Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

When I make chocolate chip cookies, I usually aim for the crispier side of things, but these are nice and fluffy and still extremely enjoyable. The pumpkin is present more in the texture than in the flavor - I was able to guess the "secret ingredient" after eating one cookie, but they certainly aren't 'pumpkin-flavored' in any way.

This is the recipe as I received it from my co-worker, and I can vouch for the results, but I intent to fiddle with it some in the coming months - I'm not a huge fan of shortening, and I've recently learned that you can use coffee in the place of vanilla extract if you do it properly, so I may post some notes on variations later.

1 cup shortening
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 egg
1 cup pumpkin (I used canned, but whatever floats your boat)
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 pkg chocolate chips
1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Preheat to 350, cream shortening and sugar. Beat in egg, beat in pumpkin, beat in vanilla. Gradually mix in flour, then spices and powders, adding chips & nuts last. Bake 10-15 minutes - I went for 15 but it probably varies with your stove. It's really obvious when they're done, as they start to brown up around the edges.

Edited 11/13/2010: Somehow I forgot to put in the "add pumpkin" step the first time I posted this and it screws me up every time. So I fixed it.

old fashioned pancakes

We had a houseguest today, and I realized we had no breakfast meats available, so instead of the eggs & bacon I had planned, we wound up making pancakes. Rather than screwing around with experimental ingredients, I went digging for a plain "old fashioned" recipe, which I present here mostly for my own reference.

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon white sugar
1 1/4 cups milk
1 egg
3 tablespoons butter, melted

Sift together dry ingredients, mix in wet. Put on hot, oiled skillet 1/4 cup at a time.

Edited 11/13/2010: You know, when I first posted this I left out the mixing instructions because I figured they were so obvious they were unnecessary. Yet every time I refer back to this entry to make these pancakes, I wind up clicking through to the source recipe to make sure I'm doing it right. Apparently I'm just hardwire to recipe format. So I put the instructions in for my own reference, silly through they might be.

rice pizza

I saw this post about 'doughless pizza' a few weeks ago and I've been meaning to try it ever since. It was actually scheduled for this past Wednesday night, but for various reasons I just got around to doing it now. The essential process is to take some rice (I cooked 1 cup of jasmine, used about 3/4s of the pot), mix it with an egg, press it down, add toppings (sliced tomato and diced onion), and then spread some mozzarella cheese over the top and bake the results. For some reason I was thinking I'd be better off baking it at a low temperature to cook the tomato properly, but obviously that was dumb, and I wound up turning the oven way up at the end to crisp things properly, which kind of didn't work. Also I didn't really know what to add for seasoning, so I kind of wimped out. So on the whole it wasn't great - but it did taste like potential.

Next time - and quite possibly next week, because this was really easy to make - I'm going to do it again. This time I'm going to mix oregano and pressed garlic in with the rice and egg. I'm going to chop the tomato very fine so it will cook quickly, and on top of the mozzarella I'll add something with a little flavor, maybe a nice sharp cheddar or some Monterey Jack or maybe both, if I still have both in the fridge. Then I'm going to cook the whole lot at 400 for about 15 minutes and see if that doesn't come out a lot better.

In the mean time, what I do have is going in the wok tomorrow with some teriyaki and I bet the whole mess will come out pretty well.

Chicken "French"

Erin wanted to make Chicken French this weekend, but things happen, as they tend to do, and we wound up not cooking Friday or Saturday, and Sunday she had schoolwork to catch up on, so I decided to give it a try. When we went hunting for the ingredients last weekend, I found a half dozen somewhat complex recipes and one really simple one, which I used for an ingredient list, and then forgot to bookmark. Of course I was not able to find it again today. So I just did what I was probably going to wind up doing anyway - I read over the half dozen complex versions, figured out the basics, and just went with what made sense.

