Milk & Cookies

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.