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It’s Cookie Time Y’all!

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Noeleen’s Nutella Thumb Buttons and various cookies from D’Amato’s Bakery, courtesy of Dan and Yasmin.Thanks Y’all!

Holiday cookies are my favorite tradition. I heart them so. I heart all cookies. I’m pretty sure if I were a muppet, Cookie Monster and I would be getting busy down on Sesame Street. It’s not like I have a thing for furry blue monsters, it’s just a cookie thing. 
Don’t judge.
At least, don’t judge me until you tasted these cookies. I’m talking about my Grandnanna’s Pecan Sandies. They are nothing short of magnificent. 
The best part about them is that Grandnanna’s recipe (like a lot of her recipes) is done in parts. This means you can adjust it as small or as big as you want. It also means they come out slightly different every time, but somehow, they always turn out AMAZING. The formula is guaranteed. Good for making a quick snack or feeding a whole boy scout jamboree.

 Grandnanna’s Pecan Sandies 

  • 1 part butter
  • 1 part powdered sugar
  • 1 part pecans
  • 2 part flour
  • 1 spoon vanilla
  • 1/2 spoon salt
  • ½ dash of cayenne pepper

  • Combine butter, half the powdered sugar and vanilla. Mix with a beater til fluffy like ponds cold cream (that’s a direct quote)
  • Add flour, salt and barely mix until blended.
  • Taste the dough, adjust as needed.
  • Shape into 3 logs and put in fridge for one hour to overnight.
  • Slice the dough into ¼” slices and shape into crescents.
  • Bake cookies at 350 for 15 minutes or until lightly browned on top. Remove cookies from the baking sheet immediately and roll them in the remaining powdered sugar.
  • Eat and enjoy!

*Note: this is a no-fail base dough. You can add jam or dip in chocolate or any number of other amazing things. Have fun. Your welcome.

*Note: Pecan is pronounced PEEcan, rhymes with he can or we can. If you pronounce it  peKAHN you’re doing it wrong and the wrath of the nut is inevitable. If your cookies come out poorly, don’t look at me. It was your fault and all those years of saying that poor little nut’s name wrong.

So, before I begin my cookie baking extravaganza this weekend, I wanted to ask; anyone out there have another good recipe written in parts (as opposed to cups and teaspoons)? 
I know there are folks out there who scoff at the flagrant inaccuracy of recipes written without exact measurements, but then those folks taste these cookies and shut the hell up. These cookies are that good. Some recipes stand the test of time! 
Anyone out there have some pointers to share? I’m all ears  🙂

The Good. The Bad. The Gelatinous.

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Better Homes & Gardens Salad Book, 1958

Y’all have to see this.

A random hunt for an old Thanksgiving cardamom roll recipe sent my skipping down the catacombs of my cookbook collection. You know what I found?  I’ll tell you — I found 128 pages of Straight Up Crazy.

Look at the page on the left. There are so many things wrong with this…

#1 Why is the word meat in quotation marks?

#2  If you were preparing to party down, would really want to whoop it up with meat? Much less meat in quotation marks?

#3 The photo above it on the page features ham and olive jello pâté. Seriously. Jello with ham and olives. I know food trends change, and you would probably be grossed out by some things that I find appealing, but seriously. Ham and olives in jello?


It blows my mind.

Who thinks of these things? And more important, who buys these books?

Oh, crap. I buy these books.

I don’t have a lot of warm and fuzzy memories of Thanksgivings of yore. As an adult, I have usually needed to work that weekend, and as a kid, Thanksgivings at Grandnanna’s house were usually spent locked in the basement with Orange Crush soda and a bucket of fried chicken. Don’t get me wrong, neither one is a bad way to spend the day but they are certainly a far cry from Norman Rockwell-esque images of a cozy family gathered around a lace tablecloth strewn with harvest bounty.

Thanksgiving at Grandnanna’s house was always something of a dichotomy; the adults would enjoy elegant food and football upstairs while the kids would play Chucky Cheese style in the basement. Since no adults wanted to spend their holiday supervising the basement chaos, the room had to be thoroughly “kid proofed” with tarps and duct tape. The Franklin Mint collector plates were relocated to higher ground and the gun rack was double bolted. Even the ping pong table was put away for fear someone would misuse the paddles. Little did they know Tiny Alice was always crafty enough to unbolt the table legs and use them as stilts, repeatedly bumping her head on the basement ceiling tiles until that one time when she got a clump of hair caught in an air duct…but that’s a story for another time. 

Early on in the day, the games started peacefully…Parcheesi, Yahtzee, Duck-Duck-Goose, Hungry-Hungry Hippos…by the time the food arrived we were on to Cowboys and Indians….eventually the little kids would hit their sugar crash and doze in the laundry room while the big kids would start playing dodge ball with Grandnanna’s bomb shelter supplies. Fun was had by all! Canned ham and old batteries would whiz across the room until someone, inevitably, chipped a tooth on a projectile can of fruit cocktail and the sight of blood would be enough for the door at the top of the stairs to unlock.

