chocolate chip shortbread (finally!)

I've been screwing around with shortbread recipes for some time now, and I just haven't had any luck getting the results I've been after. Recently I found this blog entry and I knew that this was the recipe for me. Which began my quest to find caster sugar. I went everywhere, which is to say all four grocery stores we have here, and I came up totally blank. Eventually I was pointed to superfine sugar, at which point I Googled it and realized "caster sugar" is just British for "superfine sugar." Blargh;alrkgj.

Anyway, the making of this recipe also involved learning a neat new trick. I had the butter out on the counter for an hour or so and it was still pretty firm because, well, Potsdam, winter, old apartment: It's cold in here. So I figured someone on the Internet must have figured something out beyond microwaving it and getting little pockets of melty bits in between chunks that are still solid. And lo: Someone has. You know, I remember life before Google and I still don't know how we ever got anything done back then.

Also, don't measure your almond extract over the mixing bowl unless you have a very steady hand or enjoy your cookies smelling like they've been soaking in Amaretto. Whoops.

A word on bake times: Use your judgement. The original recipe called for 15-17 minutes, I wound up doing more like 22. The final bake step is essential, in my opinion, as it substantially improved the quality of the end product.

One final note, that has just now occurred to me: I was doubling this recipe and I'm quite sure I forgot to double the quantity of chocolate chips. But these are pretty chip-heavy. I really wouldn't enjoy having twice as many chips. As always, your mileage may vary.

Anyway.
awesome chocolate chip shortbread cookies
2 sticks butter, softened
2/3 cup superfine sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
~1/4 tsp almond extract (optional)
2 cups flour
"3/4 cup" mini chocolate chips (see note above!)

Cream butter & sugar extensively. Add extracts. Add flour, beat on low, stop when flour has just become incorporated. Stir in chips.
Transfer dough to gallon storage bag. Roll dough inside bag until it is 1/4 inch thick. You'll want to make sure the height is as uniform as possible; it really will make a difference in cooking time. Oddly, this step is kind of fun. Maybe it's an OCD thing.
Put the entire flattened mass, still in the bag, in the fridge to chill for at least two hours.
Once it's done, preheat the oven to 325°. Cut the bag off, put the dough on a cutting board, and use a pizza cutter to chop it into squares. Put them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment or the like, bake for ~20 minutes (see note above). Rotate them halfway through (top rack to bottom, front to back) for even cooking. Note that top of cookie will stay very pale throughout baking process, and cookies will likely be slightly flexible even when actually completely cooked. You just really have to guess. Sorry.
Put the cookies on trays, let them cool thoroughly. Put them back on the cookie sheets, "top" side down, then put them back in the oven for another 3-odd minutes. Cool and enjoy.

red lentil soup

Since the other recipe from my Canadian pen-pal was such a success, I decided to give the other a whirl. I fudged this recipe a bit more than usual, largely because I had to go to three different stores to get everything I needed, but oh my yes, do I like the results. Actually, I have two comments on the results:
1. It becomes exponentially better when served over jasmine rice. This might just be my texture preferences, though--I don't think I'm cut out to be a vegetarian.
2. On a related note, I kept thinking this really needed chicken, and I wasn't sure why until I realized I'm pretty sure I've stumbled upon the recipe Cedars uses for their butter chicken. I could be wrong--it's been ten years--but if I had hair on the back of my neck, it would be standing up. I think this is really it. Further experimentation will occur with great haste, I assure you.

Without further ado:
red lentil soup
3 tbsp butter
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 carrot, chopped fine
1 tbsp curry powder (I strongly recommend Auntie Arwen's Whirling Dervish)
1 tbsp fresh ginger, chopped fine (or grated! I need to get a ginger grater)
4 cups vegetable broth (I used some organic mushroom broth, it was awesome)
~6 oz coconut milk
~5 oz tomato paste
1 cup red lentils (dry)

In your soup pot, melt butter, sauté onion, garlic, and carrot.
Add the curry powder, let it work its magic.
Inhale deeply. It smells delightful. Seriously. Enjoy it.
Add ginger, broth, coconut milk, tomato paste. Bring to boil.
Add lentils. Cover & simmer for 20 minutes.
As noted above, I recommend serving over rice, but your mileage may vary.

buckeyes and a chemistry lesson

'Tis the season, by which I mean the end of Fall semester, and consequently time for ritual bribery. Which is to say I make baked goods and take them to various departments on campus, partly in thanks for all the help I've received, and partly in thanks for all the help I'll no doubt need in the future. Plus, for all my (considerable) cynicism, I really do enjoy baking for large quantities of people, and it pleases me to hear from a few dozen people how much they loved whatever I made that year.