So I started with chicken breasts, sliced them in to strips, pounded the strips out, floured them, dipped them in egg, and fried them. The leftover egg (not much) went in to the pan as well. I grated some extra sharp cheddar on to the top because some of the recipes wanted me to use cheese - specifically parmesan, which I didn't have. This wound up being an empty gesture, I think, because I couldn't really taste it in the finished product, but no matter. Into a small dish I poured about a quarter cup of sherry and maybe a teaspoon of lemon juice - I wish I could be more exact but I was just kind of eyeballing it anyway - which I then spooned lightly over the chicken breasts after I had flipped them. A few minutes later, with half the dish remaining, I decided to flip them again and dump the rest in, and then added more lemon (maybe another teaspoon) more or less on a whim.

At this point I panicked, because I realized that like a total buffoon I had forgotten to prepare anything to go with the chicken! I started a pot to boil for green beans, and began wracking my brain for a starch. Fortunately we had some leftover jasmine rice in the fridge, which I wound up just tossing in the skillet with the chicken, and fiddling with the whole lot while the beans cooked. The end result was, I'm afraid, kind of an ugly mess.

Fortunately we're not much for ceremony around these parts, so we ate it anyway, and it turned out to be really quite tasty. Much of the sherry and lemon had cooked off, so the flavoring was very subtle, which on the whole I think I prefer. The only thing that displeased me was the consistency of the coating, which did not at any point in the cooking process match what I've gotten when I ordered the dish in a restaurant, but since my version was much lighter than what I normally see, that's probably a good thing. We liked it enough that we've declared it to be On The List, and we plan to make it with relative frequency.

Next time I want to try using slightly less sherry, and trying some rice vinegar with it. I might give in to the temptation to involve some minor amount of breadcrumbs in the breading process, but I don't know yet. Also I completely spaced on putting garlic in the pan, which I think would have been a nice touch.

mystery soup

So, once the chicken was picked clean and the meat all portioned out for its various purposes, I decided to boil the rest in to stock, as suggested by The Paupered Chef. In to the pot went everything that remained of the chicken, along with some raw bits I'd frozen after removing them from a batch of boneless skinless breasts a few week ago, and some miscellaneous veggie bits I'd stashed in the freezer (as per the comments on the post linked above). I wound up simmering it for the better part of four hours, then strained it as instructed, then like a dolt I put it straight in the freezer instead of giving it fridge time to separate properly. It still came out okay, although I suspect a lot fattier than it should have, but I wound up just using it as a basis for soup.

Now, in our freezer we had a bag of red meat, several months old, that we were unable to name. This is not as alarming as it sounds - Erin's family frequently comes by bulk meats, including several deer during hunting season and the occasional cow that they order (I'm not making this up), so we knew that it was edible, and we could see that it was not freezer burned. However, we had no idea what it was. So I decided the only thing to do was simply put it in a crock pot and hope for the best. This theory turned out to be fairly sound, especially when we realized that it had been sliced as stew meat already. So I floured it and browned it and tossed in in the crock pot with the usual assortment of celery, carrots, potato, chickpeas, bell pepper, green onions, sweet onion, and so forth. The stock went in as well, minus what fat had separated to the top, as did some rice vinegar and four cups of water.

So it turns out it was beef stew! Who knew? I like the way the chicken stock worked out, although the finished product does have a tendency to gel back up in the fridge. The flavors work well together. This is also my first successful beef stew.

It has occurred to me during this process that I don't actually know any other uses for chicken stock - does anyone have any suggestions?

chicken ... dumplings?

The leftover chicken is finally gone, although I haven't gotten around to using the stock yet. (More on that later.) After the pizza, I put together tacos, which were tasty but unexceptional, and tonight I made something that I don't have a good name for. See, I was going to make chicken purses, like I'd read about on yumsugar a while back, but I ran in to some basic problems with their recipe - I don't like ricotta, for one thing, and zesting a lemon always seems like a waste when I don't have anything else I really want to use a lemon for. So I opted to wing it for the filling, and wound up mixing together shredded chicken with a cup or so of CoJack, and then perusing my spice rack I wound up with garlic, onion, and mustard powders, plus black pepper. Then I added honey, because it seemed like the right thing to do.

