The only cookie recipe you will ever need

I really like cookies. This is a fact. At least once a month I will make a batch, bake up 1/4 of it and freeze the rest so we can have some in a time of cookie shortage. If I don't do this, I will eat all of the cookies. ALL of the cookies in the world. When I want cookies, I want them immediately and I want them to be delicious. 

This is a recipe I invented tonight on just such a cookie requiring occasion. I have been craving perfect oatmeal cookies for awhile now. I kept trying to make them with less sugar or vegan or whatever. Tonight, I said screw it, threw caution to the wind and made me some oatmeal cookies with healthy stuff in them that are in no way healthy. The original recipe can be found here this is my variation with bonus witty asides. Enjoy!

Ingredients

• 3 eggs, beaten

• 1 cup mixed fruit and nut mix (ours was cranberry, pumpkin seed, almond, sunflower seed and cashew)

• 1 teaspoon coconut extract (out of vanilla)

• 1 cup butter, softened

• 1 cup brown sugar

• 1 cup white sugar

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

• a dash of ground clove

• the zest and juice from two mandarin oranges

• 2 teaspoons baking soda

• 2 cups rolled oats

Directions

1. In a small bowl, combine the eggs, fruit and nut mix, and vanilla. Cover and chill for 1 hour (or 10 minutes if you are hungry and don’t really care about trivial things like directions) .
2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). You can also forget to do this, and shove the cookies into the un-preheated oven adding an extra five minutes to your timer and hoping for the best.
3. In a medium bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar, and white sugar orange juice and zest. If you are me, the zester was in the dishwasher so you simply scraped some skin off the oranges with a knife.
4. Pick the large chunks of skin out of the bowl, forget to turn the mixer off, shout “Fuck” again and again until you realize, you should probably turn the mixer off.
5. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, salt, cinnamon and baking soda; some would advise you measure the salt...I say, throw caution to the wind and just shake it a little, see what happens. Also, by combine i think they mean sift, I don’t sift, I fork. So fork together those things.
6. Add the forked mixture to the creamed mixture and stir until all of the things are one thing, do this gradually or else cover yourself in flour. Also, put the gaurd thingy on your mixer, or else cover yourself in flour. I am currently covered in flour.
7. . Next, stir in the egg and fruit and nut mixture, realize here that in the originaly recipe you found on allrecipes, the nuts weren’t supposed to be soaked in anything becuase they didn’t use a mix, just raisins and nuts separate. Hope to hell that doesn’t do anything wierd to them...then stir in the rolled oats. get covered in rolled oats.
8. Eat approximately ⅛ of the dough
9. Dough will be stiff. Drop by ice cream scoop fuls (it said teaspoons originally, but who are we kidding) onto an unprepared cookie sheet. That means not greased. But if yours look like mine ,that means black stuff on the bottom of them, so put some foil on the thing to protect them.
10. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes in the preheated oven, or 15-17 min in the non-preheated oven, until the edges are golden, or you can’t wait any more. Scald tongue repeatedly eating cookies before they cool. Shout, “I win at baking!” while writing a blog post about your superior cookies.
11. serve with beer and chocolate milk, because everything is better with beer and chocolate milk.

My Favorite Monster

Herman is amazing. Herman is my pet, Herman is my confidant, Herman is my constant companion...Herman is my sourdough starter.

My latest fascination is with fermentation. Over the last several weeks I have become obsessed with the idea of pickling, krauting, canning,kambutchaing, keifer...ing? I want to make stuff and I want it sour and I want it stewing in its own juices! This all really began with Herman.

About two months ago I ran across a recipe for a sweet sourdough stater whilst looking for bread recipes and I decided to give it a shot. I remembered my mom constantly trying to keep something she called "Herman" alive and eventually forgetting all about it in our pantry until one day she would throw it out with a look of disgust. Most people I asked about sourdough starters, including Mom told me not to bother, I would certainly forget about it and kill the thing before any tasty treats would be made. My mom however does not  have the obsession with "making shit happen" that I have. As soon as you tell me to forget something, it is pretty much a guarantee it will become my new passion.

If you have ever made a sourdough you know the basic recipe. Yeast, flour, water. Stir. Stir. Stir. Stir. Feed. Lather, Rinse, Repeat, culinary delights ensue.

I had never made a sourdough starter before. I picked the first recipe off the web and went to work. Research is NOT my thing.

The original recipe I had called for milk and sugar every 5th day. On the 15th day of the stir, stir, stir, stir feed, stir....cycle, I was super excited to make some breads  and get me some sour-dough in my face. We used a recipe from Instructables to make a no knead sourdough artisan bread. We made chowder to have it dipped in. The house smelled outstanding. We were ready for that first bite, I slathered it in butter, took in the aroma, put it in my mouth...It tasted like...nothing. Not even bread really. It had the right texture. The right chew. But it had nothing in the sourdough department or the yeasty bready department we were looking for.

Fail.

Never one to give up, I fled to the internets and searched for a reason. Turns out, most sourdough recipes do NOT call for sugar, nor milk. I was aghast. Perhaps READING the recipe, other than the instructions and ingredients may have prevented this...but who is to say really?

I started immediately eliminating the milk and sugar from Herman's feedings and instead adding only water and flour. The flour itself has enough sugar to keep the yeast going without any other help. I went back to my 4 days stir, 1 day feed schedule for 2 more weeks before attempting another experiment in Herman cooking. (so violent)

After 2 weeks, I found a recipe for sourdough pancakes that made my mouth absolutely water. Please see said recipe HERE. Warily, I approached Herman's jar. Upon opening the lid I saw that he had that fine layer of liquid on top the interwebs had said he would. He smelled like a miner from the 1800's and definitely evoked the feeling of fermentation I had been looking for.  We had a talk. We decided that sourdough pancakes were too cool to pass up. It was time he and I got down to business and started working WITH each other, and not against. We came to an accord. In the end, the pancakes were AMAZING. Sour, light, delicious. We top them with brown rice syrup or honey and we don't get that nasty carb hangover we always got from buttermilk cakes.

