Second-stab Saturday: Pepper cake is so much better with chocolate chips

Today on Second-Stab Saturdays, we present what we made to justify our friends driving out to try our sad run-in with the inbred ancestor of gingerbread!

Chocolate Chip bars 3 eggs 1½ c sugar 1½ c flour Almond extract 12 oz chocolate chips (semisweet or milk chocolate, whichever you like) Heat oven to 325°. Grease and flour a 9"x13" pan*. Beat eggs and sugar until thoroughly mixed. Stir in almond extract. Mix in flour gently but thoroughly. Stir in chocolate chips. Spread into the pan. Bake 30-45 minutes, until slightly golden on top (it'll probably be paler than you think it should be) and when a knife/toothpick/whatever comes out with no melted batter on it. Cut them while very hot. *These really want to stick to the pan, so you'll want to take the extra step of flouring it before putting the dough in. -Adapted from the Woman's Club of Ft. Worth Cook Book, 1928 (submitter: Mrs. Henry King)

As some of you may know, we tried a pepper cake a while ago which seemed like it really wanted to be chocolate chip cookies. It was good, but seemed like it wanted to be made with chocolate chips.

Jumbo chocolate chips.

Having run out of vanilla, a generous allotment of almond extract was used. It was so worth it. However, due to the 9x13 pan being occupied with the unbearable sadness of culinary Tudor travesties, it went in the skillet this time.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy...

And the results? Well, I did overbake it a bit. Thrown off by the lack of color on top, I accidentally let it get a bit hardened in the oven. And yet, this is how much was left:

Kelly chiselled these out of the pan and took them home.

So, to repeat, the gingerbread was so bad that six people left this much in the pan:

And this was so good that even the crumbs were wrapped up and taken home. The hardened edge pieces were so tasty I could have passed them off as chocolate chip biscotti. This is amazing. Plus, skipping out on beating the eggs beforehand made this easier, faster, and I didn't have to wash a second bowl.  Today's second stab is a total success!

Don't Cook on an empty stomach: A Deep-Dish Lesson from all of us at A Book of Cookrye

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we would like to offer some gracious advice. We all have those days when it seems the universe does not want to afford us a lunch break. If you've been on your feet all day, scarcely stopping anywhere long enough to eat, you may not want to do any cooking. Otherwise, things like this might happen.

If you've had one of those days when it seems Gods' mysterious designs of love don't involve you having half an hour or so to get drive-thru, you will doubtless want to sup on something that makes up for it. That does not mean you should put this much meat in a pan:

Beef and sausage.

You may decide that despite its unfortunate resemblance to silicone spray, a canned pizza crust seems perfect for encasing what currently resides in the frying pan.

Even though your friend will figure out a good way to make the crust hold its shape while you're baking it, catch yourself in your erroneous ways and desist.

This will surely bring regret to you before the night is out. It's not too late to save the meat for some greater use.

You may try to tell yourself that you haven't had any protein all day and that tomato sauce is healthy, but in your heart you know you are deceiving yourself.

You may say that the cheese on top provides the calcium you haven't had all day, but you know that is a lie.

No amount of fresh produce on top can redeem you from what you are doing, even if it does look like the flag of Mexico on the cutting board.

You thought I was joking?

You may, at this point, decide it photographs really well. Savor this moment, for you will need it when the regret arrives.

By the time you remove it from the oven, it will be too late. Your fate is now inescapable, so you may as well not delay it.

Note the bicycles. Spend a lot of time with them afterward if you do this to yourself.

Just remember, when your "pizza" is nearly as deep as a loaf pan...

We'd already bent them for the crust, why bother getting out plates?

Even though your friend gets this happy eating it...

And even though at first you feel like this...

You'll be lying on the couch with only regret and pain before three hours have passed.

Cookie Surprise with Special Surprise Ingredient!

Sometimes, I get the urge to try recipes simply because they sound terrible but someone swears they're delicious. From other people's blogs, I've tried tomato soup chocolate cake (don't ask me why, but it's really good), ketchup cake (Not sure if it was the cake or the cream cheese icing, but it too was really good), and tomato soup spice cake (kind of like a knockoff war cake).

In my post-presentation/midterm/other presentation/group assignment delirium (seriously, everything was due this week), I thought it would be a good idea to take a cookie recipe that had been so good the last time we made it and see what would happen when you added... er...

Well, you know what? We'll get to that later. Here's the original recipe, for those who want to try it (and you totally should, they're delicious). Although you'll probably want to cut it in half or maybe quarter it:

A Book of Selected Recipes, Mrs. George Thurn, 1934

These are like slice-and-bake blondies. So I thought to myself, what would happen if we added...

Just stir it in and pretend it's not there.

