Maple Orange Roasted Carrots

I made this recipe.

Then I forgot this recipe.

Then one of my coworkers reminded me that I sent it to everyone after I made it for a potluck.  

So I'm recording it here so I don't lose it again!

15 carrots, peeled and stems removed
1/3 cup butter, softened
¼ cup maple syrup (you could use honey or sugar)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/3 cup boiling water
1 tablespoon orange juice, zest of the orange

 

Preheat oven to 350. Lay the carrots in a baking dish.  Mix all the other ingredients together, pour over the carrots. Cover the pan with foil and bake for 80 minutes or until done to your liking! Pour the sauce over the carrots after transferring to a serving bowl.

Ma's Peanut Butter Jumble Cookies

 *blows dust off recipe blog*

Ma is in town! She made cookies. I asked her what she wanted to do on her visit, and she immediately said she wanted to make cookies for the cast of Ben's show. So she did!

1 stick of softened butter

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup white sugar

1 tsp salt

1 and 1/2 cups peanut butter

1 tsp vanilla

3 eggs 

4.5 cups of quick cooking oats

2 tsp baking soda

1 cup of mini chocolate chips

1 cup of mini m &ms 

(You can do any add-ins you want. Ma famously makes them with craisins and dark chocolate chips for me at Christmas!)

Cream the sugars and both butters together, add eggs one at a time, followed by vanilla and salt. In a separate bowl, toss soda and oatmeal and mix with the wet ingredients. Combine thoroughly and incorporate chips and m&ms. 

Ma firmly believes in creaming your butter first. You can beat all the wet ingredients willy nilly and it will work, but she never does, and that's why her cookies are better.  This is what she said to me after I read the first sentence of the last paragraph out loud to her and I'd put all the wet ingredients in one clause of a sentence. I was told. 

Bake these at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes until the bottoms are nicely browned. It may take longer for you, we were using a perforated sheet pan, which browns them faster.

You. Must. Use. Parchment. Paper.

This is not an opinion, Ma stresses. People have argued with her about the importance of parchment paper before and had to publicly eat their words, and she was not gracious in her victory. You will burn your cookies without it. It is hard to burn your cookies with it. This is FACT. 

This makes about 5 dozen teaspoon sized cookies and they are delicious.  

Dumplings are my Bitch

This is the greatest soup dumpling I know.   I'd give you the recipe for the soup that goes with it, but honestly,  I don't want to limit you like that.   You can drop these into veggie broths,  tomato based broths, chicken or beef broths.   Make your favorite chicken soup, and instead of noodles, drop in the dumplings at the end.  Change the herbs to suit; this version is perfect for a clear broth chicken or vegetable soup.   Double or triple the recipe as needed, but this batch size is meant for a couple quarts of soup.

Fuck Yeah, Dumplins'

Them Apples.

Part Two of our Apple Adventures.

When I told my friend Matt that Emma and I were canning apples, he mentioned that a coworker had given him a jar of apple salsa.   Apple salsa?

Sold.

I texted Emma and told her to bring hot peppers with her.   She did not mess around, and showed up with a beautiful melange of peppers, and we used them all.   Ben says this is the best salsa he's ever had.

Hellfire Apple Salsa

Apples in my Eye. Part One.

Of all the things to can in the whole world, I love the apple most.   You can do almost any kind of sweet preserve with it, and it's cheap to do in quantity. Which is important, because that's kind of the point of canning. I don't know about you, but I can't be fucked to spend three hours boiling and sterilizing shit to end up staring at the three sad pints of jam.   Which are now so precious you can't eat them, as they've come to represent an entire night of work and a filthy kitchen.

Hence, apples.  They are delicious in their own right, have tons of pectin and are a fantastic filler for more expensive fruits.  

Last night, my awesome niece Emma came over straight from the tattoo parlor and with a bag of hot peppers in hand for a canning date.  We had a couple pecks of Haralson apples, a bag of oranges, four bags of frozen blueberries, those peppers, and whatever we could find in the pantry.   

Here's one of the things we made up!  

Blueberry Ginger Apple Jam

What I Had in My House Cookies, or: Don't Tell Me What to Do.

So I made some fucking cookies, because I will not be thwarted, bitches.

I wanted to make some treats for the long day of tech tomorrow, and I thought I had my cookie ingredients covered without stopping anywhere.   And I was right, but not because I had the shit I thought I did.   Like brown sugar.  Or eggs in the plural.   Or peanut butter.

I did have a bag of cinnamon chips I bought at Bill's Imported Foods, because I thought it was whimsical they stocked them.   And I had some greek yogurt.   And oatmeal.

And that oatmeal conveniently had a recipe for cookies on the back that I fucked with until the only measurement I ended up using accurately was the leavening.

Here's what I did.

.5 cup white sugar
.5 cup raw sugar
3 tbl honey
1 tbl molasses
1 egg
1/2 cup greek yogurt
1 tsp nutmeg, fresh
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
2 sticks butter, melted
A good glug of vanilla
3 cups oatmeal
2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups cinnamon chips

Whip butter, egg, yogurt and sugars together until fluffy.  Add soda, powder, salt, vanilla, nutmeg.  Beat until combined.  Add oatmeal, and then flour, and then chips.  Chill dough for at least a half hour before baking at 350 for 10-13 minutes, depending on the size of the cookie.   Keep the dough in the refrigerator between batches.

Don't let those bitches tell you that you can't make cookies without the ingredients on the side of their box.  I actually used a whole half cup more of their product than they told me to- see how short sighted recipes can be?  Keep the proportions of dry to wet on the same rough scale, make sure you leaven for the volume, and you can lose an egg if you have good textural substitute like yogurt.

Here's the original recipe, so you can see where I took the liberties.

1 cup packed brown sugar
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup margarine
1/4 cup shortening
2 eggs
3 tbl. milk
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups oatmeal
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 cups dried cranberries or butterscotch

Do not turn your back on the leprechaun.

WTF is Irish about shitty apple cake?  That's the worse cake recipe ever. Also, what's an "Irish bouquet"?   I'm just going to keep talking about how dumb that tabletop looks so that I don't have to acknowledge the creature lurking on the right.   It means us ill.   You couldn't pay me enough to look directly into its terrifying foil face.

That's not a fucking decoration, that's a sadistic foil poppet crafted for a malignant purpose.

Hey, what was going on at this time in Ireland?   Conny?  Are you behind "The Troubles"? Conny?