At any rate, this year I decided cookies were passé, and I was going to make candy. Mostly because I wanted an excuse to make buckeyes. So I started with this recipe, doubled it, and then kind of made it up as I went along. I agonized over my peanut butter choices for a while, because I had this strange urge to use the all-natural kind. (The hippiness of this town is getting to me, I think.) I came to my senses while staring at the shelves, though: This is candy. It's not supposed to be healthy. So I bought a giant tub of Peter Pan. Your mileage may vary.

Also, you'll note below that I tell you to use Rice Krispies or their ilk. I can't give you a measurement because I just kind of poured them in until I liked how it looked. Also, I had significantly less left in the box than I thought I did. So I supplemented with Cocoa Pebbles. Don't judge me! The result is awesome.

Anyway, while doing the chocolate dip, I encountered a weird issue. I don't have a double boiler, so I was using a medium saucepan floating in a giant pot. This works fine in the short term, but as it turns out, it isn't good for extended dipping. Let me explain: As I got in to the second cookie sheet of buckeyes, I noticed that the chocolate was getting oddly gritty. Not unpleasant, but it was solidifying in little chunks in the pan. So I idly wondered how to thin it out. I didn't want to add more shortening because that just seemed excessive, and I flashed back to my family's cake. "Well," I thought, "if I mix chocolate in with water there ... let's try it!" So I splashed just a tiny little bit of water into the chocolate.

Whoops. Chemistry fail. So the chocolate immediately seized, and I went a-Googlin', only to find that I'd done something pretty stupid. No big deal, but lesson learned, certainly.

Once I made a new batch to dip the rest, I had a fair amount left over, so I mixed in a half-bag of butterscotch chips that I keep around for pancakes, and then poured in a bunch of Rice Chex. The result is messy but tasty.

Oh! And seriously! Parchment paper is the most awesome thing for cooking ever! I cannot believe I've been living without this for years! Why wasn't I told?!

Anyway, on to the recipe:
Candy center
1 stick softened butter
~20 oz creamy peanut butter
1 tsp. vanilla
~1 lb. confectioners' sugar
1-2 cups? of Rice Krispies or the like

Cream butter, peanut butter, and vanilla.
Add sugar until you like the consistency.
Add some sort of crisp rice cereal until you like the looks of that, too.
Roll into 1/2 inch balls, place on cookie tray lined with parchment paper. I say 1/2 inch because I always wind up making things bigger than I mean to and these work way better when they're roughly bite-sized.
Chill. My fridge is weird but they were in overnight and that seemed to work fine.

Candy coating
2 cups (1 pkg) semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 tbsp shortening

Mix in double boiler. Insert toothpick into peanut butter ball. Dip, cover about 3/4 of candy. Put back on tray. Put back in fridge. Enjoy.

two day pound cake

I found this recipe on 17 and Baking some time ago, and I set it aside because I knew a cake would never survive untouched for two whole days in my house. We had a party last weekend, though, and I was called upon to make a non-chocolate cake option, and since my better half was out of town, I figured I'd go for it and hide it in my closet.

I've been asked to post the recipe, so I am doing so. Everyone who tried this cake raved about it ... except for me. It really didn't do anything for me. It's not like I don't enjoy a good plain pound cake, either, so I have no idea what my problem is. So I post this without my own endorsement, but with the recommendation of a half-dozen people who worship at the altar that is this cake. Your mileage may vary.

Buttermilk pound cake
1 1/2 cups room temperature butter
3 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 1/2 cups granulated sugar
4 large eggs, room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup cultured buttermilk (or 1 tablespoon lemon juice then fill to 1 cup w/ milk)
1 lemon worth of juice (if you're lazy like me it's 2-3 tablespoons of the bottled stuff)

Preheat oven to 300°. Grease & flour bundt pan.

Sift together flour, salt, baking soda. Cream butter, adding sugar slowly. Add one egg at a time, mix thoroughly after each. Add vanilla. Add flour & milk in alternating parts, mixing thoroughly after each. Stir in lemon juice.

Bake 75-90 minutes. Cool 20 minutes in pan, then on rack. Put in cake carrier or equivalent, then hide cake away for about 48 hours. Serve.

my family's cake

I've been meaning to post this recipe for ages now. The story of its origin gets a little blurry, but my understanding is that my great-grandmother came up with this during the Depression as a way of not wasting spoiled milk. It seems a little strange to make an entire cake to avoid throwing out a little milk, but it's also the kind of crazy "logic" my family has been known to practice.