Here I must go back a bit and defend dumping barbecue sauce into cookies. First, if dumping a can of tomato soup in chocolate cake can be as freakishly delicious as it is (it's the only reason I buy tomato soup), it stood to reason that this might produce something like spice-cake cookies with an interesting twist. Second, I quartered the recipe (any smaller and I'd have been subdividing eggs), so if this didn't work there wouldn't be a lot of them. Third, there's nothing wrong with making really weird experimental culinary perpetrations-- the problem is when you then serve it to others without first tasting it yourself.

It looks so innocent...

I think it's fun to try weird stuff like this, though I can never do it at home because I'd never hear the last of it. Out of my parents' house, there's nothing stopping me from discreetly chucking the experimental results into the trash can and saying I forgot they were in the oven. Therefore, the worst that could happen was I would try one, discover it tasted terrible, throw it all out, and that's the end of it. The best case: Surprising tastiness!

The additional liquid made it too runny to shape like cookies.

...or so I thought. This was in the middle of the afternoon, and someone saw me putting the secret ingredient in. By the time these were done, I'd explained to an awful lot of people that I was curious how it'd come out, there's nothing wrong with experimenting, worst case I just throw them out, etc etc. So a lot of people were curious how these would end up.

Are you ready for this?

I tried one and... er... well, the taste was definitely interesting. They weren't bad, but they weren't good either. Unfortunately, some people were asking how they came out before I could get the rest in the trash and say I accidentally burned them, so... well... so much for not having to serve others experimental failures. Responses ranged from "Eh, it's all right" to "Y'know, they're actually not bad." One person said it tasted exactly like the skin on fried chicken from this one specific place in his hometown.
And so, in conclusion... do your really weird recipes when no one's looking. If they turn out delicious, you can then bring them into daylight.

Oh, yum.

Garlic-Parmesan Waffle Breadsticks!

Ever get one of those oddly specific cravings?

Garlic-Parmesan Waffle Breadsticks ¾ cup whole wheat flour ¼ cup cornstarch ½ teaspoon baking powder Generous amount of black pepper 1 teaspoon baking soda 1-2; teaspoon salt ¾-1¼ cups milk 1 egg ¼ cup oil (olive oil would be nice) 1 tbsp. minced garlic 1 tablespoon vinegar Shredded Parmesan cheese 1. Preheat waffle iron. 2. Combine all dry ingredients and mix well. 3. Add milk, egg, and oil, and mix well to combine. Add enough liquid so that batter makes a small mound or ribbon temporarily before returning to level. 4. Add the garlic and gently stir. 5. Right before pouring batter onto a very well-greased waffle iron, add vinegar and mix quickly. Make waffles as per the instructions for your specific waffle maker. Sprinkle Parmesan cheese on the lower grid right before pouring the batter, and sprinkle more on top of it right before closing the lid. 6. Place on a cooling rack immediately after removing from waffle iron. 7. If you plan to freeze and reheat, wrap each waffle individually, and reheat in your toaster on a medium setting. Makes 3 to 4 8-inch Belgian waffles. These are good with spaghetti sauce. Note: Adding garlic and cheese to a waffle mix probably won't be good. The makers usually sweeten them. Adapted from Eat Fresh: Quick and Easy Meals by Tom Woodbury via this article

It was late at night and I was reading some 1500s French guy's thoughts on dying (sometimes I think nothing turns a generation of students off of pleasure reading quite like literature classes). I needed something crispy with cheese and spaghetti sauce.

And a big lump of garlic.

Ever since I found this waffle recipe online, I've been making it a lot. The original recipe had suggested variations involving fruit, so naturally I got out the garlic.

Sizzle sizzle sizzle...

The idea of garlic and cheese in waffles does sound really bad if you're thinking of waffles as crispy syrup carriers (which admittedly are pretty tasty) at breakfast. But if you  just think of these as bread, you realize you get extra-crispy, cheesy garlic bread!

I tried stirring the cheese into the batter, but that proved a waste because the taste completely disappeared. It's much better on top of and beneath. As a bonus, since it spends the entire cooking time pressed into the really hot metal grids, it becomes crisp and toasty.

This is hardly a revolutionary idea in bread, but they're really good. Also, especially in the summer, the oven needn't get involved- meaning the kitchen doesn't get so hot.

Second-Stab Saturday with Extra Food Coloring: Cookies!

It's another Second-Stab Saturday here on A Book of Cookrye! Today, we are sanitizing tea trays (so exciting, right?) and attempting to make Mom's cookies properly.
You see, I wrote her asking where she got this recipe from, and she replied that she got it from a friend in the early 90s (we still get Christmas cards from them) and that fact I'd inadvertently run off with the Christmas cookies we've covered with fanciful (if not inept) icing decorations ever since we were kids.

