Category Archives: Recipes

Cookies that Wound Up Being Cake

Don’t ask me how this happened.  I followed the recipe for a batch of bar cookies – a recipe that I’ve used before, mind you – and the dough came out as dry and crumbly as pie crust.  Did an extra cup of flour sneak in while I wasn’t looking?  I added some milk to moisten it up, and somehow the result was sheet cake.  It was tasty sheet cake, though.

Is it a bar cookie?  Is it cake?

Cake

  • 1 cup butter
  • 1 cup white sugar
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 tsp. vanilla
  • 1.5 cup white flour
  • 1.5 cup whole wheat flour
  • 1 tsp. baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • milk as needed

Frosting

  • 1 tbsp. butter
  • 1 cup chocolate chips
  • 3 cups marshmallows

Preheat oven to 350°.  Cream together butter and both sugars, then stir in the eggs and the vanilla.  In a separate bowl, mix together the baking soda, salt, and flours, then add to the butter/sugar/egg mixture.  Stir in mix-ins as desired (I used baker’s chocolate and shredded coconut.  Or you could do chocolate chips.)

Bake at 350° for about 45 minutes.  Poke the middle of the cake and see if it’s springy.  Let cool completely.  Then combine the three frosting ingredients in a bowl and microwave until melted, stir, and spread on top of cake.  Let that cool, then enjoy!

Cookie Bars with Added Frosting

I love cookie bars.  They’ve got all the flavor of a cookie, but since they’re cooked in a dish and not all exposed to the air, they’ve got all the squidginess of brownies.  A perfect combination.  So when my birthday came up and I had an excuse to bring something baked in to work, I went with Cookie Madness’s Big Batch Chocolate Chip Bars.

But when they came out of the oven, they looked a little sad and lonely:

I couldn’t decide what to do about it, until at the last minute I decided to frost them (and was almost late to work because of it).

Much better.

The recipe that follows is mostly the same as the one on Cookie Madness, but I used the half recipe.

Big Batch Chocolate Chip Bars

  • 4 oz (one stick) butter
  • 1/2 cup white sugar, then another 1/8 cup
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/2 tbsp vanilla extract
  • 1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
  • 3/4 tsp baking soda
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • semisweet chocolate chips to taste (keep adding them until the dough looks chippy enough)

Preheat oven to 350º.

Then it’s the usual cookie routine: Mix dry ingredients in one bowl.  In another, cream together butter, white sugar, brown sugar.  Mix in eggs, then vanilla, then dry ingredients.  Stir in chocolate chips.  Spread into a greased 13×9″ pan.  Bake about 20 minutes (but check on it!).

For the frosting:

  • 2 cups chocolate chips
  • 3 cups marshmallows
  • 3 tablespoons butter

Microwave all three ingredients together in a bowl until melted, stir.  Pour on top of cooled cookie bars and spread with spatula.

Muffins of Win

No photo of these guys because they didn’t last long enough.  🙂

As usual, this was a heavily modded version of an Allrecipes recipe.  Here’s what I did:

  • 1/2 c. butter
  • 1 1/2 c. white flour
  • 1/2 c. whole wheat flour*
  • 1 1/4 c. sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/2 c. yogurt**
  • 2 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp grated orange zest
  • 1 tsp nutmeg
  • 1 handful slivered almonds
  • 2 handfuls dried cranberries

*  You can probably go as high as half and half for your whole-wheat-to-white ratio, but muffins are delicate creatures, so I didn’t risk it on the first try.

**  The kind with fat in it, not strawberry flavor.

Anyway.  Preheat the oven to 350º.  Mix all the dry ingredients in one bowl.  In  a mixer, cream together the butter and the sugar.  Add the eggs to that, mix well, then add the yogurt, mix, then the dry ingredients, mix.  Stir in the cranberries and almonds last, by hand.  Drop into muffin pans and bake 25-30 minutes.  Try tapping the tops with your finger (it won’t burn you) and take them out when they don’t feel liquid inside anymore.

These are best served right out of the oven with immodest amounts of butter.

Bread Soup

Also known as, “I made a big batch of bread that came out funny.  Now what shall I do?”  The answer, of course, is make a sweet & spicy stew with bread as thickener.

