When it comes to cookies, why settle for a tiny chip when you can have a big chunk instead? Besides, when you make chocolate chunk cookies, you can make them as dark-chocolate-y as you want. I used 85% dark for this batch; if I had had some 90% dark on hand, I would have used that instead. [...]
If you’re in the mood for chestnuts but don’t have an open fire for roasting them, try using your oven instead! Chestnuts are inexpensive at this time of year, plus they’re fun to roast and peel. Since they’re more starchy than your average nut, roasted chestnuts can be used as you would use cooked grains [...]
Continue reading about Elegant & Simple One-Ingredient Appetizers
Sometimes a little advance effort has a big pay-off. That’s most certainly the case with breakfast — the last thing most of us want to do first thing in the morning is spend a lot of time preparing/scrounging for something to eat. Specifically, something that will taste good, be healthy, and be satisfying enough to [...]
Imagine chocolate crinkle cookies. Now think about Russian teacakes — you know, those cute little balls covered with powdered sugar that are the mainstay of holiday cookie swaps. Then let your mind flit over to oatmeal-raisin cookies. What do you get when you put them all together? Chocolate, Cherry & Oat Balls. Or, if you [...]
Dried fruit + nuts + seeds = an incredibly handy snack. Even dinner if need be. (Like when you land in an European city late at night on a Sunday and realize that NOTHING is open.) In this case, the trail mix is breakfast. If you don’t have any “official” trail mix on hand — [...]
Continue reading about Untrodded Trails Could Lead to Muffins
Mesquite: it’s for more than just burning. And providing shade if you’re in the Arizona desert. Turns out that the pods the tree bears are edible (just as the wood is burnable), so if you let the pods dry out and grind them up, you have flour. A fragrant, fine flour that will make you [...]
Shortbread may not seem like an obvious summer dessert, but buttery shortbread cookies spiced with citrus and fresh basil are unexpectedly refreshing on a hot summer day. The light, sandy texture typical of shortbread — pecan sandies and other “sand” or “sable” (French for “sand”) cookies are essentially shortbread cookies — means that the tender [...]
Continue reading about From the Herb Garden to the Cookie Jar
There are many ways to make a cookie great: use a natural sweetener like sucanat that contributes flavor as well as sweetness to your cookie, use a variety of whole-grain/whole-food flours like sorghum flour or teff flour or peanut flour that will likewise add dimension of their own to your cookie, and use a rich-tasting, [...]
Continue reading about Making Cookies Crunchier…and Chocolaty-er!
Got extra trail mix? Want to make cookies? Then you’ve got a done deal. It occurred to me that trail mix is the perfect cookie ingredient: you get a whole handful of dried fruit and nuts and seeds at once (and it’s more cost-effective to buy a single bag of trail mix than several bags [...]
Most cookies are meant to be eaten alone, but a few cookies have so much flavor and are so sturdy that you can do all kinds of things with them: process them into crumbs and then make pie crusts out of them, crumble them into coarse chunks and layer them with fruit and yogurt to [...]