Sugar cookies ½ c butter ¼ c sugar 1 tsp. almond extract (or lemon or vanilla) Food coloring if desired 1¼ c flour Sugar for rolling Heat oven to 300°. Grease a cookie sheet well. Thoroughly beat the sugar and butter (it's easier if you leave the butter out to soften all day than if you microwave it). Stir in the extract and coloring, then mix in the flour. Roll into 1-inch balls, and roll these in sugar. Place on the cookie sheet, and give each a light tap with the measuring cup to flatten just a little bit. Bake 15-20 minutes, until slightly golden at the edge and cooked through. Refrigerate the dough for a few hours after shaping for a more shortbread-like texture.

Every other week or so, I bake a batch of something or other to properly sanitize my tea tray. Why do I have a tea tray? Because I am immune to alarm clocks and had to order one of these:

It's a special sort of person who has something that boils water right next to their bed while they're asleep.

Most alarm clocks make obnoxious buzzing sounds to yank you out of your sleep, this one boils a pot of tea. Then it makes obnoxious buzzing sounds to yank you out of your sleep, but the sound of boiling water squirting into a teapot probably already woke you up anyway. An extravagance perhaps, but I'd have flunked my 8AM classes without it.
However, attempting to pour out scalding tea when you've been awake for at most four minutes is always a dicey operation which added many stains to the desk until someone abandoned this tea tray-sized pan in the kitchen. It's made cleaning a lot easier, but after a week or so, it looks like this:

And so it must be washed and sanitized! Why sanitized, you ask? Because I worry so much about whatever took up residence on a constantly-damp surface and the oven is a perfect fix. Also, as long as I'm baking the pan, why not put cookies on it? Or brownies? Or... well, it depends on the week. It's also a nice little "Congratulations, me, you survived the week!" present.
So, for this week, it's cookies! I may not have recognized it as Mom's Christmas cookie recipe since, unlike every Christmas, no food coloring was involved when I made them. Having no shame in my tight grocery budget, I skipped buying some in favor of asking Marcus to cadge some off his parents the next time he visited. I think the box may have been in the cabinets a while...

That's the sort of woodgrain print that belongs on the side of a TV.

And thus I decided that these cookies would be... somewhere between cyan and teal. I've dissertated previously how much I fricken love putting random coloring into desserts. Perhaps I should be all grown up now, but a birthday cake is so much better if it's bright blue. Besides, it's so magical when you put some drops of black stuff into your food...

...and it turns into pretty colors!

Those green and blue swirls would look really cool painted on plates.

Looking at the cookie dough, it's kind of surprising I didn't attempt to eat Play-Doh as a child.

Who else looks at this and wants to make it into little people and then squish them?

Even though at home Mom always does this with a cookie cutter, I went the easy route and just rolled it. I also skipped refrigerating it because patience is one of those things other people should definitely consider trying.

Tada!

And... these are delicious. They're amazing. They're ridiculously easy. But you know what? My Mom still makes them better than I do.

Better eating through potential biohazards, or Free beef!

As some of you may have noticed, if we at A Book of Cookrye ever feature beef, it came with a Manager's Special sticker on the front. A week ago, we procured a decent-sized tray of hamburger, which the other day we removed from the freezer to thaw out. The next day, what should we find next to our still-frozen meat but.... this!

Here I must step back and explain a couple of things. The first is that the kitchen rules sign has, after the commands to clean up after yourself which some people pay attention to, is a line that any unlabeled food in the refrigerator is fair game for everybody. This one everyone takes seriously. People routinely will examine everything in the refrigerator very carefully, hoping that the box of Hot Pockets does not have someone's name written on it. 

Second, er... who the heck leaves an unwrapped tray of raw meat in the refrigerator like that? I don't have to say much about this being how disease starts, do I? Since it's already headed for the trash before it goes rancid, it seemed only practical to divert it ovenward. 

This meat was unlabeled, unwrapped and a sickness epidemic waiting to happen. Clearly some divine force had finally decided that my grocery budget deserved a heck of a windfall in the form of cow. This meant it was time to try a recipe from this book I've been wondering about for a while:

Even now I look at it and ask myself why.

...and also to make a meatloaf because I effing love meatloaf.

I got these apples from the discounted produce rack, although I don't see what was wrong with them aside from a couple of wrinkles.

Note the typo on my cutting board.

I actually didn't pick this one recipe for the sake of personal terror. For some reason, it honestly looked like one of those "you never think it'll work, but once you try it..." sort of recipes. Kind of like apple pie with cheese on top, you just never know. Also, there was a lovely surprise from grinding the apples: an awful lot of juice dripped out the back of the grinder into the bowl I had set under it. You know, the opaque stuff that's not from concentrate and actually tastes like apples.

Heck yes.

However, I had no idea whether I was supposed to use equal volumes or weights of apples and meat. Going with the path of least effort, I just eyeballed it.

That was quick.

