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A sandwich with meat, cheese, and a real vegetable inside? I should know about this.

That’s what I thought when, in researching a piece on Philly Cheesesteaks, I got extraordinarily distracted by the discovery of the steak hero’s porky brother, the Roast Pork Sandwich. While most sandwiches claim a couple tomato slices or some lettuce as all their vegetables, this sandwich has a heap of sautéed broccoli rabe inside with the pork and the cheese. That makes it, in my book, a complete meal, and therefore a dish I should know about.

Even better, both the pork and rabe can be seasoned and cooked in advance, making this satisfying sub accessible on a weeknight if you do some cooking over the weekend.

Normally, the cheese melted on top the pork and rabe is aged provolone. But here I use Roth Cheese’s nutty alpine-style melting cheese, which really rounds out the sandwich.

Imagine a cookie. Okay, now imagine a brownie. Which one do you want? If you answered one of each, then this recipe is for you.

In high school, when my sister Kate and I baked a lot, the cookie-brownie debate extended beyond what we felt like eating. It was more about what we were in the mood to bake. Cookies promised a little more of an activity-you had to cream the butter, choose the mix-ins, and roll ball after heaping-tablespoon-sized ball to place on cookie sheets. They baked quickly, however, and didn’t require much rest time in between baking and downing that first bite. Brownies came together miraculously quickly but baked for longer, and, technically at least, needed to cool some before becoming sliceable into neat squares. Back then, I wish we’d thought of this hybrid: if you’d like to make both cookie and brownie, this chocolate & peanut butter recipe is for you as well.

The chocolate chip cookie is the classic recipe, rich in brown sugar and chocolate chips. Instead of making cookies, you press all the dough into a pan and par-bake. This is the first layer.

The second layer, the brownies, almost acts like an icing-a peanut butter-studded icing. I poured rich, creamy REESE’S Peanut Butter Chips right into the brownie batter. The chips, to me, look like the yin to the cookie layer’s chocolate chip yang.

Before I give you the recipe-which was a huge hit with peanut butter lovers, chocolate lovers, cookie lovers, and bar cookie lovers-I wanted to share a note about Hershey and the company’s support of Dr. Mark Manary’s Project Peanut Butter. In Ghana, which maintains big peanut and cocoa production, malnutrition persists among children. Project Peanut Butter’s goal, therefore, is to distribute packets of nutrient-packed Ready to Use Therapeutic Foods. The core ingredient in the packets is the peanut; they also contain the vitamins needed to help kids survive malnourishment. Founded in Malawi in 2004, the project has been recognized by the United Nations, World Health Organization, and World Food Program as the standard of in-home care for malnutrition.

Then, in 2012, with funding from The Hershey Company, Project Peanut Butter announced an expansion into Ghana, where not only did it plan to distribute the remedies but to source the peanuts and produce the packets too. Over the summer, PPB’s Ghana team began test runs of the local factory they’d built along with Hershey’s manufacturing expertise, and hopes to feed two-thirds of Ghana’s hungry kids. You can get updates about the Ghana project here.

Thanks for reading!

This post is sponsored by The Hershey Company. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thanks for supporting the sponsors that keep Big Girls, Small Kitchen delicious!

If you’ve ever wondered why some of us find food fascinating long after the dinner dishes are cleared, look no further than the case of curry.

When I say curry, you might think of a leaf, a paste, or a powder. You might begin to crave savory Indian stews, dream about bowls of spicy Thai soup, imagine portions of sauce-smothered Japanese katsu, or salivate after thoughts of German currywurst. You might even think of Singapore Noodles, an entry in the dry-not stew-like-curry list. All are valid food fantasies. There are a lot of curries!

Our Christmas food tradition counts on chocolate cake more than anything else, in part because December 25th was my chocolate-loving grandma’s birthday, and cake had to be on the table. (You shouldn’t miss the recipe for my mom’s chocolate cake, one of the first recipes I posted here.)

But just because you love one chocolate cake doesn’t mean you can’t love another. Especially another classic, like this one. Yet until this year, this cake, though classic, wasn’t mine yet.

It’s Hershey’s. And it’s the one on the back of the cocoa powder can.

Over the summer, I got a chance to visit Hershey, PA, and tour The Hershey Company’s offices and research and development center—yes, the place where they come up with all the new chocolate and candy.

In NYC, it seems that every chocolate maker markets itself as artisan, local, and/or handmade—as do many purveyors of oils, cocktail mixers, pastries, and vegetables. That sometimes makes us wonder about companies that have been around longer and operate on bigger scales. But should we be? That’s one reason I was excited to visit Hershey: to see how food can be made in a larger format. If you follow me on instagram, you’ll notice I’ve been visiting a lot of producers over the past several months, getting a glimpse into the details of our massive food system, and this trip suited my meandering curiosity.

To be clear, this post—as well as three more posts and recipes to follow over the course of the next several months—is sponsored by the company. But as a generally nosy person, I was thrilled to see inside an international food company with such a rich American history.

In no particular order, here are some of the things I found most interesting from my visit to Hershey:

Before they were sweet, pies were savory. The dough that bakes up into our beloved flaky crust was, way back when, merely a convenient holder of filling, a means for peripatetic medieval types to wrap up meat or vegetables and take them on the go. Sort of like a pop tart.

Now that a pie usually refers to the kind of double-crusted or meringue-topped thing of dessert beauty (or terror, if dough always seems to stick to your rolling pin), I love the idea of taking the pastry back to its roots in my holiday cooking this year-whether at Thanksgiving or Christmas, or sometime in between.

This is happening in two ways. One, we’re making savory pies, not sweet ones; and two, we’re choosing a rustic presentation over a perfect, fussy one. Put away your rolling pins and deep-dish fluted pie pans. This is going to be simple.

At your pie party, I envision an array of savory pastries, with crust and filling mixed and matched to suit your tastes. To add even more visual fun, play around with shapes, too. There are mini galettes, dough wrapped around filling that’ll disappear in three bites. There are long and skinny galettes containing bright seasonal vegetables; they’re to be cut into manageable squares for serving. Others are more or less round, like, well, pies. We can even pick and choose the name of these savories: galette, crostata, pie, tart, tartlet, pizette. Though some of these have specific meanings and others are sort of made up, a good diverse spread should have good diverse names - don’t you think?

The first recipe here makes a couple of Apple Crostatas. With a whole-wheat crust and a melted brie topping, the cute rounds make an awesome vegetarian lunch (with a green salad) if you’re not having a pie party or looking for a great starter for Thanksgiving.

But that’s not all. There’s a big Sweet Potato-Rosemary Galette with a rustic cornmeal crust that’s punctuated by delicious roquefort. Click over to ArtofCheese.com to get the recipe for these delicious, seasonal gems.

This post is sponsored by Lactalis, who provided cheese and compensation. All opinions, of course, are my own. Thanks for supporting the sponsors that keep BGSK delicious! If you’d like to enter to win $50 worth of your own Président cheese, visit ArtOfCheese.com, where you can download a coupon and enter the Pinterest sweepstakes, plus find more holiday recipes and product information.

You’d think that a move between two apartments two blocks apart would be easy. But the distance from apartment #1 to #2 turns out to matter a whole lot less than the number of years you’ve hoarded kitchen equipment in the old place (four) and the sum of stair flights to be climbed between the pair of Brooklyn walk-ups (six and a half). Two blocks can be long indeed. We were going to need some help.