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.