Over the last month Herman and I have been trying some new things. I have switched him to an entirely whole wheat diet. This seems to agree with his digestion more than the white bread flour I was using. He is always hoochy and bubbly. I also haven't divided him since like the second week I made him. I gave some to a couple of friends and then no one wanted the responsiblity of an edible pet monster so I haven't handed any out. Because I am pathologically incapable of throwing away food (or most things really) I haven't divided him at all since.  If anyone knows whether this is causing my bread to mutate into some sort of yeast beast I would like to know because all I know is he tastes awesome.

To date we have made using Herman:

Sourdough Cinnamon Rolls

No Knead Sourdough Bread (whole wheat and white) both awesome

Sourdough Whole Wheat Bread

Sourdough Tortillas-whole wheat, we are still perfecting this one

and Sourdough English Muffins

Herman an I have grown rather fond of each other. Boss refers to him as another member of our family. Pinkone takes her turn feeding him and talking to him to make sure he is well loved and cared for. In return he fills our bellies with delicious taste treats at least once a week. There are thousands of links for creating your own starter if you only consult the Oracle. I would post mine here...but it doesn't actually exist.

Here is one that is similar from My Sisters Kitchen or you can take the Gnowfglins Sourdough E-course and learn about ALL OF THE THINGS!!!

Tell us about your favorite monster?

*update: prior to this posting Herman passed on. His jar was contaminated by some unknown substance. We have not ruled out sabotage by other bread products wishing to be as awesome, or possibly the dog, looking for attention. Either way, Herman 2.0 has been created today and will hopefully live up to his predecessors delightful flavor. RIP Herman.

[caption id="attachment_975" align="aligncenter" width="540" caption="quite similar to Herman"][/caption]

Tah-Boo-Lee!

I love Levantine cuisine.  Everything from the basic olives, Hummus and Shwarma to the more "adventurous" like Shashlik, Dolma and Kibbeh and if you have never tried Baklava you have never truly lived.  Often some of these foods can be difficult to prepare, I mean who has a Shwarma spit in their kitchen? (one day it will be mine, oh yes it will be mine!) However, one of my favorite dishes from the Levant region of the world is Tabbouleh.  Originally from the mountains of  Syria and Lebanon, tabbouleh has become one of the most popular salads in the Middle East. Traditionally made with bulgur wheat, Tabbouleh is a super easy and delicious salad that can be served as a main dish or a side.  One of the best things about it is that you can make a large amount, store it in the refrigerator in a tightly closed container and its flavors develop more and more as the days pass.  We are trying to reduce the amount of gluten we eat in casa DR and experiment with new grains and seeds so I have adjusted my usual tabbouleh recipe to use quinoa instead of bulgur, this give it a softer texture but I really like the taste and this recipe could be used to make tabbouleh with almost any grain.

Fun Fact!

The largest recorded dish of tabbouleh to date weighed 4,324 kg and was created on 13 November 2009 by the Yaldy Association at Alaayen Elementary School in the Arab town of Shefa-Amr in Israel.

Here is my recipe for a traditional tabbouleh with a few of my own tweaks.

So for this you will need:

1 cup dry quinoa*

3 ripe Roma tomatoes

1/2 long english cucumber

1/2 red bell pepper

1/2 yellow or orange bell pepper

1 bunch Italian Flat leaf parsley.

1 cup kalamata olives

1/2  red onion

2 cloves of fresh garlic

2 whole lemons

1 cup quality olive oil

1 tsp ground cumin

1/2 tsp sea salt

1/2 fresh ground black pepper

*You can make this with either cooked quinoa or raw sprouted quinoa.  To see how to sprout quinoa visit our post on sprouted grains  or if you are going to cook the quinoa, here is a great tutorial on how to do just that! If using cooked quinoa I recommend cooking it at least 3 hours prior to making the salad so that it has plenty of time to fully chill. The best is to let it cool in the fridge overnight.

To begin, put all your cooled quinoa in a large mixing bowl. Chop up all vegetables with the exception of the onion,garlic and cilantro in small cubes, I find the smaller cubes work better than large chunk vegetables to maintain a consistency of texture and to ensure you can get a bit of each ingredient in each bite! Add all chopped veggies to the quinoa.

At this point I attack my parsley.  Usually I will wash it and trim off the bottom third of the steams. Also pick through it and make sure there are no wilted, blackish bits...trust me, you do not want to get one of these in your bite..very foul! After I have made sure it is all good to go I bunch it up tightly together as if I am going to do a chiffonade of the bunch. The tighter you hold it the smaller pieces you can cut it in the first go around, otherwise it tend to explode and go everywhere!

Toss it in with the quinoa and veg. Now, on to the dressing which brings this all together in a mess of tangy freshness.  Combine your olive oil and lemon juice, add in the salt, cumin and pepper. Whisk well so that the lemon juice and olive oil combine.  Cut up onion in a small dice and mince both garlic cloves, add to lemon and oil mixture.  Whisk well to incorporate. At this point my mouth usually starts to water as the heady garlic and onion and the tart lemon scent hits me.  Pour dressing onto salad.

Slice up your olives and combine with your salad, mix well.  Now comes the best part...the taste test.  Take a big spoonful, close your eyes and..NOM!!  This salad just gets better as it sits so usually I will make it at least 1 hour ahead of time and cover it and put it in the refrigerator to chill and let the flavors mingle.  Drop me a comment and let me know how yours turned out and what, if any, adjustments you made.  Enjoy!!