A stampede of kids would rush the steps and within a minute, the elegant party was overrun with sticky fingers and questions like Who is Tom Collins and why can’t I have one?

The rooms were lined with card tables displaying tall, gaudy flower arrangements clustered by colorful platters of finger foods. Blue daisies and Hawaiian themed appetizer trays were a particular household favorite, as was anything suspended in gray Jello or nestled in a ring of cheese salad. Mmm….who’s hungry?

Thanksgiving y’all – it drudges up all kinds of strange. The good. The bad. The gelatinous.

Return of the Chocolate Turkey

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Chocolate Turkey Cake, aka “belly ache on a plate”

Thanksgiving belongs to roast turkey and pumpkin pie, but Black Friday belongs to the Chocolate Turkey. He is rich and decadent and gooey and he’s all Neil Diamond’s fault.

May have mentioned this before… I grew up listening to a lot of Neil Diamond. A lot. If your Mom was half as crazy about Neil Diamond as my Mom was, you know every word to the Hot August Night album, including the song Porcupine Pie. Look, it’s not his musical manifesto, but it includes as reference to chicken ripple ice cream, thereby making it Officially Awesome. 

Inspired by the song, porcupine pies have been a common occurrence throughout my life. So common, in fact, up until 5 minutes ago, I assumed everyone knew what they were. A quick google image search for “porcupine pie” has just revealed otherwise. Apparently, they are a little more unique than I thought.

Assuming they are new to you, I’ll explain, in a nutshell, a porcupine pie is any sort of dessert with spikes. Sometimes a simple cookie crust filled with ice cream and shards of chocolate inserted all over the surface….sometimes a buttermilk cake that looks like a Thanksgiving turkey…sometimes a cheesecake rimmed with a mountain-like skyline of dark chocolate peaks…

Fun to make. Fun to look at. Fun to eat.

For a long time, we made porcupine pies for all kinds of special occasions…birthdays, report cards, first day of school, big business meetings…any time Mom wanted to make someone feel appreciated and celebrated. She didn’t cook a lot, but she would fancy up ice cream at the drop of a hat. One time a guy came to read the gas meter and they got to talking…turned out his wife had just miscarried a baby…ten minutes later they were at our kitchen table having a heart-to-heart, both of them with a glass of chardonnay and him with a soup bowl of rocky road ice cream topped with a flourish of whipped cream, three projectile oreos, and, as always, a maraschino cherry speared on a plastic cocktail sword.

To this day, I am positive maraschino cherries served on plastic swords will cure just about anything. Served on ice cream or in a good stiff drink, their magical healing powers know no bounds.

Back to the turkey….these days I reserve ice cream as a comfort food and stick to making cake. A post-Thanksgiving turkey cake is one of my favorite things. It goes great with leftovers.

One year I tried to make this on Thanksgiving day, to serve as dessert and a centerpiece. Big mistake; #1 the heat from the candles and other food wafted up and melted the chocolate spears, and #2 no one wants to each chocolate after a big heavy Thanksgiving meal. Except me. I can eat chocolate any time. No time like the present!

To make chocolate turkey cake, you will need:

  • 1 bag of chocolate chips
  • wax paper
  • 1-2 flat aluminum pans
  • freezer space to store a flat aluminum pan (hot commodity in my house!)
  • a cake 
  • template* optional…(I used a turkey head template but you could skip that and draw it free form, or use any animal; what about about a dinosaur cake or a hippopotamus pie? Just about any creature with a strong silhouette and a lump shape in the middle would work!)

******** Pardon the photo quality here folks. My camera does not cotton to kitchen lighting 🙂


Use your microwave or a double boiler to melt one bag of chocolate chips in a glass bowl. Semi-sweet, milk, dark, white chocolate…doesn’t matter, whatever you prefer, just get it good an melted.

Layer your template between wax paper and an aluminum pan. Follow the outline with a piping bag of melted chocolate (you can also skip the bag and use a spoon). Fill in the gaps,and freeze for 30 minutes. The end result will look like a hardened, lumpy turkey head. Just what you always wanted!

Spread the remainder of the chocolate over another aluminum pan lined with wax paper. After 30 minutes in the freezer, it should be hard and you can use a knife to draw vertical stripes down the length of the chocolate. Expect it to shatter. It’s ok. The little bits are the tastiest.

Any cake or pie base will work, just make sure it is cool. NOT WARM. You will find that the chocolate shards slip in the cake easy, unless your cake is warm, in which case, it will all fall apart. It will still taste real good, but it will look all droopy like you left your cake out in the rain.

