The Chocolate Chip Country

My mom brought this recipe home, and I had to try it. Made these today and loved them, but keep milk or something similar on standby!

Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 to 1 tsp cayenne pepper (to taste)
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup (2 sticks) butter or margarine
1 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1/4 cup molasses
1/3 cup (or so) of Demerara sugar (also called "turbinado")

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We used a slightly generous 1/2 tsp of cayenne, and that was just enough heat for us. (I like jalapeno poppers and spicy chicken sandwiches, but not much more than that.) The other spices don't stand out very much, but they're a great back up choir to the pepper's lead. And I love the slight sparkle and crunch from the Demerara.

These wild cookies have capsaicin and protective scales, but this proves ineffective at deterring local predators. pic.twitter.com/jcRaP0Bf8o

— April Fool Raposa (@AlphaRaposa) April 30, 2016

For the holidays, I went hunting for a whole wheat, honey cookie with no refined sugar at all. I adapted a whole wheat, honey, chocolate chip recipe to remove the chips. I think they turned out delicious. Very soft, too. But huge.

Ingredients
3 Cups Whole Wheat Flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 sticks butter, softened
1 1/2 cups honey
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 1/2 - 2 cups chopped walnuts

PREPARATION
1. Sift together flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and all the spices.
2. Preheat oven to 325. Beat butter and honey with a mixer on medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Beat in eggs one at a time. Add vanilla. Reduce speed to low. Add flour mixture; beat until combined. Mix in nuts.
3. Drop dough by heaping tablespoon onto parchment lined baking sheets, spacing about 2 inches apart. Bake until golden around edges but soft in middle, about 13-15 minutes. Let cool for 5 minutes. Transfer cookies to a wire rack, and let cool completely.

Makes 20

Make Ahead
Dough can be refrigerated for up to 5 days. Cookies can be stored at room temperature for up to 3 days.

These make fragrant cookies with great aroma. The ginger is noticeable! They also have that lovely, warm honey taste.

This weekend, there were ripe bananas, and leftover peanut butter chips. So I made muffins.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 c whole wheat flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
1/2 c butter, melted
1/3 c maple syrup (the real thing, not the fake stuff)
2 very ripe bananas
about half a bag of Reese's peanut butter chips
some unsweetened flaked coconut

Oven at 350 degrees F. Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl. Beat the eggs, butter, and syrup in another. Mash the bananas and add to the wet ingredients. Poor the wet ingredients into the dry, mix, add chips. Sprinkle the coconut on top. Bake for about 20 minutes. Makes 12 nice, big muffins.

They are delicious muffins, full of peanut butter and banana goodness! And it allowed me to finally clear out some stuff that I needed to use up.

Been a while since my last cooking post!

This is a pasta technique I found that helps encourage the cubs to eat more veggies.

Ingredients:
12-16 oz pasta (you can use macaroni, but rigatoni or similar ridged pasta holds the "sauce" better)
Some broccoli - 2-3 large stalks, or 3-4 crowns
A few garlic cloves
cheese
olive oil
salt
water for boiling

Prep:
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When finished cooking, you have green pasta that tastes a lot like broccoli. You can't really call this broccoli disguised because of the taste, but the older werecub gobbles up the green, broccoli coated pasta and not any pieces of broccoli stem that survive the cooking. Maybe it's a texture thing.

Anyway, a good dish if you like broccoli but aren't wild about the texture. Or just like green pasta.

I tweeted about hash, and got some confusion. It's easy to forget that other people aren't familiar with your native cuisine!

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And that's hash. Tonight's hash was leeks, celery, bacon, potatoes, turnip, baked chicken, and eggs.

Christmas dessert this year was key limes all the way. I'm posting the recipe for the cheesecake below:

Key Lime Cheesecake (gluten-free recipe)

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This was my first time baking any cheesecake, and I was thrilled with how it came out! It's a little lighter and creamier than the standard cheesecake, but it carries the key lime flavor very well. The recipe makes about 12 modestly sized slices or 8 rather large ones.

