Red beans and rice is a Monday night staple in the big easy, and I'm feeling just a little bit homesick.
Category Archives: The Nation Has An Appetite
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Celebrate your independence from store-bought cookies! (Um, maybe I’m trying too hard to get into the spirit of the day.) This recipe came from my paternal grandmother, and I’ve never seen another chocolate chip cookie recipe quite like it. The cookies have a wonderfully light texture. And I know this will sound odd, but I actually don’t like these right out of the oven. I prefer them once they’ve cooled and have lost a little bit of their crispness.
These are also excellent if you need to apologize to anyone in your life. For instance, if you gave someone else a pizza dough recipe that broke his brand-new food processor. Not that I’ve ever done anything like that.
1 cup (2 sticks) butter [or Earth Balance]
1 cup (7 oz.) granulated sugar
1 cup (8 oz.) brown sugar
1 egg, room temperature
1 tablespoon milk [or soy/almond/whatever milk]
1 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 cups (18.5 oz.) all-purpose flour*
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
10-12 oz. semisweet chocolate chips
Preheat oven to 350°F. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.
In a medium bowl, combine flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt. Stir briefly and set aside.
Using a stand mixer (or sturdy electric hand mixer and a large bowl), cream butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar, beating on medium speed for approximately 3 minutes, until light and fluffy. Scrape down sides of bowl. Add egg and milk and beat for 30 seconds. Turn mixer to low and gradually add oil and vanilla while beating. Continue beating for an additional 1 minute. Scrape down sides of bowl.
Add flour mixture—start blending on slowest speed and gradually increase to medium speed. Beat until just combined and no more flour is visible. Stir in chocolate chips.
Use a cookie scoop, spoon, or your hands to form dough into 1.5-inch mounds. Place about 2 inches apart on parchment-lined cookie sheets. (These cookies do spread a fair amount while baking.)
Bake for 12-14 minutes, rotating sheets on top and bottom racks halfway through. When done, cookies will still be pale in the middle but edges will be starting to brown.
Let sit on cookie sheet for 5 minutes (these can be a little fragile just out of the oven), then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
Store in an airtight plastic container or ziplock bag for up to 1 week. This recipe makes a fairly ridiculous quantity of cookies (maybe 5 dozen?), but the cookies also freeze beautifully.
*I generally replace half the flour with white whole wheat four. That makes the cookies into health food, right?
Sweet Potato and Goat Cheese Hand Pies
I had a hankerin' for some sweet potato pie, and a hankerin' for an english hand pie. So, naturally, I combined my desires into one delicious dinner / breakfast / whatever, portable meal. A slice or two of crumbled bacon wouldn't hurt this recipe one bit, fyi.
2 Medium sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 inch cubes
2 packages frozen puff pastry sheets
4-5.5 oz goat cheese
2 green onions
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp smoked paprika
salt and black pepper to taste
In a medium pot, cover cubed sweet potatoes with salted water, and bring to a boil. Boil potatoes until fork tender, remove from heat, drain and return sweet potatoes to pot. Gently mash the potatoes with a potato masher. Crumble one small package (4-5.5 oz) goat cheese with a fork into the sweet potatoes. Mash and stir the cheese and sweet potato mixture until almost smooth, and then add 1/4tsp cayenne, 1/4tsp smoked paprika, and two green onions, including greens, sliced thin to the pot stirring to incorporate. Add salt and black pepper to taste.
Preheat your oven to 400˚ F. Remove thawed puff pastry and cut each sheet into 9 equal squares for a total of 32 squares. Place 18 of the squares onto an ungreased baking sheet. Fill the interior of the square with a tablespoon to a tablespoon and a half of the sweet potato and cheese mixture leaving about a 1/4 inch gap all around. Lightly wet the edge with water, place another square on top, and seal the edge with a fork. Repeat for remaining pies. With a very sharp knife, or razor blade, cut two vent slits in the top of each pie. Bake according to the puff pastry package instruction, about 20-25 minutes or until golden brown.
Heart of Darkness Brownies
These brownies are quick to make and require very little in the way of equipment. (No mixer!) Plus they're dark enough to satisfy the most serious chocolate craving. Any type of cocoa powder will work—either natural or Dutch process. The latter will give you darker brownies. My cocoa powder of choice is Valrhona.
from Cocoa Brownies recipe in Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy by Alice Medrich
Ingredients
11 tablespoons (5.5 oz) unsalted butter [or Earth Balance]
1 1/4 cups (8.75 oz) granulated sugar
1 scant cup (3 oz) unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs, cold
1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon (1.75 oz) unbleached all-purpose flour
Directions
Preheat oven to 325°F. Position a rack in the lower third of the oven. Line bottom and sides of an 8-inch square pan with foil. (There's no need to grease the foil.)