Slice, eat, enjoy.

Gobbly Gobble ya’ll!

Favorite Thing: Autumn Apple Picking

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Some people say summer ends with Labor Day. Others claim it’s the Fall Equinox. In my house, autumn begins with an apple picking.

This time of year, when the light is bright and the air is crisp, there is something in me that itches to get out in the country. Places with no streetlights. Places with more tractors than people. Call it my inner farm girl, but I tell you, there is nothing more satisfying than taking in the harvest.

OK OK OK…“the harvest” was barely a bushel and it came with wine tasting and there were no combines or overalls involved…but gosh darnit, it felt great!

As a city dweller, apple picking is something of an excursion. It takes two hours to get to a decent orchard but man is it worth the trip! If you have never enjoyed what it feels like to grow your own food or to pluck it from the Earth, I suggest you start with apples. Apple orchards are pretty easy to find all over North America, and they make for a wonderful adventure. Depending on the type of apple, the arrival time will be staggered throughout the Fall, so you a re pretty much guaranteed to walk away with something great. And there is something wonderfully symbolic about apples. So beautiful. So wholesome. Fresh. Clean.

A visit to the apple orchard has become something of an annual tradition. I like to go with friends and pack a picnic. This year we went just down the road from my favorite Blueberry Farm, DeGrandcahmps, to McIntosh Orchards and Winery, in South Haven Michigan. Did you ever find someplace off the beaten path that was so special that you didn’t want to tell anyone for fear the secret would get out and ruin your special discovery? McIntosh is like that. I’m tempted to keep a lid on it, but the family that runs this place is so special and their goods are so wonderful, I feel like it’s a disservice to keep it to myself. Honestly, my standards are high. This place exceeded all expectations. If you or anyone you know lives within an hour of Chicago, I highly suggest you forward this post or this link asap. Kids and adults will enjoy themselves silly and they will thank you for it later.

McIntosh Orchard isn’t just an apple orchard, no no no, it’s a cider mill and winery. They carry lot’s of semi-dry fruit wines…blueberry, apple, peach, pear, plum…all excellent and around $10 a bottle. A bargain. As someone who saves their sommelier skills for Diet Coke tasting, I cannot claim to be an expert, however, I know a good thing when I see it: this is Good Stuff.  They also sell a lovely collection of gift items, including these lovely milk bottle candles. One of those items that I saw and said “Why didn’t I think of that?!”…so easy to make, but the smell of these candles….oh how I wish the internet could convey smell!  These candles where so delicious. And can you read their names? That one up front in called Barn Dance, and yes, it really does smell like a barn dance! Like fresh pine and a wood burning stove with a hint of citrus and musk. 

Just a little further down the Blue Star Highway is my ALL TIME FAVORITE ANTIQUE PLACE: Sunset Antiques. It is unfair to call it antiques, really, more like a well-edited collection of eccentric rif raf, or what the call “junque” (somehow saying “junk” in semi-fake-French makes it more legit). Most of it is outdoors, shaded by a gigantic elm tree.Well over an acre. They carry everything from old restaurant signs to astronaut suits to taxidermy moose heads to wooden doors…all of it dirt cheap. I’m still kicking myself for not buying that Hurdy Gurdy!

*Sigh*

Back to life, back to reality.
I see a lot of apple baking in my future!

The Liza Minelli of Cake: Chocolate Zucchini with Peanut Butter Cup Ganache

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I repeatedly have to remind myself: you are not writing a food blog…you are not writing a food blog…there are thousands of fabulous food blogs already…no one wants to hear about your ugly chicken marinated in diet coke…blog about something else…you are not writing a food blog…

But Y’all, sometimes I can’t help it.  The force is too strong. I can’t contain it. This cake busted out of the oven like some kind of Liza Minelli, all sparkly and crazy eyed, making jazz hands, dancing as fast as she can and singing Cabaret songs as LOUD AS SHE CAN in hopes you will forget who her mother was and that creepy phase when she married a gay guy who had way too much plastic surgery but it’s ok because he made her feel special.

This cake deserves to feel special, too. This cake deserves your love. You can’t turn down the volume on this one: this is The Liza Minelli of Cake.

Note: There is zucchini in here, so really, this is basically health food.

*If you are not a chocolate person: this is probably going to gross you out.
*If you are a chocolate person: get ready to blow your mind! This cake is so easy to make, and so decadent that it’s hard for me to eat more than a sliver. Look, I realize you probably don’t know the severity of my chocolate addiction, but let me tell you something; for me to say suggest “a sliver” is pretty effin profound. This is serious business.