The werecub is still working on those last two molars, so one of his favorite snacks is a wedge of frozen waffle to gnaw on. We ran out, so Tuesday I decided to make some more and use up some very ripe bananas along the way. We used this recipe: http://www.food.com/recipe/whole-wheat-banana-waffles-393187

They were good, if very floppy (they don't even freeze stiff). But we wanted more. So, I found a half a pint of unused whipping cream in the fridge. We whipped it with a tablespoon of "special dark" cocoa powder and some powdered sugar. We sliced more banana on top of the waffles and covered it all with the whipped cream.

Oh, my, such indulgence. We each ate one waffle that way and were full. So, now I have leftover whipped cream and ideas on how to use it. I think next time, we can make the whipped cream with xylitol instead of sugar and have something rich and sweet but even more healthy!

And I did have plenty of leftover waffles to freeze for the cub.

Last week, we stopped by the butcher at the farmer's market and picked up some marrow bones. I roasted them and we tried eating marrow on toast. Very tasty for one piece. Four pieces of toast with marrow is just too much.

After that, I took the bones, threw in some onion and a lot of water and some garlic and some vinegar into the crock pot. I cooked them for several hours, let them rest half a day, cooked again, let rest, and then took out everything and strained the liquid. Bone broth.

To that, I added beef broth (from the store) to bring it all up to somewhere between 4 and 5 cups of liquid. The hubby was kind enough to soak some barley for me while I was at work, so when I got home, I made stew.

1 cup lentils
1 cup barley (presoaked at least 4 hours)
1 teaspoon additional minced garlic
2 small cans of petite diced tomatoes (plain, no added spices)
3-4 cups of chopped kale
Salt, pepper, and oregano to taste.

I cooked the lentils and barley together in broth for 30 minutes. Added tomatoes (with juices from can), kale, and spices. Cooked it another 20 minutes until the kale was tender.

It's very thick and hearty, and sort of Christmas colored, with the blond barley and lentils mixed with red tomato pieces and dark green kale. I wish we'd had some bay leaves to add to the broth, and both the hubby and I agreed that it could use some meat, probably bacon or sausage. So, next time, I'll try adding those in. And there will definitely be a next time. It's healthy and we all liked the taste, including the werecub.

Warning: both the lentils and barley expand when cooked. This makes a LOT of stew.

We had some roasted red pepper strips on hand. I fried some bacon, and layered the pepper strips with the bacon and some mozzarella and a little mayo between two slices of bread. Grilled on the griddle until the cheese just started to droop.

It was very tasty. Definitely something to make again. :9 Maybe next time, I'll put it in the George Foreman grill to make a panini-like sandwich.

Next time, I will roast more peppers, though. I only had enough for two sandwiches.

So, I'm continuing to make freezer jam after my strawberry experiment. I made a batch of peach freezer jam that failed to set on the first try. I think the peaches were too ripe. So, some sugar and more pectin and boiling off some of the extra juice, and now I have firm, spreadable peach jam! With less than a cup of sugar in just over a quart. (2 pint jars plus tiny leftover in 1/2 pint jar.)

I commented on twitter that the amazing thing about homemade jam is how intense the flavor is. I'm not kidding about that. Since I'm using a low/no sugar pectin and adding very little sugar to the mix, the fruit tastes are not diluted by extra sugar or water. It's just FRUIT. Since I had to boil the peaches on the remake for about a minute to get rid of the extra liquid, it's been concentrated some. Not much, but it's a real wake up for somebody who's lived all her life eating the store-bought stuff.

So, cherries are showing up at the supermarket, and I bought some to turn into more jam. It's funny, but now that I've had the real thing, I don't want the sugar-filled jams and jellies from the store. I don't even want the spreadable fruit stuff. I want to have the stuff that I make, that I put on in a very thin layer because there's so much flavor in it.

Incidentally, peach jam tastes good in a sandwich with cream cheese. And now I'm looking for recipes that use jam as an ingredient. I can understand thumbprint cookies, now. When you have jam that's full of real flavor, you want to use it in stuff!