We all collect recipes for special occasions. But who has special recipes for Election Day gatherings and Election Night parties? Old-Fashioned Southern Brunswick Stew is an old southern tradition to lure people to the polls. It's a simple stew, just layers of different meats and favorite southern vegetables like corn, okra and lima beans. And it's healthy too, great for parties but simple enough for family meals too. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” ~ The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the 1962 movie The facts are apocryphal so I’m sticking with the legend about Brunswick Stew, the story that captured my fancy when I looked for healthy election-night party food a couple of years ago.The story is that in certain times and places in the American South, political players would use a big pot of thick stew – traditionally squirrel meat with southern-style vegetables like corn, lima beans and okra – to lure people to the polls on election day. Cast your ballot, stop by…

A healthy rice pudding made with a mix of quinoa and brown rice, cooked on the stove or baked in the oven. The combination of quinoa and brown rice moves familiar rice pudding into intriguing new territory, still very much comfort food but with an appealing nuttiness and tender (not mushy) texture. If rice is the world’s most-consumed food, no surprise that rice pudding comes in country-by-country variations, something only a cookbook fanatic (who, me?) might notice. Around the world, rice pudding is the obvious answer to the question, What can we do with all this leftover rice?Leftover rice stacks up and sits around at my house, thanks to an affinity for Oven-Baked Brown Rice, my adaptation of Cook’s Illustrated’s Fool-Proof Oven-Baked Brown Rice. I mix brown rice with other rices and grains, often my favorite Minnesota wild rice, most recently, some red quinoa.One morning, I started to make a porridge from leftover rice and all of a sudden, the rice took over and turned itself into r…