Cake
Ingredients:
•    1 stick of unsalted butter, softened
•    4 large eggs
•    1 teaspoon vanilla extract
•    ½ teaspoon Louisiana Hot Sauce
•    1 cup sour cream
•    1 box Devil’s Food cake mix (18.05 oz, preferably with pudding in the mix, but no big deal)
•    1 large zucchini, shredded and laid on paper towels to absorb excess moisture
•    Half a bag of mini semisweet chocolate chips
•    Optional: 1 cup chopped pecans
•    Optional: ½ tsp cinnamon

Preparation:

  • Grease and flour a 13”x9”12 cake pan.
  • Heat oven to 350°
  • Mix wet stuff til its good and sloppy.
  • Mix in box of cake mix until it’s well incorporated.
  • Mix in the zucchini, chocolate chips, and anything else that’s strikes your fancy. Don’t overbeat.
  • Spoon the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 40 to 50 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted in the center of the cake. 
  • Cool completely.

Ganache
Ingredients (slightly altered from this recipe from Bakerella)
•    1 cup chopped peanut butter cups + plus more for garnishing (I used 2 bags)
•    8 oz. semi sweet chocolate chips
•    1 cup heavy cream
•    1/4 cup peanut butter
•    ½ teaspoon salt

Preparation:

  • Bring cream to a slight boil and then pour over chocolate chips. Whisk until chocolate melts. Add peanut butter and salt and whisk until smooth. Let it cool until thick.
  • Remove cake from 13×9” pan, turn on to flat surface and cut in half to make 2 cakes.
  • Slather ganache on one half, stack the layers, then smooth a thin layer of ganache all over as a crumb coat. Let it set 15 minutes.
  • Go back and spread the rest of the ganache. Allow it to set for another 15 minutes then gently press remaining chopped peanut butter cup pieces all over top and sides of cake. Place in refrigerator for about an hour to set.
  • Remove, serve, tap dance!

Old McDonald in the City

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IS IT SATURDAY YET?!?!

Someday, at 6am, go to the corner of Rush and Division and prepare to see some odd sights;
rejected frat boys strangling out of the bars they walked into eight hours earlier…
ladies wearing six inch heals, tip toeing around the vomit spot in the doorway…
bus boys hosing down the vomit in the doorway, whistling at the ladies in six inch heels…
and Old McDonald.

Saturday Mornings = Urban Farmer’s Markets

The town is crawling with them. They block off major streets just to facilitate the occasion.  It’s wonderful, and there are THREE of them within an eight block radius of my apartment alone. THREE! And it’s not just one of those skimpy farm stands where you bag your own apples. No Ma’am, this is serious business. We are talking about eggs laid by CHICKENS WITH NAMES. Not to mention cheeses that smell like feet, soy bean soap, elk meat, chocolate covered coffee beans, rhubarb-strawberry danishes, warm buttery croissants, Casablanca lilies as BIG AS YOUR FACE…and of course, fresh, local, organic produce in every shape and color you can imagine. Plus, (HELLO!) you get to try all the stuff. What more could you ask for?

And you know what –it’s not just about super fresh fruit and veggies, or free samples, or the economic savings (most stuff is 10-30% less than the local grocery store), or even that you are buying your food from the person who grew it; it’s about a mass group of people who are happy to be there. They are crowded, chatting, squealing, dodging strollers and small dogs, but they are happy to be there. Together. A community.

WHOA.

Welcome Home Bird!

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I love cat-sitting. You know I love almost as much as cat sitting? Cake.

My friend Kiki Bird went away for a week and left me in charge of her children-with-fur, Tzeitel and Yentl. Obviously I wasn’t going to let their super-model-quality good looks go undocumented and we spent most of the weekend taking pictures and laying in sun spots. A good time was had by all. 

When Bird got home, we had a feeling she was going to need a pick me up.

Enter: Cake.

To be specific, yellow sour cream cake with chocolate frosting.

I know.

You want some.

So what if it was just a doctored up box of cake mix and a can of frosting –it took 10 minutes of prep time and tasted amazing. I can’t explain why rainbow sprinkles make everything better. They just do. It’s a scientific fact.

We made tiny slits in drinking straws to serve as the base, and then cut letters from a colorful slop mat used in the Great Crayon Melting Experiment of 2009, an historic event that resulted in the loss of hair and feeling in one finger.

Just as I finished the sprinkles, Tzeitel stuck her paw up on the counter, cocked her head to the side, and said, you know what, those sprinkles would look totally hot if you put them all over your face. Maybe you should slather yourself with that jar of Vick’s Vapo Rub and see if the sprinkles will stick. Its gonna look super cute  and it won’t make your eyes sting what-so-ever. And I was all, yeah Tzei, that’s a great idea. Why don’t you kitties give makeup tips more often?

Pretty sure my Crazy Cat Lady ranking just exploded.

Welcome home Bird!