a recipe for your chocolate peanut butter bark, or your popcorn balls or your cranberry barbecue sauce, I just think it makes it even better to receive. And oh I had thought of this. If you're a Recipee Club, you have access to our new recipe template, which is beautiful. It looks like a page right out of a cookbook. So let's say you want a gift, you've got like a signature. Like my really good friend Jenna, her grammy has these ginger snap cookies that we all, we all they're like famous amongst our friends. But let's say Jana wanted to gift her Grammy's ginger snap cookies. She could take our template Recipe Club, put the recipe in, print it out, and gift the recipe with the cookies. And it's just a really nice little touch. It doesn't take that much extra effort, but I think it's really nice. Okay, this is something that I I always say I'm going to focus on this and then I end up doing something different. But consider making it a tradition because then you only have to decide once what is going to be your thing that you gift. So if you find a recipe you really like and feel signature to you or your family, like my friend Jana's the perfect example. Everyone loves those cookies from her grandma stick with, that's it. It cuts down on the decisions you have to make in future years and it kind of becomes your family's signature gift to give. So for many years we were gifting my honeycorn recipe, which is like a caramel corn that actually it's got like an extra touch of honey in it. It's a really fun recipe. It's from my first cookbook. It's actually in our guide for gifting from the Kitchen on Recipe Club, and it is so tasty. I made it on my show Kelsey's Essentials on Food Network years ago. It's just been around forever, But about two years ago I started mixing things up a bit.
I wonder if we should have turned it.
We're not going to this year. I'll tell you what we're doing this year. But the honey corn recipe is so good and people really I think the reason I stopped doing is because people had already received it. So anyways, but think about making it a tradition.
So you have to make one.
Less decision a year from now. Okay, let's say you don't have very much time. It's an extra crazy holiday season. Consider gifting something tasty that you don't make. So it's tough to beat the selection of treats perfect for gifting at Trader Joe's. Like I said, I'm headed there today and I'm sure i'll take a look. But gifting from a local bakery is another great way to let someone else do the hard part this year. Or I saw a really oh gosh, who was it? I saw it on social on Instagram. Someone was going to gift a nine x thirteen inch pan. So this would be someone you want to sound like, I don't know, a fifteen to twenty dollars gift on a nine x thirteen inch pan with a bag of The Roads cinnamon rolls and a pint of heavy cream. Because there's this awesome hack for roads cinnamon rolls where if you put heavy cream in the bottom, they bake up and they like are cinnabunworthy. So like that's really fun too, and that could totally be a signature thing attached to the recipe.
And you've got yourself a great gift.
So let's discuss the lineup of sweet and savory recipe ideas. I'm going to suggest. So sweet, these are things that I have made before in the past and that are always hits. So chocolate peanut butter bark, so simple, Like you don't even have to turn the oven on for this, Like this is so easy. This is a really easy thing to do with kids. It's got pretzels, it's got peanut butter. It's kind of messy, it doesn't need to look perfect. It's rustic, and it's really really tasty. So chocolate peanut butter bark. Salted caramel sauce. So I have given this in the past. It on one of the first season of My Sean Food Network, we did a Gifting from your Kitchen episode. This would have been you Guys thirteen fourteen years ago, and salted caramel sauce was one of the the recipes. He featured and I'm actually just remembering a memory back on this episode where I am from. I am from Utah, so I'm from the western United States. But obviously I was living in New York City at the time, and I had noticed that while I grew up with it being called caramel, like for whatever reason, all the people are found me at like they were saying, so I'm like, I'm may gonna supposed to call this caramel. So we're filming this episode and I kept going back and forth between caramel and caramel, and They're like, Kelsey, you've got to pick one. You've got to pick one. So even now to this day, that word I look at it and I'm like.
Ooh, which way is it? I don't know.
Anyways, despite that it's a delicious salted caramel sauce. You can gift the sauce on its own, which is a delicious ice cream topping, or something I have done in the past is to gift the caramel sauce with a recipe for caramelidas, which is caramelida bars so good, so so so tasty, or you could do both. You could make caramelida bars and gift the sauce and gift the recipe and you know MVP right there, so keep that in mind. Those are really good vanilla almond scones ooh, super super yummy.
This is a recipe for my first cookbook. It's also an.
Recipee club and they are so tasty. When I was doing my book tour, this was the one thing I would make and take to all of the events in the difference because they just melt in your mouth.
They are so so good.
