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A-ha!

Water, measuring spoons and a paint brush occupied Chase painting and measuring on the deck while I made dinner.  

Cleaning out the cupboards

We’re still out of AP flour.  I made the same old shortbread but subbed in 3/4 of a cup of oat flour and 1/2 a cup of cake flour to rave reviews.  Here’s how they looked packed up for my mid-class snack.

Cooking from the farmer’s market

I hate beets but my resolve to cook and eat fresh had me buy a bunch in spite of this.  I used a recipe from Deborah Madison’s book Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone that I borrowed from the library.  This is the second time that I’ve borrowed it I think I’m going to invest.  Super simple… grate three pounds of beets on a box grater (they will dye your hands, I learned the hard way).  Melt on tbsp butter in a skillet, add beets and cook briefly, stirring.  Season with S and P, add 1/4 water cover and cook over medium heat for another 3-5 minutes.  Remove lid and cook out any remaining liquid (I didn’t have any)  Stir in a tbsp balsamic vinegar (you could also use red wine vin or lemon juice).  Taste for seasoning and stir in 2 tbsp chopped parsley.  This might be a little off the original but is pretty much how I made it.  I will definitely make them this way again if for no other reason than to change up the veg every now and again, even Chase ate it. 

Our first recipe from Martha’s new book was a success. I didn’t have a hand in its preparation however, only the taste testing. This recipe gets my vote. Ben and I are always fighting over what to have for dessert. He likes chocolatey things and I don’t. I like fruit desserts and he doesn’t. This cookies bridges the gap pretty nicely. It doesn’t fall into the traps of the usual suspects that I don’t like for dessert that are too rich, goopy, heavy handed with the chocolate or god forbid involving ice cream (unless it’s homemade I suppose). I was really happy with how these turned out and even happier that Ben found the dutch process cocoa even though the regular cocoa was at the front of the cabinet. I am very impressed by his performance.

You can find the recipe for these cookies on her site. We used our regular little cookie scoop and cut the baking time down to ten minutes which seemed about right. We baked them in the toaster oven which is how we usually bake up cookies. Just enough to eat in one sitting at a time. We got a little quarter sheet pan and tiny silpat just for this purpose and it works perfectly. I don’t know how I survived for so long with a tiny little toaster oven. I’ll never go back.

Wanting to make cookies but having no sugar can prove problematic. I’ll tell you how we ran out of sugar. When the new Costco in Columbia opened they had a new product a giant, I mean GIANT bag of organic fair trade sugar. We got hooked and we got low I went back for more but there wasn’t any. So instead of figuring out an alternative I griped about it and hoped the situation would resolve. Meanwhile, the amount of sugar we had on hand reached a critical low this morning. Thankfully there was enough left for coffee because I don’t want to think about what could have happened if there wasn’t. We’d have been trying to sweeten our java with whatever we could find, tootsie rolls, hard candies or god forbid, honey.
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