At any rate, this makes an excellent cake. It's a very mild flavor, with a dense texture. The only problem is I can't get the damn thing to come out solid enough--assuming I can get the cake out of the pan without it tearing in half, it often crumbles while I'm frosting it, and I make the frosting nice & fluffy just to avoid that. So I don't know. Any advice would be welcome.

I've also included my favorite frosting recipe, which is incredibly simple, but I love the outcome. You may remember it from the chai frosting experiments of yore. It came from here originally.

Depression-era sour milk cake
1 cup boiling water
2 squares bitter chocolate
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup shortening
2 cups sugar
2 eggs (separated, but you do use both parts)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup sour milk (if not available, use 1 tablespoon vinegar & fill to 1 cup w/ milk)
1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Stir chocolate into boiling water until dissolved, set aside.
Combine flour, salt, baking powder - set aside.
Cream shortening, sugar, egg yolks, and vanilla.
Add dry ingredients and sour milk in alternating parts.
Add baking soda to chocolate (must wait until cooled), stir.
Blend chocolate in to batter.
Beat egg whites, fold in to batter.
Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes, two round cake pans.

Buttercream frosting
1 lb. confectioners' sugar
1/2 c. butter, softened
1 tsp. vanilla extract
3 tbsp. milk

Combine. Add more milk until you're happy with the outcome.

ginger maple chicken

A while back I got an email chain letter that proposed a recipe exchange. I thought this was pretty awesome, and it became pretty much the first email chain letter that I passed along. Very few others thought it was awesome, sadly, but I did get this excellent recipe from a Canadian pen-pal (are they still pen-pals if there's no pens involved?). I finally got around to make it last weekend and I was absolutely delighted by the results.

- 2 garlic cloves, chopped
- 2 teaspoons of fresh ginger, grated
- 2 tablespoons of cider vinegar
- 2 tablespoons of soya sauce
- 1/2 cup of maple syrup
- 1/3 of flour
- 1 1/4 lb of chicken breasts
- 2 teaspoons of oil (I use olive oil, but whichever I guess)

1. Put the oven on - 325 F
2. Cut the chicken in pieces and cover them in flour.
3. In a pan, add the oil and cook the chicken pieces for 5 minutes (or until they're golden on all sides).
4. In a bowl, mix the maple syrup, cider vinegar, soya sauce, ginger, garlic, and pepper.
5. Pour the sauce on the chicken and cook in the oven for 5-10 minutes.

Edited 11/13/2010: I can now recommend using almond. I crushed some up and put it in the skillet with the raw chicken and it added a nice texture to the end result. Also, this combination of cider vinegar/soy sauce/maple syrup went very well in a chicken soup that I made a few days later.

the good lord's own cookies

Once upon a time, I went to a Methodist Sunday school in a very small town in Maryland. One of my teachers had a cookie recipe that she would bust out when we were leaning about a specific part of the Bible. The cookies are light, fluffy, whitish in color, kind of springy-textured, and sweet. These cookies, she told us, were manna cookies. That's right. The food God threw down for people to eat. God's own dessert food. For real.

So if these cookies have another name, I do not know it. I will say that they are very tasty. A friend of mine tested the first batch and said, "They're nice and sweet and then there's this aftertaste that makes me want to hug my grandmother. Your cookies make me want to hug my grandmother." To be honest, I'm not quite sure what that means. But I'm taking it as a compliment.

The only down side to these cookies, which I always forget until it's too late, is that they're going to stick to each other. If you're packing them, put something between them (wax paper would probably work just fine). Otherwise, they're easy to make and don't disappoint.

Maryland Methodist Manna Cookies
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
2 cups flour

Preheat oven to 400. Cream butter, adding sugar gradually. Add eggs and beat thoroughly. Add honey, salt, and vanilla.

In a different bowl, combine baking powder and flour; add to butter mixture. Drop by half teaspoonfuls onto buttered cookie sheet.

Bake at 400 degrees for 5-6 minutes. Watch very closely. They don't really brown, per se; you just have to wing it. Cool on wire rack. Makes 6 dozen.

seco de pollo (adventures with cilantro)

In response to my recent announcement that I did not like cilantro and was sick of getting mountains of it every week from my CSA, a friend suggested I try to find some Peruvian stew recipes dealing with it and see how I felt afterwards. So I found this one and decided to give it a try. My version:

Strawberry Cream Cheese Pie

Hey, remember last year when I promised you a second pie recipe? Neither do I.

