Click below for an awesome chocolate cookie recipe. I searched and couldn’t find a recipe for really rich and decedent chocolate cookies, so I developed this one. The texture has the best of both worlds – cookies and brownies. Enjoy!
The second page includes a chart of scoop/disher sizes. Ice cream scoops come in many sizes for a variety of applications. Who knew? Alton Brown recommends using a #20 disher to scoop his cookie dough onto the cookie sheets. I researched what that meant and gathered the info to share with you all.
I bought these colorful carrots at the Farmers Market few weeks ago. I served them with cheese ravioli.
The second photo shows them cut up so you can see the color was different on the inside.
At 7pm, I still didn’t know what I was going to make for dinner. Fortunately, I had stocked up on canned chickpeas a couple of weeks ago. Also, fortunately, I went to the Catonsville Farmers Market yesterday.
I Google-d “chick pea salad” and found a great recipe over at Smitten Kitchen. I had all of the ingredients in the house. Unfortunately, for the second time in a row, the dog ate the whole grain farmers market bread, so I had to scrounge crusts from the store bought.
I served the chick pea salad on the toasted crusts and over fresh local lettuce, garnished with diced fresh, local bright red and yellow peppers and more black olives. It was very tasty and DH was still hungry afterwards. We finished up by eating local cranberry-walnut bread and some fresh, delicious summer peaches.
These days, we’re constantly being admonished to eat better food. The environmentally conscious and the nutritionally aware communities are pushing their message like never before: our cheap, industrial food supply is probably not the best thing for us, dietary-wise. The problem is that most of us are used to our current supermarket prices, and small production organic or natural-method farms are justifiably charging a premium for their products.
Case in point – we love the folks at Springfield Farm. They’re a bio-conscious operation in northern Baltimore County that raises laying hens, roaster chickens, turkeys, hogs, and lambs on natural pasture. You can see their laying hens in the photo above. That little red building all the way in the background is the hen-house, and the food & water’s as far away from it as possible, so that the hens spend most of their time outside. They’re exercised, in the open air, and free to forage for bugs and tasty plants. They’ll strip most of the green vegetation off this section of pasture, and will be rotated onto pasture vacated by the sheep.
Thanksgiving is a hard meal to plan for. Logistically, it’s a nightmare – lots of separate dishes, all having to come together at once. There’s a huge bird to roast that takes hours to prep and cook properly. A vast array of sweet and savory flavors lie in wait to sate the palate, and put us all into a postprandial coma.
All of which presents a dilemma. I want to have a good glass of wine with dinner. But the quantity of food and the flavors makes choosing an appropriate drink a bit of a challenge. With candied sweet potatoes, oyster stuffing, and turkey legs waiting to send you into carbo-overload and tryptophan nappy-time, this is not an opportunity to whip out the best vintages. That being said, Thanksgiving is a “special occasion” with friends and family gathered around the holiday table, and cheap plonk just doesn’t seem right.
So, what’s called for are decent wines that won’t get lost or be squandered competing with the bounty of the rest of the table. They also need to be assertive enough to hold their own against a fair amount of heavy eating without adding too much of their own weight. To this end, I would suggest serving three wines, scaled in quantity to serve all of your guests at least one glass of each.
Rob: Dude – what did you think cookies were made out of? They’re a butter and sugar delivery device. Almost every sugar cookie recipe is in a 1:1:1 ratio of butter to sugar to egg. And...
gorge: TWO STICKS BUTTER, TWO CUPS SUGAR AND TWO EGG YOLKS!!! AND YOU ARE CONCERNED ABOUT PACKAGED BROCCOLI. GIVE ME A BREAK! I HAD A HEART ATTACK BY JUST READING IT.
Eric Hundin: I found your blog on MSN Search. Nice writing. I will check back to read more. Eric Hundin
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