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 [...]
Peanuts are my favorite misnamed food. (They’re legumes, not nuts. In a similar vein, buckwheat has nothing to do with wheat; gooseberries have nothing to do with geese. Jerusalem artichokes are sunflower tubers, not artichokes. Makes you wonder who was in charge of naming these things…) But I digress. The point is, I love peanuts [...]
Food is like fashion: trends keep coming back. In the case of fashion, that’s not always welcome (the current resurgence of 80s-style Spandex pants — c’mon, folks, not a good look then, not a good look now!), but when it comes to food, reclaiming traditional ingredients is a wonderful thing. We’ve gotten so enamored of [...]
Chestnuts roasting over an open fire used to be pretty popular in the States, but that was before chestnut trees that had been imported from Asia caused the American stocks to fall prey to a nasty fungus. By the 1940s, chestnut trees were very few and far between. Roasted chestnuts remain popular in other countries, [...]