This recipe is from my friend Meg, who in turn got it from her mother. It's a once-a-summer sort of thing for me, and it is absolutely delightful; the version here has a few minor tweaks built in but of course I encourage you to experiment if that's your thing. Regardless, this pie is supremely tasty.


Glaze:
1 cup sliced strawberries
1/2 cup sugar
dash of salt
2x 1/4 cup water
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Blend strawberries until smooth. If you go a little over a cup it's not a bad thing. Put strawberry goo in medium saucepan, add 1/2 cup sugar, salt, and 1/4 cup water. (Personally I put it and a dash more in the blender, swished it around, and got every drop of strawberry I could in to the pan, but I'm a bit obsessive.) Put the cornstarch in a small dish, prepare 1/4 cup water, set both aside. Also prepare two tablespoons lemon juice; set this aside as well.

Stirring constantly, bring contents of saucepan to a boil over medium heat. Cook (still stirring) three minutes. Remove from heat. Combine water and cornstarch, mix well, add to saucepan. Put back on heat, cook two minutes (still stirring). It will thicken as you cook and it will be pretty obvious when it's done. Stir in lemon juice, set aside to cool.

Filling:
3 cups strawberries
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon orange zest
2 tablespoons orange juice
1 8oz package of cream cheese
2 tablespoons cream/milk
1/2 teaspoon of almond extract
9 inch baked pie shell (Graham cracker crumb-style)
glaze (see above)

Put the pie shell in the fridge. Wash the berries, cut off the stem (I recommend a nice flat surface), set them on a towel to dry. Combine cream cheese, sugar, orange juice, orange zest, cream/milk, and almond extract. Beat until light and fluffy. Spread evenly into cooled pie shell. Arrange the strawberries, cut side down, over cream cheese mixture. Try to cram as many on there as possible. Pour the cooled glaze over the berries; you're shooting for an even coating here. Refrigerate until chilled, 3+ hours, and enjoy.

Notes:
At first I was iffy on the orange zest. The recipe calls for grated orange peel, which is what I thought zest was, but I don't have a grater and I keep forgetting to buy one, so I checked online and found this guide that told me to just chop it super fine. I did, and then thought it was a terrible idea, but I put it in anyway and I was very pleased with the result. Also, I squeeze the juice out of the same orange, which is probably your best bet for good juice. If you have a juicer, use it, because I made a mess, but no matter. You can, according to this recipe, just leave the orange out entirely, but I like what it adds to the pie. Plus, you have most of a nice tasty orange to eat after you make the pie! Win-win.

A note also on the strawberries: Using mostly-whole berries on the pie makes it a little awkward to eat. It tends to fall apart. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, if you want a more unified pie, you can slice them and pile them up; I did that the first time I made it. This lets you fit a lot more strawberries on the pie if you so desire, but it leads to a somewhat damper experience. Basically it comes to the quality of the berries. Last May they were so-so, so I liked each forkful to have berry and cheese and crust. The ones I used today are glorious, so they're excellent once they've fallen off the pie and they have just a hint of the glaze on them.

Lastly, as to crust: I used a shortbread crust that was sitting on the store shelf right next to the graham cracker crusts, and I found it to be the far superior choice for this pie.

zucchini bread

Thanks to a running gag that a friend of mine has been working for a while, I've been really craving some zucchini bread. (I'd explain, but you really had to be there. The point is it came up in conversation a lot.) I've started getting some zucchini from my CSA, so I decided that now was the time.

Sadly, once I actually set out to make the stuff, it became a comedy of under-preparation. The good news is that the final product is quite tasty, so I'm calling it a win.

my friend's mom's breadsticks

When I was very young indeed, my best friend's mother had this recipe for breadsticks that were like none I'd tasted before. Instead of being puffy and soft, these were flat and crunchy, tasting heavily of butter. My mother acquired the recipe, and eventually I acquired it from her, and now I am sharing it with you.

These breadsticks are kind of an acquired taste. If Olive Garden breadsticks are perfect in your mind, you probably won't enjoy these. But, you know. Crunchy. Buttery. If that suits, I recommend them. Plus they're super easy.

