cookies of the week

I'm a sucker for snacks.  I always want them, but when I'm at the grocery store, I always skip buying them just to make sure I don't eat too many.  Don't worry, candy still makes its way into my life.

March is a very dreary time here in Portland.  Its kind of cold, its windy, it rains a lot and its been doing this for months.  I had the brilliant idea of trying to bake a new kind of cookie I've never made before every week all month.  So that's 4 new cookie recipes to love or hate.

Now I am not a baker.  In fact, I'm not that remarkable of a cook either, so everything I do has to be easy.  That's how you know you'll want to make these cookies, too.  They take very little effort, and not a lot of ingredients.

Last week's cookie was this:  Trissalicious Pistachio Cookies.  (She wants us to CALL the cookies "Trissalicious" because they're from her blog. Major eyeroll, as these are a classic Italian cookie).  Even if the name makes you want to roll your eyes, the cookies are so delicious they will be gone in two days.  They come out fabulously chewy and nutty, though I kind of felt they were missing something when I made them.  My friend, who has a gluten allergy (and made these right away because they are flourless), alerted me that she added vanilla to hers.  I will certainly try that next time.  So maybe if you add vanilla you can call them "Hilarylicious Pistachio Cookies" because that's Hilary's version.

The Recipe is all in grams.  I could give you my conversions, but then you wouldn't get to try and use this awesome tool for converting recipes:  Gourmet Sleuth.  Hint:  you'll want to select "ground" when you convert the almonds.

This week's cookie was a bit different.  There is one left and I didn't get any pictures.  They came out kind of badly but this time I blame my oven and my laziness for that, not the recipe.

Mayan Chocolate Cookies.  The idea of this recipe is to make the plain-ish cookie and then top it with this mixture that is supposed to caramelize in the oven.  Welp, I didn't have any heavy cream so I used milk.  NOPE.  These need cream.  Or maybe the cinnamon sugar needs to be mixed with the cream instead of sprinkled. The cinnamon stayed...powdery and made me cough while eating them.  If you can get it to work, I bet these will be tasty, but for me they were a failure. Even so, they disappeared in less than 24 hours.  These cookies definitely turned me on to the flavor combination of chocolate-spicy-sweet-cinnamon.  There are plenty of mayan chocolate cookies out there, with chocolate and cinnamon and spicy pepper in them, and I might try another recipe, because I'm just no good at the two-step.

Have a Soup-er day.

The weather lately has been really cold.  It was especially windy and rainy today.  Soup to the rescue!  I threw together this easy soup that tastes pretty fantastic.

6oz Fully-cooked Chicken Sausage Meat.  Italian-y flavors would probably be best. Find them at Trader Joe's

1 large carrot, chopped

1 stalk of celery, chopped

1 small yellow onion, chopped

1 small tomato, chopped

4 cups of broth (chicken or vegetable)

1 can cannellini beans

cooked orecchiette or similar pasta.  About 1 cup, cooked.

2 tbsp butter

olive oil

dried thyme, basil, rosemary, oregano

salt and pepper

Melt the butter and add the Chopped Chicken meat.  Brown about 2 minutes, then add the carrot, celery and yellow onion.  Cook until the onion is transparent.  Add the broth, tomato, beans and olive oil, herbs and salt and pepper.  Bring to a boil, then reduce to simmer.  Let it go about 20 minutes.  Add the pasta when you're ready to eat.  This soup tastes great reheated.

I got rave reviews from Zach.  Make it!  Enjoy!

Hello, gorgeous!

Last night I returned from my surprise trip to Pittsburgh.  Spending time with family and old friends always inspires me to do new things and continue to do things that I love.  It's like anti-depressants except it requires 4 plane rides and a $40 dollar cab ride home.

So today when I woke up and I wasn't scheduled for work, I got moving as soon as I could.

One of the first things I needed to do was go shopping.  Thankfully it was a gorgeous day, and I walked to Safeway.