Ever wondered what beef and apples look like mixed together?

Wonder no more!

Here we come to where the recipe and I diverge. Fry these? Although you just know it's good, I really didn't want to eat fried foods right now. They went in the oven. I coated them in flour anyway, and you can see the outside trying to become a crispy outer skin.

As for the taste: Honestly, these are really good. A lot of times when we put sweet things on meat, it comes off as overly sugary like crappy barbecue sauce. This was subtle, and the apples' tartness was absolutely delicious. These did not last long, and I would totally make them again. However, they seem like they're supposed to go on top of something and I have no idea what. Is there a sauerkraut casserole recipe elsewhere in the book that ends with "Top with Mrs. W. J. Bailey's Apple Meat Balls"?

However, my free-meat-induced euphoria (I was actually singing, to the tune of Happy Birthday, "Merry Christmas to me, Merry Christmas to me...") was nowhere near done. You may have noticed that was a big tray just waiting there, and I only used a handful of meat for the apple balls. I hadn't had a meatloaf in a long time.

The other ingredients: One pulverized bell pepper, a generous squirt of squeezy garlic, and a lot of salt and pepper.

This was the best meatloaf I've had in a long time. No breadcrumbs, no egg, nothing but (free!)  meat, green pepper and lots of garlic.

Also, free ketchup to go on top.

I didn't care that the pan looked like this when it was baked.

I just let it soak while I did homework and it all came right off by the time I got to it.

I also didn't care that the grease spattered so much I had to run a cleaning cycle in the oven so it wouldn't fog up the kitchen the next time someone turned it on. 

Merry Christmas to me, Merry Christmas to me...

Every now and then something goes really right, and heck yes this was awesome. Plus, I got to give away some of the meatloaf to others to pass on the windfall. La vie, c'est si bon.

Hump-Day Quickie for those Long Nights: Bread Pudding

I don't know about you, but sometimes it seems that everything comes up at the beginning of the week. I suppose it's nice that by the time I've slogged my way to Friday everything's done, but the beginning of the week is when there's a pile of stuff due tomorrow, hardly anything to eat, no time to run to the grocery store, and I start speculatively eyeing food that's been abandoned downstairs in the kitchen...

Bread Pudding Heat oven to 350°. Grease a round cake pan. Tear old bread into pieces and pour milk over them. Mix together. You want to use just enough milk that it all gets absorbed and the bread is completely soggy, but not so much that it turns into soup. There should be at most a spoonful of milk at the bottom of the bowl that didn't quite soak in- pour off any excess. Let sit a minute or two, then squish and mash it with your hands. Beat in the eggs- about one egg per half of a sandwich loaf (that's 1 egg per 9-12 ounces of bread). When mixed, add enough brown sugar (preferably dark) to make it about as sweet as your average cake batter*. Add also baking powder (about a teaspoon per half of a sandwich loaf), and spices to taste. Lastly, stir in raisins to taste. Pour into pan and bake 30 minutes, until a knife in the middle comes out with no liquid batter on it (ideally it won't quite be totally clean and dry). This is good warm, room temp, or cold. Tightly wrapped, it keeps well in the refrigerator. The amounts below are how much I happened to use this time; there's a lot of room for leeway based on how much of what is lying around. 10 oz old bread ¾ c milk† 1 egg ¾ c brown sugar, preferably dark Spices to taste (cinnamon, cloves, mace, nutmeg, &c) ¼-½ c. raisins 1 tsp baking powder *There may still be little pieces of bread that won't soften and mix in. As long as they're small, they will soften in the oven. So, you needn't worry about them unless the appearance bothers you. †Powdered milk will work just fine, but mix it a bit richer than the directions say to.

The shelf life of white sandwich bread kind of unnerves me. A package of hamburger buns from a barbecue we had six weeks ago has been sitting in the kitchen getting stale. You'd think bread would have a healthy fur coat after six weeks, but these were just stiff. Perhaps in addition to cockroaches and Twinkies, white bread will survive the nuclear apocalypse.

Given that you can't smell it, it kind of looks like tuna salad.

Then again, given that I live in a building with, y'know, other broke college students, one should not ask why a bag of bread didn't expire for six weeks. The real question is how did it manage to sit out on the counter with no one's name on it for six weeks? In any case, this is really easy and made reading some of the dullest writing to come out of the 1300s bearable.

Even if the little bread pieces and raisins look like maggots and flies got in there.

This is definitely not one of the more photogenic things I've ever made. It may look sort of like a cake on top (albeit a somewhat leathery one), but when cut, the texture is somewhere between cake, brownie, and custard.

However, it's actually pretty tasty. It's kind of like a spice cake. I'm not going to go out and say this is the best thing ever, but it's pretty good, really easy, cheap, and makes a long list of things to do go by with a lot less vexation.