I want to take a moment to address my frequent use of CoJack. For the record, it is not the only cheese I like. It is, however, my go-to cheese, and I keep forgetting to buy others. In case you were wondering. Which you weren't.

Anyway, I then spooned the filling onto the wonton wrappers, and promptly ran in to trouble - I don't know if I got the wrong size wrapper or what, but there was no way I could wrap them into the classic purse formation with anything resembling a reasonable amount of stuffing. So I wound up kind of folding them over, then flipping them and wrapping them into another, which didn't delight me but one does what one must eh wot, and so I wound up with little dumpling-shaped things. I boiled them til they floated as instructed, then wound up sauteing them for a bit in some butter - not the half a stick suggested in the recipe, because that's just too much butter, but enough to coat the pan. Because they wound up more or less flat along the bottom, and subsequently the top, I was only able to crisp the two large surfaces - a more circular formation would've cooked much more evenly when tossed.

Now, for all that these wound up very different from the original idea, they were very very tasty. I'm looking forward to trying again with different flavor combinations - I still haven't remembered to stock horseradish, which is all but criminal, and I have some ideas for a mixture that starts with rice vinegar as a foundation ... well, we'll see. We should be roasting a chicken again before too long.

chicken & onion pizza

Yesterday we had some really wonderfully good roast chicken for dinner. Of course, now we have heaps of leftover chicken that we have to find uses for. Tonight, I decided to try out yumsugar's chicken & onion pizza idea.

Of course, from there I had to find a recipe for pizza dough. I wound up settling on this one from Fabulous Foods, which I will document here for my own purposes: Pour 1 cup warm water in bowl. Add 2 tablespoons honey, 1/2 teaspoon salt, then mix. Add 1 packet yeast and mix. Wait 5 minutes. Add 1 cup flour & 1/4 cup olive oil, and (you guessed it) mix. Then add another 2 and 1/2 cups flour. At that point it should ball; add water or flour 1 tablespoon at a time until desired consistency is reached. Let rise 45 minutes, then punch. Let rise 60 to 90 minutes and use, or punch and let rise another 60 to 120 minutes depending on timing and patience. (I chose 90 minutes and then use this time.)

This dough was very tasty, and in fact we discussed that this is the recipe I should use if I want to make breadsticks or fried dough anytime soon. It comes out nice and fluffy with a good firm exterior. Due to prior bad experiences in this area, I was unwilling to try an untested dough recipe directly on the pizza stone the first time through, so I wound up using a large non-stick cookie sheet. This worked well enough, but it had the unfortunate side effect of not really browning the bottom of the crust in a way I would have liked - I will try that next time, since I know how it's going to behave.

Anyway, once the dough was ready and spread out over the sheet, I topped it with salsa, shredded leftover chicken, Cojack and onion. The recipe called for straight Monterey Jack, but I couldn't find it shredded and I was feeling lazy and besides Cojack is my go-to cheese anyway. It also wants one to sauté the onion before use as topping, probably to distinguish it from whatever onions one might find in the salsa, but I bought a nice big sweet onion and I wanted to taste it, so I didn't bother. It should be noted that I used a mild salsa because while I like spice, and pizza, I don't generally enjoy the two combined.

The end result in this case was very tasty. Between the fluffiness of the crust and the behavior of the salsa it could have been a little dryer, but I wouldn't say it was any soggier than your average extra-sauce pie. We did wind up dipping it in some spaghetti sauce we had in the cabinet, because we wanted a splash of tomato - next time I might just put some sliced tomato on under the cheese. All told an excellent use of leftover chicken, and one I definitely plan to use again.

chai frosting

Because moving always seems to involve people showering me with things from the back of their pantry that's about to expire, I am in possession of a few boxes of cake mix that are not long for this world. On a whim a few nights ago, I decided to make one, and combine it with a theory that we've had for a while. Essentially the theory is this - standard buttercream frosting can be flavored with cocoa during the creation period, so why not use instant chai?