  • about half a loaf of brown bread
  • 2 onions
  • 4 cloves garlic
  • 3 cups black beans
  • 2 sweet potatoes
  • probably about a quart of chicken stock
  • brown sugar, paprika, chili powder, and salt & pepper to taste

As usual with these crock-pot recipes, it’s dead easy.  Soak the beans in water overnight, throw in the pot.  Chop the onions, peel the garlic, peel & chop the sweet potato, throw in the pot.  Crumble bread & throw in the pot.  Throw everything else in the pot.  Add not quite enough chicken stock to cover everything.  Let it rip!

Result: success.

The Congee Incident

Back in August, I went out to a Chinese restaurant with a couple of old friends from Carleton.  I had just moved into the Twin Cities prior to starting grad school and I was living in this temporary housing thingie like a cross between a motel and a dorm room.  No money and no refrigerator space equals peanut butter and jelly and canned green beans.  Anyway, I figured I could scrounge together enough to go to this restaurant and see my friends.

I ordered congee.  It was mind-blowing.  In retrospect, this may have been because it was the most flavorful thing I had eaten in a couple of weeks.  It’s like this savory rice with chewy bits in it and flavored with ginger.  We were having a ball, I was slurping away, Wing was telling me all about how congee is like the chicken soup of the Chinese community – it’s what everyone eats when they’ve got the flu.  And ever since then it has been my mission to recreate this wonderful congee.

I knew from Wing that the basic principle is that you put some rice in more water than you usually use and then you boil it forever.  And I knew from the restaurant menu that there was pickled egg and ginger in it.  So I took some rice:

Kelp and pickled eggs from the Asian foods market near where I live:

I cut those up and threw them in the pot.

Can o’ mushrooms from the Rainbow Foods.  Also thrown into the pot.

Ginger, salt & pepper, chicken stock, garlic, teriyaki sauce.

I put it all in the Crock Pot and let it rip.  A few hours later, what do my wondering eyes behold?

OH GOD.  This dish is going to be legendary.  That was one of the most godawful disgusting things I have ever created.  This ranks up there with the Kohlrabi in the Soup Incident and the Chinese Five Spices Incident.  It smelled like low tide and the texture was like mucus.  After I threw it in the trash I had to take the trash out because it was stinking up the whole kitchen.

Next time, I am going to look up a recipe for congee before I begin.

 

***Update***

I went and looked up an actual recipe for congee.  Turns out you’re supposed to add one pickled duck’s egg, not the whole six-pack.  That may have had something to do with it.

Chocolate Chip Cookies with Extra Goodies

There’s not much recipe to this one; it’s just a modded version of the chocolate chip cookies on the back of the chocolate chip package.  I upped the amount of vanilla, added a bit of coconut and toffee bits because I had them on hand, added some allspice and clove, and replaced 1 cup of the flour with whole wheat flour.  Results of the experiment:

•  Turns out it’s okay to make cookie dough the day before and refrigerate it overnight.  I wasn’t sure about this since it the recipe involved baking soda.

•  You can’t taste the coconut.  It didn’t do any harm, but why waste your coconut?

•  The toffee bits melted, which tastes nice, but I wanted crunchy bits.  I won’t bother with these in the future, either.

•  The allspice and clove: yes, please!

•  The whole wheat flour: nice nutty flavor.

Using Coconut Milk in Bread Pudding

I got the idea from some cooking magazine somewhere, the details of which are lost in the mists of time. You can substitute coconut milk for the milk on a 1:1 basis, which adds an interesting flavor, and the recipe is still as dead easy as always. Just dump the following ingredients together in a bowl:

  • 1 can coconut milk
  • 2 beaten eggs
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar, packed
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • handful of walnuts and/or raisins, if desired

Take the darkest, crustiest bread you can find and tear it into chunks (you can even leave it out uncovered overnight to make it crustier). Stir that into your coconut milk mixture. Glorp the whole thing into a greased loaf pan; top with shredded coconut, if you like. Bake at 350º until just crunchy on top, about half an hour.

The Seitan Recipe o Greatness

Not original by me.  I picked this recipe up from a vegan blog, where it was already second-hand.  It seems that this recipe has been blazing through circles of seitan enthusiasts online.  I’m not vegan, but I love seitan.  The stuff is a little bit like tofu  – gluten, the proteinaceous part of wheat, molded and formed into chewy deliciousness.  It’s also hideously expensive.

