Milk & Cookies

Whoops, we didn’t get a chance to make cookies this week. Instead I thought I’d share an article I read about Michael Pollan’s new book, Food Rules. I like Michael Pollan, but be warned. I’m going to make fun of him a little.

First of all, I find it a little hilarious that his last book, In Defense of Food, had these three rules printed on the front cover: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I liked the minimalism. Food Rules contains 64 rules spread out over 70 pages. You know, because his intention was to make eating healthy simpler.

The rules themselves I pretty much agree with. Here are a few that I like:

Memories.

“Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” – Well, Michael Pollan never met my great grandmother but if he had, she would have offered him Planter’s Cheez Balls which she always had on hand for guests/great-grandchildren. Just because she was born in 1895 doesn’t mean she never embraced modern culture! She lived to be 101 and got her first cavity filled when she was 99. Sadly, Planter’s Cheez Balls have been discontinued. (And our country’s health is deteriorating! Coincidence? You can sign this petition if you’re concerned.)

“Eat all the junk food you want — as long as you cook it yourself” – I have to totally agree with this one. Most people are too lazy to bake very often, even if it means getting to sit on the couch with a whole batch of cookies and be even lazier afterwards. Case in point: We haven’t made cookies in more than a week! And we have a blog about it!

“Avoid foods you see advertised on television” – I mean, if you buy ANYTHING that’s heavily advertised, a lot of your money is going towards the advertising instead of the value of the product. It’s just even grosser to think about with food because after you buy the low value product you have to eat it.

I love heath bars. These cookies have been on my to-bake list for about 6 weeks and I just haven’t gotten around to them what with the holidays. My plan was to just try putting heath bar chunks into toll house cookies instead of chocolate chips and see what happened. When I saw my family over the holidays it turns out my aunt Sally already makes cookies just like that! (She also makes about 30 dozen cookies every Christmas so she’s an expert.)

Heath bars shed their skin once a year

So I went out and bought a 12 oz. bag of mini heath bars. This turned out to actually be much cheaper than buying several full-sized heath bars but I feel a little bad about all the excess packaging! Then I chopped each mini heath bar individually into 12 chunks. Now that I think about it, I probably could have used the food processor, but the chopping didn’t seem so bad with terrible reality TV going on in the background (The Bachelor: On the wings of love). This resulted in about 2 1/2 cups of heath bar chunks.

Then I followed the Toll House cookie recipe (the one on the yellow bag!):

• 2 1/4 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs
• 2 1/2 cups Heath bar chunks

This dough was really smooth. Since it's really not any different from regular cookie dough, I'm guessing it's because of the extra hour the butter had to soften while I chopped each Heath bar individually.

Preheat oven to 375 F. Combine dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, and salt). Cream butter and sugar in a separate bowl, then add vanilla and eggs and mix. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix. Finally, add the Heath bar chunks and mix.

Put spoonfuls of dough onto a baking sheet and bake 10 minutes.

From the top they look less appetizing because the Heath bar chunks don't "pop" like regular chocolate chips. From the bottom I think they look pretty cool.

Well, I really liked these cookies but I think I like regular chocolate chip cookies better. No offense to Heath, but I think the chocolate used on Heath bars is not as high quality as the usual Nestle semi-sweet morsels I use in choco chip cookies. On the other hand… TOFFEEEEEEEEE. Maybe next time I’ll go half choco chips, half Heath bar chunks!

This is what Christmas looks like in Not-California. Jealous? Oh yeah, and on New Year's we made a snow-woman.

Since I now  have some experience cooking/baking, this Christmas I forced some of my recipes upon my family, with mostly good results. Here are some of my favorite recipes, cookie and non-cookie, which ended up in my parents’ kitchen this Christmas.

Parsley soup

I made this one up myself. One of my favorite soups to make because it is easy and is good for leftovers. Turn on the fan or your entire house will smell like onions for days! This doesn’t seem like a Christmas day meal, but keep in mind it was vastly overshadowed by the fondue (hey, we needed some vegetables). If you’re not making fondue, it also goes great with any sort of cheesy bread.

• olive oil
• 1/2 red onion, chopped
• 2 tsp (or to taste) garlic, minced
• 1 tsp (or to taste) dried basil
• 1 tsp (or to taste) dried oregano
• 1 tsp (or to taste) red pepper flakes
• 1 28 oz. can diced tomatoes (with juice)
• 3 14 oz. cans vegetable broth
• 1 14 oz. can canneloni beans (without juice – rinse the beans off first!)
• 1/2 lb dry rotini
• 1/2 – 1 parsley, chopped finely

Start water boiling for the pasta. Cook the pasta until very al dente.

Meanwhile, saute the red onion until almost translucent. (There are different types of red onions but the type that I get are huge and shiny, magenta-red and they taste awesome when cooked. The type that is small, not shiny, and brownish-purple is not as good.) When the onion is almost done, add garlic, basil, oregano, and red pepper flakes. Cook the spices for a few minutes, making sure not to burn them. When done (usually when I am starting to fear burning spices) add the tomatoes and vegetable broth. Rinse the beans and add them. Simmer with a lid.

