BEER!

Yes, that's four, count 'em, four, kegs. Why so many? So that Tony can brew to his heart's content and we can have more than one flavor on tap. Now he's bugging me for a keggerator for the new house...

Dinner by Tony

This is a yummy dinner we had back in August, when Tony decided to buy some salmon at Whole Foods. I love that store with all of its pretty colors and organicness. He grilled the salmon and I made some garlic butter potatoes to go with it, and even though I'm not much of a fish-fan, it was rather tasty!

Wheat Wrap Pizzas

I make these for dinner while I'm on Weight Watchers and Jake likes them. The ones on the right are mine - 80 cal wheat wrap, 1/4 cup of pizza sauce, 1 ton garlic, 1/8-1/6 cup fat free cheddar, and this time topped with italian chicken breast. Jake is not on Weight Watchers, so he gets normal pizza cheese mix and mini pepperonis. I put them in the oven at 425 and watch them until the cheese melts. Quick and pretty healthy (6 g. of fiber in just one wrap), and of course, you can add whatever.

Sugar Drop Cookies or How I Learned to Distrust Joy of Cooking

I used my Kitchenaid mixer for the first time on Saturday (since I received it for Christmas) to make some corn bread using the Joy of Cooking cookbook recipe. I've had the cooking/baking since and decided to try making one of the many cookies in the book. After much deliberation, I settled on "Sugar Drop Cookies", because I didn't have to go out and buy anything on the list of ingredients.

I started by letting Kitchenaid mix the dry ingredients,

then whisked together sugar and canola oil (looked a bit like slush!) in a large bowl.

The recipe told me to add the flour mixture to the sugar, oil, and eggs and mix, and my arm gave out after a few seconds (and after half of the wet mixture was stuck in the center of the whisk), so I offered the concoction back up to Mr. Kitchenaid. The dough looked very loose and was a bit less held together than Play-Doh when it was done mixing.

I moved the dough over to the oven (preheated), where my super large cookie sheet was primed with parchment and ready for dough balls. I then read the words,

"Shape the dough into 1/2-inch balls".

Dear Joy of Cooking, you do know what a 1/2-inch ball looks like, right? Of course you do. I will take this opportunity to shape (press together, not roll) this dough into 60 1/2-inch balls. In time, this task will teach me to be a more patient and reasonable individual (right?). I will actually enjoy shaping 60 small as marble cookies while standing adjacent to a 375 degree stove on a 90 degree day. I will savor it.

So I shaped and I dipped (rolled) into sugar, and I placed the balls. It took a good long while to get 32 of them done and lined up, and I felt like I hadn't put much of a dent in the dough ("It should be half way gone by now..."). At this rate, I wanted to get those babies in to make sure that I wasn't going to be rolling until 10 in the evening just to end up with some crap cookies. I put the 32 cookies in the oven and set the timer to 10 minutes, the low end of the 10-12 minute recommendation.

I continued to roll and dip additional 1/2-inch balls. I watched the cookies and got a little worried when, after 6 minutes, they looked exactly the same as they had when I put them in. I checked the stove, it was definitely still hot. I watched the timer until 10 minutes. There had been no change. I popped one of the round little suckers in my mouth (nothing that small could possibly burn a person, right?) and it tasted quite done (read: the roof of my mouth is a thing of the past). Maybe the cookies were called "drop" cookies because they were meant to be the size of a droplet of dough. Is this what I had signed up for?

After the second round of "I really don't know what's going on anymore, but I already shaped and rolled these around in sugar, so here you go oven"

cookies came out, unchanged but cooked, things got serious. I took my chances and rolled spheres about 1-1/2 inches in width and height and breadth. "Go big or go home", I thought. I then looked at the recipe again and saw the line at the top,

"About sixty 2-1/2 inch cookies"

These completely unchanging, immobile cookies formed from 1/2-inch balls could never, ever reach 2-1/2 inches in width, even if they did do a damn thing in the oven other than look out at me, pointing and sneering in the heat. I think... I think that Joy of Cooking may have fibbed to me about the 1/2-inch shaped ball size (these are cooked):

At the end of it all, I have about 40 (well, now about 25) super tiny cookies (that are sort of like rocks, but they taste of sugar, so I'll forgive them) and 12 normal sized, similarly unchanged, but cooked cookies. I've learned a valuable lesson today about size and how it does matter, and how even 75th Anniversary edition books can sometimes fib.

Oh yes, and something about patience. Right.

Old Favorites

Well, I thought it might be fun to start this off with one of my old favorites, chocolate chip cookies. It has taken me several years to get it right, so that the chocolate chips don't protrude from sadly flat cookies. I now have it down pretty good, and I usually make a huge batch so that I can freeze the extra dough and have it on hand for when the cookie monster in me strikes.

Here's the recipe:

Dry Ingredients (Mix these together before adding to the other ingredients)

5 C of unbleached, all-purpose flour

2 tsp of baking soda

2 tsp of salt

Other ingredients:

4 sticks of butter (no fake stuff, only real butter), softened

1.5 C of brown sugar, packed

1 C of white sugar

4 eggs

2 tsp of double-strength vanilla (I love Penzey's) or 4 tsp of regular-strength vanilla

4 C of chocolate chips (24oz)

Using an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugars on medium speed for 4-5 minutes until they're really smooth. I used to just mix them up, but they need to cream together for several minutes to be consistent. Then beat in the eggs and vanilla.

If you have a really beefy mixer, you can add the mixed dry ingredients, one cup at a time on low speed until it's all mixed together. Otherwise roll up your sleeves and mix it with a wooden spoon by hand. Scrape the bowl as needed to make sure there aren't any pockets of flour at the bottom. Then stir in the chocolate chips.

Place by teaspoonfulls onto an ungreased baking sheet. Bake at 375 for about 10 minutes until golden brown. Remove from oven, let sit for about 3 minutes, then transfer onto a wire cooling rack or directly into your mouth, muwahaha.

Bake as many as you like, and then freeze or eat the remaining dough.