Vital wheat gluten is not so cheap either ($2.50 for the 1 and a half cup it took to make this recipe), but it was still worth trying.  So, without further ado,

THE SEITAN RECIPE O GREATNESS

  • 1.5 c. vital wheat gluten
  • 1/4 c. nutritional yeast (Not sure what nutritional yeast is, actually.  I used 1/8 c. of baker’s yeast instead.)
  • 1 tsp. salt
  • 2 tsp. paprika
  • 1/4 tsp. cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp. cumin
  • 1/2 tsp. pepper
  • 1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper
  • 1/8 tsp. allspice
  • 3/4 c. cold water
  • 4 tbsp. tomato paste
  • 1 tbsp. ketchup
  • 2 tbsp. olive oil
  • 2 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce or soy sauce
  • 1-3 cloves garlic, crushed (Naturally, I opted to use 3.)

Assembly could not be simpler.  Preheat oven to 325º.  Mix together all the dry ingredients in one bowl and all the wet ingredients in another.  Then add the wet ingredients to the dry, stir it, then knead the heck out of the dough.  Form it into a log, wrap it in foil, then bake it for 90 minutes.  Let it cool down completely before you do anything with it.

Chewy, salty, savory, and great.  My seitan popped its foil wrapper, though, so it ended up looking like a turd in the oven.  Wrap it up in extra foil?  Or is it because I used baker’s yeast?

Wheat gluten, the hard-to-find main ingredient.

O Greatness?

The final product. Check out that texture!

Stuffed Zucchini

“Oh, no, I have too many zucchini!  Whatever shall I do?”

Answer: stuff ’em!

To stuff two large zucchini, start by simmering one heaping cup of barley until soft.

While that’s going, slice your zucchini in half the long way and scoop out the insides with a spoon.

Throw all the zucchini guts into a large bowl.  Add diced bell peppers, spinach, sausage (walnuts instead would also work well), and the barley.  Toss with salt, Italian seasoning, and olive oil.  Now you’re ready to moosh all that back into your hollowed-out zucchini.

Put onto a foil-lined baking pan and top with Parmesan.  Bake at 375º for about half an hour, and voilá, stuffed zucchini!

Lesson learned: taking photos of what you’re cooking while you’re trying to cook is really hard.  Perhaps I’ll leave this to the experts.

Sweet Baked Tofu Stir Fry

Argh, I keep forgetting to take photos for these recipes.  I was all set to take photos for this one, and then kittens happened.

  • 2 tbsp. honey
  • 3 tbsp. soy sauce
  • dash of sesame oil
  • 1 package extra-firm tofu
  • 2 bell peppers
  • snow peas
  • 1/3 cabbage
  • 1 12-oz package soba noodles
  • 1/2 jar of salad olives

Baking tofu is a new technique to me.  The interesting thing about it is that it turns the tofu into an entirely different dish.  It gets chewy, a texture kind of reminiscent of oysters.  Anyway, the trick to baking tofu is to remove as much moisture from the tofu as possible.  Drain the tofu and cut it into long, thin strips with a knife (see?  Here’s where a photo would have been helpful.)  Block the heck out of them with a towel.  You might want to wrap them up in the towel, put a plate with a weight on it on top, and leave them there for a while.

Put the thoroughly blotted tofu strips onto a foil-lined baking pan.  Mixed together the soy sauce, honey, and oil, and sprinkle it on top.  Stir them around a bit to make sure they’re coated.  Or coat them with whatever sauce floats your boat – tofu will take on the flavor of whatever is around it.  Bake in the oven at 350º for 15 minutes, stir, then bake another 15 minutes.  Once the soy sauce becomes a gooey, chewy coating like road tar, you’ll see why you foil-lined the pan.

The rest of the recipe goes together like a regular stir fry.  Chop the peppers into long, thin strips and sauté on high heat along with the snow peas.  Chop the cabbage into long strips.  Once the peppers and peas are softened up a bit, throw in the cabbage.  Then throw in the soba noodles, olives, and baked tofu strips.  Fry that all up until it’s as brown as you like it.

Sweet and salty – great combination!