Melt the butter in a medium heatproof bowl set directly in a wide skillet of barely simmering water.
Add the sugar, cocoa, and salt. Stir with a spatula until ingredients are blended and the mixture is hot. Remove the bowl from the skillet and set aside briefly until the mixture is warm (not hot). Mix in the vanilla. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing vigorously with a spatula after each addition.
When the mixture looks thick and glossy, add all the flour at once and stir until you cannot see any streaks. Then mix vigorously for 40 strokes. Spread evenly in the lined pan.
Bake 20-25 minutes, until a toothpick plunged into the center emerges slightly dirty looking. (Note: This, to me, is the trickiest thing about baking brownies. When you're baking a cake, you want the toothpick to come out clean. But brownies baked to that level of doneness will be too dry. You want these to be set but still moist in the middle.) Cool on a rack. Lift the edges of the foil liner and transfer the brownies to a cutting board. Cut into 16 or 25 squares. Store in an airtight container for 3 to 5 days. If they last that long.
Chicken Stir Fry
Hot on the heels of my wildly popular Mexican Tuna Melt, I thought I'd share tonight's dinner as well. Whereas the last one was the result of my raiding the pantry for anything that might plausibly go together, this meal was planned well in advance. Originally, I was going to be cooking for a dinner date, but things got postponed. But that was not going to stop me from having this delicious meal. Continue reading Chicken Stir Fry
Culture Club: A crock full of soyogurt
As mentioned a couple of days ago, I recently decided that I wanted to try making yogurt at home. Specifically, yogurt that The Girl would eat (nondairy). I started looking around for yogurt makers on the web, but then ran across a variety of recipes for making yogurt in a crock pot. Well, sweet. I gots me one of those.
It was surprisingly easy. Step one: buy some soy milk. In my case, I purchased a half-gallon of Silk Organic Unsweetened Soy Milk ($3.48 at my store), plus a single-serving cup of some vanilla soy yogurt with active cultures (I could not find plain). Total cost: about $4.50. For what will be about 1 1/2 quarts of yogurt after draining some of the whey and allowing for some evaporation.
Continue reading Culture Club: A crock full of soyogurt
Mexican Tuna Melt
Or a tuna quesadilla, whichever floats your barco.
I tend to eat a lot of what I'd classify as "bachelor chow" - frozen pizzas, cans of tuna, pasta in sauce. I'm actually a pretty good cook and enjoy cooking, but funds are tight so no bacon-wrapped scallops for me at the moment. I hope I don't cause our resident gourmands any embarrassment to share a post category with me, but I thought I'd share something I whipped up that turned out, I thought, very well. Continue reading Mexican Tuna Melt
WGOM Mini-Caucus (lunch) – DWNTWN MPLS
Just got off the phone interwebs with Pepper and realized something - Did we nail this thing down?
Seems the consensus last week was that a Thursday meeting at Be'Witched would be convenient for most involved. Washington isn't close to where I'm at, but seems close to where y'all are working so I'm happy to make a trip over - maybe swing by and pick up Dread Pirate enroute.
I can take lunch anytime. The questions are:
Does Thursday, April 3 work for you?
What time works best for you?
I <3 pork, but it’s lent, so let’s get salmony
I'm not really going to give up anything for lent because I'm not really into being catholic, but for those more observant citizens I'll whip up a couple of posts without my favorite protein. Today's challenge is smoked salmon. For my birthday I smoked a whole salmon, some speckled trout, and a couple dozen chicken wings. My birthday also happened to be on Superbowl Sunday which helps when throwing a party. You'll need to plan ahead as the salmon will need to soak in brine for 12-24 hours before you smoke it. A word about brine, I've seen ever ratio of salt to sugar, and, when hot smoking, what this boils down to is really a matter of taste. I've had great success using a ratio of 1 part kosher salt, 1 part white sugar, 1 part brown sugar with a healthy splash of soy sauce just for kicks.
Continue reading I <3 pork, but it’s lent, so let’s get salmony
Thin-Crust Pizza
This has been my go-to pizza recipe for the last few years. A while back, CoC suggested I share it, so here it finally is. It has the best crust of any pizza I've made. Continue reading Thin-Crust Pizza