So we did. The end result is not at all unpleasant, although I'm not sure I'd do it again. The flavor is more like the smell of the chai powder than the taste of actual chai. Although it did occur to me later that this results in a caffeinated cake, which may have a certain appeal. I recommend giving it a whirl if you're in to that sort of thing.

bootleg helper

So as we settle in to our new home and try to watch our food expenses and obsess about things like college grades, I'm inclined to remember my broke-ass days of yore, when I could barely manage to boil water and ate SpaghettiOs uncooked straight out of the can. Well, okay, I still do that, but the point is I don't think it's a meal.

Anyway, through the rose tinted glasses that let me view those memories without rupturing blood vessels, I fondly remember how Hamburger Helper would seem like a veritable home-cooked feast. I have no desire whatsoever to eat that filth, but when a recipe from the 'cheapcooking' Yahoo Group came across my inbox, I decided to try it. My end product differed greatly from what the recipe was intended to create, but it was still fairly tasty.

First, I sliced five strips of bacon into bite sized bits and sauteed them. When they were almost done I added chopped carrots, celery, onion, and tomato. This I cooked until the carrots were done, at which point I added ground turkey, and cooked until that was done, then added a lot of paprika, stirred thoroughly, then added ziti and filled the skillet with water. When the ziti was edible, I pronounced it done.

On the whole, it wasn't terrible. The original recipe called for "several inches of water", which would have required a dramatically different bit of cookware (oops!), and created something much more soup-like. This is also one of the rare circumstances where I should have used ground beef instead of turkey, because the flavor would have saturated much better. Still, I dubbed it 'Bootleg Helper'. On the whole it was reasonably food-like and highly nostalgic.

fried rice

We had some leftovers in the fridge, but not enough to make a full meal, and part of our new initiative (due mostly to being broke on account of that whole college thing) is to not waste any food at all. So tonight I decided to give this whole 'fried rice with leftovers' thing a whirl, and see how it came out. I started with some garlic that's getting on in age, and I threw in the chopped carrots right at the outset so they would cook through. Then in went half a can* of French cut green beans and some Vidalia, followed by the leftover teriyaki-marinated venison backstrap we grilled last night, and finally three scrambled eggs and of course the rice itself. The whole shebang got a liberal helping of both soy and teriyaki sauce, along with some powdered mustard seed I found mixed in to our spice rack from God knows when.

The result was not bad, although it needs work. It felt a little bland; we wound up adding ground black pepper to the finished product which rounded it out nicely. Next time I want to start with a nice chili oil or such to add some zest - what I really wish I'd had on hand was some sort of horseradish.

The rice itself could've cooked longer (but everything else was quite done) - I had assumed since it was still quite warm it could go in last, but maybe I'll put that in right after the uncooked ingredients next time. Also I didn't make it with the normal liberal splash of olive oil, because I assumed it would get plenty enough in the wok, and I think that might have been the wrong choice - I think the extra lubrication would've worked wonders.

Still, I found it acceptable, and Erin enjoyed it to the point where she claims to be looking forward to eating the remnants for lunch. (Leftover leftovers? The mind boggles.) It was also pretty easy. I could see this turning in to a regular thing in our household for leftover disposal.

* Yes, I know. Canned green beans are gross. And who the hell eats canned green beans in the middle of summer? My girlfriend, that's who. I don't understand it either.

eggs & links

I've been teaching myself about eggs lately. See, I don't like eggs, but I'm making it a goal to eat a real breakfast every day, with some source of protein instead of just a pile of carbs. And tempting though it may seem, I can't eat bacon nonstop. So I'm teaching myself to like eggs, and at the same time, how to cook them. So far I've mastered over hard, mostly by accident, and I've pulled off over easy, although it could use some work. I can't really seem to work up any enthusiasm for sunny side up yet, although in theory as I grow to like them (or at least get used to them) that will seem appealing - I did rather enjoy the egg yolk soaking in to the toast with the over easy eggs. I've also created some fairly decent scrambled eggs, which was surprisingly easy. I'm looking at omelets next, but any suggestions are welcome.