I wanted to give frozen yogurt another try so I bought blueberries and a tub of Fage 2%.  So this is the recipe I came up with:

3 cups Fage 2% strained Greek yogurt
approx 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 cup blueberries.  Mine were fresh but you're freezing this so why not use frozen?

1/2 cup black raspberries.  They're a bit easier to find frozen.

honey and/or agave nectar to taste.

I threw this in my ice cream maker and went to town.  My first impressions are that it really is much creamier than the other version, but I think I like the texture of the low-fat regular yogurt I used the first time.  I like ice-y ice cream, and the first was more like soft-serve.  This is more like slow-churned ice cream.  It has a higher fat content but is nowhere near the fat content of ice cream.  I love the gorgeous pinkish purple color it came out to be after I mixed it.  It could really use some cookie pieces or graham crackers on top, but I don't have any.  Should be great for breakfast.  Balloon had some, she approves.  As soon as she realized I was eating one of her favorites, she raced over to try to steal my bowl!  She was pleased to finish it up when all the berries were gone.

The second thing I tried today was some crusty French bread. Using the easiest recipe I could find on Google, I made my first loaf in forever.  The only changes I made were to add some dry milk and also to use quick rise yeast instead of regular.  I find almost no difference, except for speed (for pizza dough, that is).  Do as the recipe suggests and spray some water during the baking of your loaf.  The crust will come out thick and delicious.  

 

It sure looks professional, but I haven't tried it yet...so I'm off do do that.  I'll  let you know!

Addendum:  Not the loftiest bread I've ever eaten, maybe a bit heavy. Maybe I should have let it rise a lot longer? Didn't stop me from eating about 1/5 of the loaf immedately.  Olive oil + oregano + sea salt makes a fabulous dip.  This bread will definitely keep me trying new stuff.

3/10:  Makes decent (albeit small) toast.

oh the cats!

Hey that's not one of our cats!  This is my favorite wine, Zeller Schwarze Katz that came in a special collectors bottle.   Obviously I have collected it, and it now resides on a shelf next to my teacups.

Balloon is so delicate and ladylike she always crosses her paws when laying down.

Ms. Balloon in a lovely little scarf.  She took it off herself after 1 solid minute because "it made her face look fat".  Whatever.

I caught them in the act of spooning!  (Shortly after this they started fighting and Balloon got ousted.)

Furball and I snuggled on my birthday!  He makes a great pillow!  

That's all for now!

Slow-baked beans: Whoa!

A friend recently sent me a recipe that was published in the New York Times.  Because he reads my blog, and wishes he had more time to cook, I decided to make this dish just for him.  ...Also it sounded amazing. Raj, a med student at Yale, has a mother who is an amazing cook and a maker of epic pies.  After eating all that tasty food, I trust his culinary suggestions.  And as I sit here writing and burning my mouth on molten beans, I'm here to tell you that it was totally worth it.

This recipe, vegan in its entirety, is exactly the thing I would expect someone who is intellectual and also vegetarian to eat.  Indeed, what an intellectual dish.  Nourishing, healthy, simple and delicious.  Not to mention economical.

Often times, I use recipes as guidelines and create my own version. However, I wanted to make this one exactly as written.  Safeway, as it seems, wanted to thwart me.  They were out of kale (!), so I decided to substitute fresh spinach.  I also had an early relative casserole dish which wasn't up to the capacity of the recipe, so in the end, I made 3/4 of the actual recipe, leaving a bucket of half-soaked lima beans on my counter.

I upped the temperature to 300 degrees.  Apartment ovens are not famously accurate, and I'm sure mine runs a bit cool.  Also I don't believe ANYTHING can cook at 225 degrees.  That's only 55 degrees hotter than a sauna, and people can survive in that.  

The beans turn creamy, the herbs are delicious, and everything melds together so nicely.  Definitely worth the three hours. Make it on a weekend or ahead of time and heat it up later.

