Holiday Cookie Time

I'm deeply immersed in everything cookies, from the Cookie Walk at church to holiday baking. First came the Hanukkah Cookies, baked with Shara & my mom.

Then we made the Chocolate Covered Cherry Cookies for the Cookie Walk

The Morello Cherries from Trader Joes are so much better than marachino.













Next came the first of the Christmas Cookies. We tried our new Oxo Good Grips cookie press. I have to find out how to get the cookies to stick to the ungreased cookie sheet but when it worked, they came out nice. This is an experimental cookie - Cardamom Orange. I boiled down orange juice to add to the dough with the egg. I made it a pretty thick syrup so I don't think it made much of a difference with the texture. It's based on these Swedish Christmas Cookies.

If anyone wants to buy the press, you can get it at Amazon. I like the press itself. It cleaned very easily, the discs changed quickly and you can see the dough in the press as well as air pockets. I just have to find a recipe that will be a bit stickier maybe? It wasn't a recipe specific to a press, so I'm hoping that was the issue. I may have to try another batch!
So next on the agenda? I'm not sure but I have about 100 recipes I'd like to try. You can check out my Pinterest board of possibilities here.

Follow Laurie Lessner's board Recipes - Holiday Baking on Pinterest.

And the beet goes on

Had some beets in the fridge and didn't want to bother cooking them so confirmed that raw beets aren't very different than cooked and decided to throw together a beet slaw. Ingredients kept going in the bowl -
grated beets
lemon juice (my lime had seen better days)
fresh, frozen dill
crushed garlic
greek yogurt
diced cucumbers
salt & pepper

Mixed it all together and it tasted like garlic dill pickles. I couldn't taste the beets at all and that was just fine with the rest of the family, who don't like beets but love pickles!
And you certainly can't beat the color:

Birthday Dinner

 Last week Alan and Shara planned and cooked a dinner for me so I could relax on my birthday. Since my birthday is often hectic, we decided to wait until after July 4th and had it on July 5th instead. The menu was as follows:
Rainbow Rolls w/ peanut dipping sauce
Teriyaki Salmon
Cheesy Cauliflower Rice
Wine provided by Shara
Small Cake

It was delicious, though the red cabbage in the rolls ended up being radiccio and was a bit bitter. The cake wasn't a cake but a pie - chocolate cream from the Pie Guys. A pie we could all love, since I'm the only fruit pie fan in the house.

Speaking of fruit pie, I'm always looking for lower calorie fruit pie options and played around with making a lower calorie "shrub". I feel like I succeeded. This one has:
whole wheat pastry flour
almond milk
almond extract
sugar
wheat bran
Mix that together & top a bunch of fruit. In this case, it was cherries, rhubarb and blueberries. It was very yummy topped with frozen yogurt for a dessert or plain greek yogurt for breakfast.

Cupcake Camp - Recipes

This is my go-to chocolate cake mix. It's very much like a boxed mix but tastes so much better!

2 cups flour (I often use any of the following in combination whole wheat/white wheat/all purpose)

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 cup unsweetened cocoa

2 tsp. baking soda

pinch salt

1 tbsp. instant coffee or espresso powder

2 eggs

1/2 cup oil

2 cups hot water

2 tsp. vanilla

Basically mix it all together and bake! 350 degrees for 20 minutes (cupcakes), 30 minutes (layers), 35 minutes (sheet cake). Makes 24 cupcakes, 2 - 9" layers, 1 - 9"x13" sheet cake.

7-minute frosting - King Arthur Flour's recipe, but I cook the sugur/water until it caramelizes.

Candied bacon - did it really simple by taking cooked bacon, dusting with sugar and baking at 400 degrees until crisp. Watch it because it burns quick!