On an unrelated note, I rather whimsically searched Yahoo Groups for 'cooking' a few days ago, and I'm quite pleased with the results I've turned up. The format kind of lends itself to recipe sharing, and it's pretty neat to have such a random variety of ideas showing up in my inbox. I get my very own non-sucky kitchen in a matter of days, and I've already got a dozen things on the spike to try.

Speaking of other people's recipes, I've also added a blogroll. I suggest checking out the sites I've linked, and I'm always open to suggestions for sites (or email lists, as above) that I haven't seen.

Three Things

1) While defrosting some chicken this weekend, a bag that I thought I could trust turned out to have a leak, and while I was cheerfully watching Dr. Who, water was seeping in to the bag, resulting in some rather soggy chicken. I've had this happen in the past, and the result this has on the end product's texture is usually pretty gross, but since I was grilling it, I figured I might as well see what happened. I drained the bag, switched to another, finished defrosting, splashed in some teriyaki sauce, left it alone for 20 minutes, and then threw it on the grill. The end result was pretty good - a lot juicier than one would normally expect from chicken so thoroughly grilled, but quite tasty. I don't know if I would care to repeat the experiment, though.

2) Speaking of teriyaki: apples. Seriously. We made marinated kabobs a few weeks ago, which included apples basically on a whim, and the result was fantastic. Then I took what we didn't wind up grilling and threw it in a wok for a while, and that was also fantastic. I wonder if this would work for roasting?

3) I also had occasion to grill a zucchini that was fresh out of the garden (by which I mean we cut it off the plant, washed it, and threw it on the grill). I vented it, poured honey on it, and splashed some garlic on top of that, then wrapped the whole thing in foil. It was good, but I didn't count on just how thick the skin was going to be on this particular plant. Next time I'm going to slice it in half lengthwise, and put the seasoning inside, which will (a) saturate better, I hope, and (b) make it cook faster, which is not something I ever thought would be useful with zucchini, considering.

Blueberry "Pie"

My girlfriend's mother acquired blueberries in massive quantities recently, and determined that a pie should be made. Generally interested in trying new things, I offered to bake one, and dug out the America's Test Kitchen binder again. The recipe I used was as follows:

6 cups blueberries
~1 cup sugar
4 tablespoons instant tapioca
2.5 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon ginger
pinch of nutmeg
double pie crust
2 tablespoons butter

Now, first of all, it should be noted that cooking in my in-laws' kitchen is always an experiment in substitutions, because (1) things you think you have always turn out to be several years old and (2) the nearest store is kind of a haul, so you only want to make the trip once (and ideally not at all). So I used instant tapioca when I would have rather had potato starch, and the tapioca wasn't really the greatest quality nor particular easy to crush, which was a large factor in the end result. I also realized right as I came to need it that I had no lemon zest, so extra lemon juice was used, which probably didn't help. Lastly we couldn't find the allspice that everyone was quite sure we had, so I wound up faking it with ginger and hoping it worked out.

As it turned out, six cups of blueberries was way too much for a nine-inch pie. I would have been better served with five cups, perhaps even four and a half. Also, the tapioca didn't really dissolve all that well, giving the whole affair a somewhat grainy texture. And we made the mistake of serving the thing that night, instead of giving it time (and, ideally, chilling it). So what we wound up with was really more of a cobbler in a crust.

Now, the good news is the flavor was excellent, and once the half that we didn't get in to was allowed to chill, it more or less became pie-like. Still, I'm looking forward to trying it again with proper ingredients.

Pancake Experiment

Ah ha! I bet you thought I had forgotten all about this blog. Well, you were only partly right - the sad truth is I haven't really been cooking lately due to problems with my kitchen that I have no interest in getting in to here. But I've been doing some cooking at my in-laws' house, and there were a few items of note.