While the soup is simmering, chop the parsley which will go on top as a garnish. Drain the pasta. Add the pasta when you’re almost ready to eat. It will absorb the liquid so you don’t want to put it in too early. Serve with parsley on top and don’t be shy with the parsley! It is awesome.

Buttermilk pancakes

My mom got an electric griddle for Christmas so of course we had to make pancakes! I taught her this recipe. This one is an example of the power of the internet. I found it because it had 145 reviews on Recipezaar with an average of about 4.9 stars. Behold it here. I have always been super picky about pancakes and even thought I didn’t like pancakes for a while, except when I went to good pancake restaurants. It’s because they use buttermilk. I first went looking for this recipe when we had leftover buttermilk from the Red Velvet Black and White Cookies. So even this recipe comes to me thanks to cookies!

• 2 eggs
• 2 cups flour
• 2 Tbsp. sugar
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. salt
• 2 cups buttermilk
• 4 Tbsp. unsalted butter, melted
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
• vegetable oil to grease the pan
• maple syrup, for serving

Lightly grease your griddle. Set your electric griddle to 350 F (without the electric griddle I set my gas burner to medium low). Beat the eggs well. Add the buttermilk, melted butter, and vanilla and mix. Add the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt and mix until just blended (probably a good idea to mix all the dry ingredients before adding them to the wet ones). Ladle spoonfuls of batter onto the griddle. Flip after ~3 minutes or when the surface looks the correctly bubbly. If you’re not sure if they’re done, check to make sure the middle isn’t raw by sticking a knife into one of the pancakes and seeing if it oozes. Eat with maple syrup or even maple syrup and eggs!

Chocolate mint chip cookies

I have already posted two posts about these so I don’t need to expound more. But they’re really good, I made them for our extended-family Christmas celebration and they were well-received.

Chocolate chip muffins

My mom “accidentally” bought more chocolate chips than we needed for the cookies. Oops! So I made muffins.

Cookie cutting without cookie cutters

Along with rum balls, we made gingerbread cookies with icing! We used Paula Deen’s gingerbread recipe. The flavor was okay but not great, I thought it was too molasses-ey and not enough ginger-ey. Thusly, I won’t describe the cookie recipe in detail.

The fabulous part about these cookies was our total lack of cookie cutters, forcing us to use our own ingenuity to make cookie shapes. I think we did quite well. Here are some of our ideas:

• We used a snowman head-shaped measuring cup to make snowman head-shaped cookies!
• A champagne glass to make round (ball, ornament) shaped cookies
• For the rest, a knife – some good shapes were stars, christmas trees and probably the winner of the creativity contest, Johnny 5.

Assorted

Johnny 5, or as I sometimes call him due to my 80's-specific cultural ignorance, Jackson 5

Dry ingredients

For the past few years, my friends Sarah and Harley have had completely opposing winter schedules from Jason and I. They live on the east coast and this year flew to the west coast for Christmas. Meanwhile, we’re living on the west coast and flew to the east coast for Christmas. Various combinations of travel schedules have foiled Christmas hanging-out for the past few years. Fortunately this year we overlapped for a full day, which we spent making rum balls and gingerbread cookies, eating thai food, listening to Christmas music, and playing Apples to Apples. Fun!

Gosling's

There’s a special place in my heart for my own family’s Christmas traditions of course, but having spent a large part of my teenage years at Sarah’s house, there is a special place in my heart for her family’s traditions too. In particular, I have Christmasey memories of caroling parties and rum balls, my first experience with delicious yet alcoholic desserts.

This recipe comes from Sarah’s father, who recommends not driving after consuming a few of these.

All mixed together. It looks delicious in person but the camera is not too flattering.

Recipe:

• 2 cups of Vanilla wafers – crumbed real fine.
• 1 cup of walnuts if you like ‘em (we did!)
• 1 cup confectionary sugar (1.5 cups if you leave out the nuts – we didn’t)
• 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder (4 if you leave out the nuts or if you want a real chocolate flavor – okay… you know I want a real chocolate flavor)
• 2 tablespoons of corn syrup
• 1/2 cup of dark rum or brandy (we used Gosling’s dark rum)

Zoe and Sarah making batter into balls

The best thing about these cookies, according to Sarah, is that they are made out of other cookies! Here’s how you make them: In a food processor, process the Nilla wafers into fine crumbles. Then process the nuts. Add the confectioner’s sugar and cocoa powder. Add the corn syrup and rum and stir together until homogeneous. Finally, form the batter into balls and roll in confectioner’s sugar. Refrigerate overnight, then enjoy! We didn’t have time to refrigerate them overnight, but a couple hours seemed to be enough.

Then, don’t drive! Ride a reindeer instead!

Completed rum balls, and one of Santa's reindeer