2 1/4 cup flour
1 tablespoon sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk (soy works fine)
~1/3 cup butter, melted

Preheat oven to 400. Grease two cookie sheets.
Sift dry ingredients together. Add milk to mixture. If necessary add more in small amounts to soak up excess flour.
Turn out on well-floured surface (dough will be sticky). Knead 10-20 times. Roll out as flat as possible, slice into thin strips. Arrange on cookie tray; brush with melted butter.
Bake @ 400 for 8-10 minutes or until golden brown. If yours are too tall, they may only crisp on one side; after cooking I sometimes turn off the oven, flip the sticks over, and put them back in for a few minutes.

So, blam. The whole thing takes twenty minutes if you do it right. Serve with marinara, ranch, or whatever else you like your breadsticks in, and enjoy.

baked ice cream cake

So, I found my way to this entry on Omnomicon recently, discussing a method of making cake with a box of mix, three eggs, a cup of water, and two cups of ice cream. I found this very intriguing, and I decided to try it. It's goofily easy, as you would imagine--combine ingredients, 350 for 45 in a bundt pan, enjoy.

And oh. My. Yes.

The final product reminds me of a cakey pudding, or perhaps a puddingy sort of cake. It also kind of reminds me of jellied cranberry sauce, only chocolate and bready instead of ... cranberry and ... the metaphor breaks down, but seeing the partitioned ring of cake quiver when I slice in to it really sells it.

We did a chocolate fudge mix with "Forbidden Chocolate" flavor ice cream, and the result is a damn fine bit of chocolate. We also bought some nice light strawberry frosting, but frankly it doesn't need to be frosted. Next time I'm going to try a chocolate cake with a mint chocolate chip ice cream; Silver wants to try Butterfinger.

So. Healthy? No. Classy? Not really. Delicious? Oh yes. Oh my, yes.

Click through to the original for some excellently illustrative pictures as well as a very well-written food blog. You know. If you're in to that sort of thing.

checkerboard cookies

A few weeks ago I encountered a post on 17 and Baking about checkerboard cookies, and they looked like a fun and complex project, ideal for breaking in my new kitchen. On a side note, if you're not reading 17 and Baking, you should be--the author is a young writer who (as you might guess) loves to bake. Her posts are introspective and well-written, and the recipes are always quality.

You'll note from my picture that my own product isn't quite as well put together as the examples on the original post, but I'm not going to pretend to be particularly ashamed of that--these are some excellent cookies I have created, and while there is a lack of right angles, the presentation is still pretty cute (and not too shabby for a first attempt if I do say so myself).

Also, I learned something interesting in the course of making this recipe. Specifically, I learned about room temperature eggs. Seriously, I have been baking for [mumble] years, and I even took cooking classes in my youth, yet no one ever bothered to tell me about the room temperature egg thing. What's that about?

At any rate, the dough recipe is fairly basic, and will have healthy eaters cringing right away. It goes like this:

5 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 lb (2 cups or 4 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 cups granulated sugar
1 tbsp pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

Combine flour, baking powder, and salt. Recipe calls for sifting; people tell me you don't have to do that anymore but I do it anyway because it's fun. In another bowl, cream the butter and sugar thoroughly, add eggs one at a time, then vanilla. Add the flour all at once and mix lightly with the beater then continue by hand--you don't want to overmix this, but fortunately it will be really obvious when you're done if you're paying attention.

From here, it gets complicated. First, you want to split the dough in half. As per the recommendation, I weighed my dough. If I had been smart, I would have checked the weight of the bowl it was in so I could just remove the appropriate amount of the final product, but instead I had to do a complicated back and forth sort of thing. Once you're done, knead the cocoa into one half. Split each half into halves again, then shape them in a roughly rectangular fashion, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate for two hours.

At this point, you take one of each flavor out and let them warm up. It took a while for mine to be workable; I don't know if that's a feature of my fridge or if the original 15 minute estimate was just really optimistic. At any rate, you want to roll it out into a rectangle that's about 12 by 5 inches, then cut nine half-inch strips.

Now, I do want to take one moment here, because something about that math tripped me up. It should be pretty obvious: 9 x 1/2 = 4 1/2, not 5. This worked out for me because my dough was a little uneven, so the trimming from one side fleshed out the other side. But if you're neurotic and have a ruler (ok, I had a ruler, it was just a sloppy result), you'll wind up with a full extra half inch strip. This is even funnier if you look at my source's source, who went to the trouble of making a diagram showing nine half inch strips turning into a five inch sheet. So ... yeah.