And then the honeycrn. I've given the honeycorn so much this year, I'm gifting sweet and I am gifting the gingerbread cookies I keep talking about on Instagram. I love gingerbread, but in this chapter of life, I just don't have the time, bandwidth, or patients given my helpers in the kitchen being three and seven years old, to roll out cookie dough and make gingerbread men. So this cookie gives me all of the flavor of gingerbread without the hassle of rolling out.
I love the little guys. They're so cute.
And There's gonna be a time in my life where I'm gonna make gingerbread men from scratch. This is not that time. So for the time being I'm gonna get the fix of that delicious gingerbread flavor and a very simple cookie. So that's what everybody's getting from us this year with the printed recipes, and I'm excited. Savory, Okay, you may want to go savory now, this can be really really fun. Like I have a cranberry barbecue sauce huge hit. There was a couple of years ago where this went viral. Is so so tasty, and it's particularly delicious with the pork loin in my opinion. Although you can serve it with chicken, you can serve it with beef, you can serve it with whatever, but I really like it with pork. And you could make a big batch of cranberry barbecue sauce, package it up in little mason jars, and attach a recipe for the pork coin with cranberry barbecue sauce.
And you're essentially giving someone an easy dinner. I mean, what's better than that.
And it's this beautiful, bright red color, like it's just it's very cheery and happy, and that's that's really fun. Buttermilk biscuits, which you know, it could go sweet or savory, but that's a really fun thing. To do, and you could even you could either do them frozen or you could do them baked off. Pickled onions, so simple, so fun. Think about doing the pickled onions with a recipe for our black bean tiktos or my carnitas or you know something like that. And then finally on Sayrey, I have the no kneed bread. Freebody loves a good fresh loaf of bread, and this no need bread like it's very very simple. It's kind of impossible to screw it up. So those are a couple of sweet and savory ideas. All of these recipes are in our Gifting from the Kitchen Guide in Recipe Club, so you can get access to them there.
But really really fun.
Finally, let's chat quickly about packaging. So presentation is kind of one of my favorite parts.
Of gifting from the kitchen.
If you have it in you to go beyond paper plates wrapped in foil. I pulled a couple of things just in my Amazon storefront to make it easy. And you also can find so many of these things that you know, a local Michael's or Joanne's or even a local restaurant supply is going to have a lot of these things. But takeout boxes are perfect for cookies and brownies. I like that that coated interior kind of keeps the outside of the box clean so that it doesn't like the grease doesn't link through or not the grease, but the butter you can seal with a sticker or wrap and twine for a really nice touch. I do like to order just an extra spool of ribbon every year, and Amazon has been a really great The ribbon selection on Amazon has.
Improved over the years.
I got a bunch of beautiful like green velvet that I'm using this year. Small Mason jars. I mentioned that for the cranberry barbecue sauce, but Mason jars are great for homemade sauces or granola or a soup or a cookie mix.
And I just find them to be so useful.
Whether someone's going to repurpose it as a small flower vase, or they're going to use it for making jam or for making dressings at home.
It's just a it's.
A very reusable thing. Clear Deli containers and now I've gotten these at a restaurant supply in the past, and they can be really great for sauces, spreads, dips, snack mixes like popcorn or like checks mix, or you could even do like frosting for cinnamon rolls, where you could bake off rolls and attach the frosting separately. I like that they come in a lot of different sizes, and you're gonna find those at restaurants supply or on Amazon and then sell. This time, my mom always did it, sell aphane bags or rolls. Tell me, tell me you can hear it now, your mom rolling out the cellophane and she's putting together a gift for someone and she takes the edges and I can hear it now. That is a core memory for me. But they're great for small batch gifts, whether it's cookies. It's just good for nice and nice to package up fresh baked goods really simple. It's nice that you can see through it, and a little goes a long way. So let's maybe also just run through a couple of quick Christmas sayings for gift giving, because I can't help myself.
It's a little corny, but here you go.
So we whisk you Merry Christmas whisk with a cookie mix for somebody. So dear, we wish you a cup of cheer and you could do like hot cocoa. We're nuts about you. Would be great for spice or candied nuts. A holiday treat for someone sweet, anything sweet. Spreading holiday cheer like a specila with a little like cranberry compound butter would be so fun. We just pop by to say happy holidays. You can do the honey corn or popcorn. Some tasty cheir for you and yours. That could be a drink of some sorts. Warmest holiday wishes from our home to yours could be like a homemade potpourri or just anything that's warm, baking, spirits bright. It's such a treat having you as a neighbor. Just a couple of ideas, are you guys? There you have it gifting from the kitchen. I hope you're able to carve out a few hours this holiday season to enjoy baking or cooking with your family and spreading some Christmas chair. Thank you so much for being here. I'll be here next week and can't wait to chat with you then.