A few weeks ago, I had a craving for some well made pancakes. (I'm very particular about my pancakes, so most restaurants don't really meet my requirements.) Digging out the America's Test Kitchen binder, I wound up with this recipe:

1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup graham cracker crumbs
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
dash of salt
1 large egg
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
2 cups buttermilk

It should be noted that the recipe called for 1/2 teaspoon of salt, but like everything else, I tend to ignore that and just add a splash (more for luck than anything else). The beauty of this binder is that it always suggests substitutions - in this case, the graham cracker crumbs were listed in place of a cup of flour. The notes suggested I put 9 crackers (i.e. half a box, one of those little wrapped stacks) in a food processor and grind them into fine powder, which I did, and it also wanted 2 tablespoons of cornmeal for texture, which I left out, because I was using whole wheat flour instead of all purpose. The end result was very tasty, even though I butchered the first few by putting too much oil in the pan. (My kingdom for non-stick skillets!)

A few notes: if you have pancake rings, this would be a good time to use them. The batter pours out in a lump, like it's not going anywhere, but as soon as it melts it spreads out and can fill up the pan. If you like the flatter, limper pancakes that's fine, but with a recipe like this I think they work better when they're nice and tall. Also, next time I probably won't grind the graham crackers quite so fine - I think bigger chunks of crumb would have made for a nice crunchy result.

quickie curry

I went to a church sale recently and recovered a stack of cookbooks so tall I could barely carry them to the car. One of them, and perhaps the one that amuses me the most, is The Busy People's Cookbook, published in 1971. The premise is simple - you're busy, so these recipes all take less than 30 minutes. Many of them call for things like frozen vegetables, and call for them in quantities like 'one bag'.

Tacky though this may seem, I am a very busy person, and so I thought it might be useful to see if some of these produce anything resembling edible food. Accordingly, I've marked several recipes for experimentation, and last night I tried one called "Hurry Curry". I made a few changes to it, and here's the recipe I wound up with.

2 cups rice of choice
1 large chicken breast
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1/4 cup coconut milk
1 cup sour cream
1&1/2 teaspoons curry powder

Start the rice on one burner. Cube the chicken and fire it up in a small skillet with your choice of lubricant.

In a large skillet, melt the butter, then saute the onions and garlic. Add the soup and coconut milk (I added a bit more than 1/4 cup of the latter just because), stir thoroughly. Then add the sour cream and the curry. I used red curry for this, although to be fair I would have preferred yellow. (Sadly red was all I could find while shopping this weekend, and I was in a hurry.) Stir this mix until it's smooth.

Your chicken should by this time be fully cooked, and if it's floating in fluids or oil or whatever else is in the skillet, you should drain that off. Put the chicken in the main skillet and let it cook for a bit - don't let it boil, but heat it through, as they say. At this point you're probably done, but I wound up forgetting the rice until the last minute, so I kept it simmering for a good fifteen minutes longer than I felt was necessary, then continued to let it sit in the skillet for a while after. I think this was actually a good choice, because it tasted dramatically better after that than when I was first ready to declare it done - your mileage may vary.

I was a little dubious about this, to be honest - I'm not much for sour cream, and the coconut milk was complete improv on my part - but the results are pretty awesome. I will say that as looks go, it's not the most appetizing dish I've ever prepared, but some minor presentation with a vegetable counteracted that easily, and it was quite tasty both immediately and left over. The process took a while longer than the book promised, but I did my own chicken prep instead of buying pre-cooked giblets (being lazy but not that lazy). Still the whole thing took less than an hour, and I probably could have made it an even 30 if I'd rushed.

Welcome

Yeah, yeah, another damn cooking blog. To say nothing of another damn blog for me. There is method to my madness, however. I have a theory that no one really wants to read random cooking entries in a blog that's not devoted to same, and the people who do want to read them will be happy to read a blog devoted to just that. (I read a dozen or so myself, in fact.) So to avoid spamming people who read me other places with endless talk of kitchen mishaps, I figure I'll just put them here, and if nobody reads them, so be it.

And hey, maybe someone will read them. If you are that person, hi!