Anyway. Once you have your strips, you make two checkerboard patterns, which you can probably figure out by looking at the cookies above. Carefully squish it together, do your best to define the corners, then wrap those up and put them back in the fridge for another two hours. Then you take the other, not-yet-molested chunks of dough, warm them, roll them out nice and thin, and wrap them around the checkerboard patterns, using the opposite color to the four corners of the one you're wrapping. This is where it starts to get really sloppy. If you're going for a professional presentation, you might consider some sort of weight setup to flatten the sides. Personally I didn't care this time out.

Refrigerate overnight, then slice with a sharp knife and cook at 350° for 12 minutes. I have a nice stove, which temps quite accurately, and 12 minutes is exactly what I needed for each batch, but of course your mileage will vary. Make sure you refrigerate the dough in between batches, because (1) it will get harder to cut when it's warm and (2) screw up your cooking time.

The end result is delightfully tasty, and fairly impressive to look at. Obviously the presentation is the whole point here, so I would recommend just slopping it together, but unless you're actively trying to impress a tough crowd, even lopsided ones look pretty nice for a randomly-thrown-together sort of cookie project.

steak & asparagus

I tried two new things tonight. First, I used a steak-preparation idea that I read about on Jaden's Steamy Kitchen some time ago that is purported to turn cheap steak into great steak. You should check her post for the scientific explanation, but basically you use salt to lock in flavor and moisture and such. I would love to tell you that I bought cheap steak as a purely scientific endeavor, but I'm a college student, so we both know that's a lie. The point is, I had cheap steak. I did indeed coat it in garlic, rosemary, and salt, and let it sit, then wash it and pat it dry, as recommended. The texture wasn't great--about like you'd expect from cheap steak--but the flavor was really good. I am looking forward to doing this again with a better cut in the near future.

The other is nowhere near as obscure, although I suppose it is equally science-y: I blanched my asparagus. It turns out that word doesn't mean what I thought it meant--I was under the impression that blanching was like when you toss some broccoli in boiling water for a minute and then pull it out because you want it crispy. Which isn't inaccurate, just incomplete. Apparently one also then has to plunge the vegetable into cold water, halting the cooking. So I boiled the asparagus for about 5 minutes, then put it in a pan full of cold water (into which I ran more, since it heated up very quickly) until the asparagus was just above room temperature. The result was fantastic--soft and fully cooked, but still with some resistance when you bite in. I am going to do this every time I make asparagus, seriously. I cannot recommend this enough.

YMMV, of course, but I was very pleased.

bigass cookies

I stumbled across a new (to me) recipe for chocolate chip cookies last night, and since there was talk of making cookies anyway, I decided to go for it. According to Cooking on the Side, this recipe originally came from a Land O Lakes butter box, so the butter content below should not surprise anyone.

I made this as it is here, and it was pretty good. The dough got really crumbly by the end; I had to squish it pretty hard to get it in to proper blobs for cooking, but the cookies came out well. Very bready, which is a good thing once you get used to it. I am probably going to cut it down to 4 cups of flour next time and see how it works, but for posterity, here is the original:

4 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups salted butter
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups firmly packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 (12-ounce) package (2 cups) semi-sweet chocolate chunks or chocolate chips

Heat oven to 375°F.

Combine flour, baking powder and baking soda in a medium bowl. Set aside.

Combine butter, sugar and brown sugar in a large bowl. Beat at medium speed, scraping the bowl often, until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla. Continue beating, scraping bowl often, until well mixed. Reduce speed to low. Beat, gradually adding flour mixture, until well mixed. Stir in chocolate chunks.

Drop dough by 1/4 cupfuls, 2 inches apart, onto ungreased cookie sheets (tip: line the sheets with parchment, if you have some). Bake for 10 to 14 minutes or until light golden brown. (Do not overbake.) Let stand 1 to 2 minutes. Remove from cookie sheets.

fakery

As some of you may recall, I've been trying out a variety of non-alcoholic beer since I quit drinking. I never really cared for O'doul's, although it's drinkable in a pinch, and most of the others are just pretty awful. I'm quite fond of Kaliber, but for some reason I can't get it in this part of the state, and so I've been mostly drinking St. Pauli NA, which is ... not my favorite. However, I discovered last night that Labatt - which previously offered only Nordic, which I did not like - now has a non-alcoholic Blue. I am pleased to note that this tastes exactly like I remember Blue tasting, although at this point God only knows how accurate that memory is. If any of you drinkers out there want to do a taste-test and let me know, I'd appreciate it, but until then, I've got something that'll get me through my time here in the frozen north, until I can move back to the civilized world (for values of the civilized world equal to "places where I can get Guinness products").

In other news, this article about making cheap steak taste really good is both extremely funny and something I need to try in the near future.