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.

holy crap, quiche doesn't suck

I've never liked quiche. But then, I only just started liking eggs. About a week ago, I started craving quiche for no apparent reason. So I found this recipe. Of course I had to screw with it, so here's what I settled on.

4 eggs
2 cups half-and-half cream
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/8 teaspoon cumin
4 ounces shredded cheddar cheese
2 ounces shredded Swiss cheese
1/2 lb ground turkey
broccoli ("some")
onion ("a bit")
1 (9 inch) unbaked pie shell

Preheat to 425. Brown the meat. Saute the onion & broccoli. In a bowl, mix eggs, cream, spices, and cheeses. Add meat + veggies. Pour in to pie shell. Cook 15 minutes, reduce heat to 350, cook another 25 minutes. Filling should set.

This turned out to be really, really good. I plan to make it again soon.