Cynthia MacGregor's Kitchen

In addition to the food we are served at festive get-togethers, many of us cook holiday dinners ourselves—for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas—with, for most, either a turkey or a ham as the main attraction.

But all of this often leaves us facing three sets of problems:

1 – Cooking the holiday dinners often raises questions, ranging from how long the turkey is likely to need to cook to what herbs and spices best complement squash to how long you can keep leftover scalloped potatoes in the fridge.

2 – Leftover turkey or ham is a great labor saver and money saver for subsequent nights’ dinners, but how many nights do you want to eat rewarmed turkey or reheated ham?! What else can you do with it, though?

3 – All that eating is sure to put pounds on, which you’ll want to take off before they become permanently attached to you, but how?

Fortunately I have written three cookbooks that, taken together, can resolve all these problems and more.

Lost in the Kitchen, while not strictly a cookbook, does have a cornucopia of recipes that follow the information in the book. While Lost in the Kitchen was written primarily for kitchen novices, there’s plenty of information that more experienced cooks may still need to refer to from time to time…like cooking times and freezing times and what-goes-with-what and how best to store leftovers.

Stealth Leftovers helps you disguise your leftovers in scrumptious new presentations such as Casbah Turkey and Ranchero Romero’s Skillet Dinner, which are quick and easy to prepare and thoroughly delicious to eat. Nobody in your family will wrinkle up their nose and say, “Ugh—not the leftover turkey [or ham] again!” They’ll dig in…and ask you to make this dish again soon!

The Firehouse Diet is chock full of totally yummy dishes that are sensible and don’t taste at all like diet food. Now, let me level with you: Following the precepts of The Firehouse Diet will not cause you to lose 10 pounds in a week…but losing weight that fast isn’t healthy for you anyhow. No, what The Firehouse Diet does is help you to lose weight slowly but surely and sensibly, and to keep it off! The recipes are for good food, delicious food, food you’ll enjoy eating. So you won’t give up after three weeks and put all the weight back on again. You’ll stick with it…and keep shedding those pounds.

There you have it: The trinity of cookbooks you need not only this holiday season but all year-round: Lost in the Kitchen, Stealth Leftovers, and The Firehose Diet. Now, where can you buy these books?

XoXoPublishing.com is the publisher, and you can buy the books on their website or at Amazon.com.

Happy Holidays. Enjoy your cooking. Enjoy your eating. Make it a good one!

Cynthia MacGregor is the author of 54 conventionally published books and over 50 e-books, and also does other forms of writing, ranging from web copy to ads to catalog copy. An accomplished editor of books, magazines, and web copy, she also has ghostwritten books, blogs, and other forms of writing. A former New Yorker who has called Florida “home” since 1984, Cynthia enjoys cooking and entertaining, and she also writes for fun as well as for a living. Her plays have been produced by the Palm Springs Players (that’s Palm Springs, Florida—not the more famous namesake in California), and her wordplay is enjoyed by fellow members of PUNY, an online punsters’ group. A decided happy woman, Cynthia avers that “There is no one in the world I’d want to trade lives with.”