(10 seconds each to read and are almost that quick to prepare)
By Lisa Messinger
Food and Cooking at Creators Syndicate

(originally published 11/20/2010)

There are other shortcuts this cookie season beyond the sound of screeching brakes in the parking lot of the supermarket from other less organized folks' and their sprinting in five minutes before a party to buy a tray of store-bought baked goods.

When potlucks, cookie-recipe exchange get-togethers, holiday parties - or simply your hungry kidlets - come calling throughout the season, consider refrigerated cookie dough and cake mix as your kick starts.

Camilla Saulsbury did, and that's probably why she was able to create almost 750 recipes rather than just the usual fraction of that for her now-classic "The Ultimate Shortcut Cookie Book." The winner of Food  Networks's Ultimate Recipe Showdown with her grand-prize exotic spice cookies with ginger, cardamom and rose water - like Sandra Lee, best-selling author of the "Semi-Homemade" series of cookbooks, and "Cake Mix Doctor" series author Anne Byrn - optimistically promotes that half homemade is a measuring cup half full, rather than half empty.

Just scanning through Saulsbury's easy innovations is probably enough to give you ideas to create your own treats from convenience ingredients:

- Adding raisins and cinnamon to refrigerated chocolate chip cookie dough takes only a few seconds and yet gives the resulting cookies the homemade advantage.

- Gingerbread men don't have to start from scratch. A package of spice cake mix with some added ground ginger, cinnamon and molasses is all it takes.

- "Stained glass" cookie cutouts begin with refrigerated sugar cookie dough. Before baking, get an easy addition of crushed colored fruit hard candies to make the "panes."

- Other seasonal favorites are just a few bright ideas away, like spiced pecan balls that begin with ground vanilla wafers, eggnog cookies jump-started with yellow cake mix before the addition of nutmeg and some optional brandy and pumpkin pie bars formed on a crust of refrigerated sugar cookie dough.

Fun fare like this also proves cooking can be easy, nutritious, economical, jazzy - and fast. They take just 10 seconds each to read and are almost that quick to prepare. The creative combinations are delicious proof that everyone has time for tasty home cooking and, more importantly, the healthy family togetherness that goes along with it! Another benefit: You effortlessly become a better cook, since there are no right or wrong amounts. These are virtually-can't-go-wrong combinations, so whatever you - or your kidlet helpers - choose to use can't help but draw "wows" from family members and holiday season guests.
     
QUICK TIP OF THE WEEK: Fusion cuisine - food prepared by blending the ingredients or techniques of two or more regional or ethnic styles of cooking - has played a role in the development of many restaurant dishes since the 1970s. It is also something you can personalize at home for delicacies and to further teach children about their heritage. A Greek father, for instance, and Italian mother might create meatballs that have been spiced with marjoram, rosemary and mint (seasonings often used in Greek cooking) to serve over imported Italian pasta. My Norwegian relatives might stuff the Hungarian side of our family's cabbage with rice prepared with a bit of gjetost (a Norwegian cheese sold at many U.S. supermarkets) and top it with a traditional Norwegian cream sauce.

Lisa Messinger  is a first-place winner in food and nutrition writing from the Association of Food Journalists and the National Council Against Health Fraud and author of seven food books, including the best-selling  The Tofu Book: The New American Cuisine with 150 Recipes   (Avery/Penguin Putnam) and  Turn Your Supermarket into a Health Food Store: The Brand-Name Guide to Shopping for a Better Diet (Pharos/Scripps Howard). She writes two nationally syndicated food and nutrition columns for Creators Syndicate and had been a longtime newspaper food and health section managing editor, as well as managing editor of Gayot/Gault Millau dining review company. Lisa traveled the globe writing about top chefs for Pulitzer Prize-winning Copley News Service and has written about health and nutrition for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, Reader's Digest, Woman's World and Prevention Magazine Health Books. Permission Granted for use on Dr.Laura.com.