Fish for Friday

My original plan was to have fish, acorn squash and some kind of grain. Then I picked up some nice portobello mushrooms yesterday and needed to use them with the kale I had. Searching one of my two favorite recipe apps, Ziplist, found me a great recipe - Spicy Peanut Portobello Kale Rice Bowl. Though this was fine on its own, I still wanted fish, since we hadn't had any in quite a while. So I ended up not getting out of work until about a 1/2 hour later than I had planned. I called Alan when I left work because I couldn't get my head around picking up fish and having time to cook dinner too. He kindly offered to clean the kale and I figured I could use a package of pre-cooked rice/quinoa pilaf. So time crunch problem was solved. I even let myself have a bottle of beer - a Watchusett Octoberfest that had been waiting for me for a couple of months, while I made dinner.

This recipe is certainly a keeper. I used my PB2 instead of regular peanut butter and could have used more but it was still very good and saved about 50 calories per serving.

Banana Almond Pancakes

I made these today and substituted the whole egg for an egg white. Shara had hers with mini chocolate chips and Alan and I typed ours with the strawberry cassis topping from the other night. They were fantastic and I made them completely in my blender. 

Enjoying the Autumn Produce

We've been cooking fairly regularly around here. And the nice thing is my daughter has been helping too!
We made these thai tofu lettuce wraps and Shara crumbled the tofu and helped plate.

thai tofu lettuce wraps

We also made scallion pancakes. When I was picking up my CSA order, I was talking to Kelly, my Langwater friend, and she was planning on making them too and didn't even see the PIN I had found to the recipe on Serious Eats. Things are so coincidental, or maybe not... Either way, ours came out great, but we didn't eat until about 7 PM that night!

rolled out - before first fold

all ready to go

pan-fried goodies

shrimp w/ spinach & mushroom soy sauce, 

daikon, carrots & onions, scallion pancakes

I tried to fry these with a bit of oil, not too much. Next time I think I'll try doing these with some spray in my non-stick griddle, all at once. There should be enough flavor from the sesame oil in between the layers.























For a dinner party, I also used my CSA sugar pumpkin to make a version of "Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good" I used a ciabatta roll, about a 1/2 cup unsweetened almond milk instead of cream, 4oz. light swiss, garlic, thyme, sage, nutmeg, and a chopped apple. I think that's it. It was very good and only a few Weight Watchers points for the cheese! I've followed the recipe before, just adding the bacon as Dorie suggests. In our house we say everything is better with bacon.

Last night, pre-Sandy, I sauteed chicken breasts, removed them, then added some Port to deglaze. Into the pan went a bunch of mushrooms - baby bellas, White Beech and portobellos. Sauteed a bit, then added some vegetable broth, thyme and Szechuan peppercorn salt, and the chicken. Yum!

Mixed mushrooms & chicken in Port sauce, roasted 

acorn squash, sweet potatoes, white 

potatoes & garlic w/ szechuan salt & pepper

Cottage Cheese Substitute

While trying to find the ingredients for the cheesy rice from ffwd (I wasn't home with the recipe and wondered if I needed to go to the market), I stumbled upon a thread from Chow.com where JoanN talked about a cottage cheese substitute for heavy cream. You just take cottage cheese and puree it. Cottage cheese happens to be one of the few foods I really will not eat plain. It's find in noodle kugel, but that's about it for me. Well I gave it a shot and what do you know, it turned into a great replacement for ricotta cheese. I haven't tried it in place of cottage cheese, but certainly will.


For the test case, I had grilled eggplant and steamed broccoli. I pureed the cottage cheese with basil, garlic and parmesan cheese. Not a lot of parm, maybe a 1/3 cup to 1 1/2 cups of cottage.


I then layered it with the vegetables and topped with some mozzarella cheese. It was watery, but I hadn't added any eggs as I would normally do with ricotta. Calorie breakdown:
Part-skim ricotta - 1/2 cup = 140 calories, 9 grams fat
Fat-free cottage cheese - 1/2 cup = 70 calories, 0 grams fat


If the taste and texture are the same, which would you choose?