Bean casserole doesn't photograph particularly beautifully...

The Recipe:  Slow-Baked Beans with Kale

Pasta, yum!

Tonight's dinner is something I made up a long time ago, when Zach and I first went vegetarian in college.  This was, of course, long before I started writing this blog.  Its a quiet, unassuming casserole dish that you can't really mess up, and is perfect to take along with you or to make ahead of time and pop into the oven.  Its cheap, and you don't need a lot of stuff to make it.

2 cups of dry pasta.  Any shape works fine, but spaghetti probably wouldn't be very good in this.
1 can of beans (I used garbanzo.  Cannelini beans would also be a good choice.  You could probably use cooked chicken, also.)
1 jumbo log of goat cheese, crumbled up (mine was 11 oz, I only used about 5)
1 jar of pasta sauce.  If you make your own, use it.  I use Newman's.
feta cheese crumbles
vegetable of your choice.  Tomatoes go nicely, I've put onions in before but its a good idea to sautee them a bit first.  Spinach might also.

Cook the 2 cups of dry pasta and drain it.  Chop the vegetables and add them to a medium-sized casserole dish.  Add the beans, pasta, sauce (to your taste) and  goat cheese.  Mix together.  The sauce should get a little creamy.  Top with the feta.

At this point you can put this in the fridge to bake later or pop it in an oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, just long enough for everything to melt together and get really hot.  Serve.

Start to finish this might take 40 minutes.  Made ahead of time, dinner is ready almost before you are!

Note: I said you can't really mess this up, but you can. Tonight I used sun dried tomatoes.  They made everything really salty, so I'd save them for another time, since sauce from a jar is probably already salty enough.  Normally this is damn tasty.

What do to with leftover goat cheese?  I think its fabulous on crackers!

The big 64

The other day I bought 64 ounces of plain yogurt.  I've been eyeing up this jumbo tub of Nancy's for a while, but searching for something new to inspire me I went right ahead and bought it last week.  So, other than eating it covered in honey and frozen black raspberries (they were much more delicious-and a whole lot less money- back when I got them from grandma's back yard!) what in the world do you do with that much yogurt?

Well to start, you're going to want to whip yourself up a batch of this amazing low-fat pasta salad.  Its a bit summery, but that's what one needs in late January.  I found when I was making it that I had only about two tablespoons of mayonnaise left, so I just used more yogurt to replace it.  I also only had tomatoes, onions, and celery, but those seemed to work really well in this. I added feta cheese, and believe me, you'll want to.  It adds such a great texture to the yogurt dressing.  If you don't like feta, I'd still try adding just a bit of Parmesan cheese.  Don't forget lots of salt and pepper, but other than that it doesn't need much!  Its very similar to a pasta salad they sell where I volunteer and I'm constantly addicted to it.

This was great but I'll probably never eat red onions again...talk about two days of the worst stomachache possible!

Remember that cheap ice cream maker I bought last year? That's right, I'm way ahead of myself in terms of the seasons!  The husband and I happen to frequent those by-the-ounce frozen yogurt shops that cost a fortune.  Let me tell you, for less than one trip to a yogurt shop you can make yourself a pint and a half of creamy goodness and it is incredibly easy.  I found this recipe, and quickly whipped some up.  In less than an hour I had amazing frozen yogurt.

They claim you can't use low-fat yogurt, but guess what? You can. And its good.  Maybe not as creamy as ice cream, but it certainly beats those soft-serve places.  The yogurt plus the toppings ran us under 10 dollars, and we still have some left after a delicious and healthy dessert.

The recipe calls for greek yogurt but I used regular american-style plain yogurt.  Its very tangy and delicious and I can only imagine what using Fage would do for this yummy stuff.

The toppings are mini-mochi...we got them at our local asian market.  They're soft and chewy and make a great topping for ice cream and fro-yo.

So now maybe I feel a little snazzier than I did last week...but I still have some yogurt to eat!