Brown Sugar Cookies

We've all been snowed in (in Virginia Beach, that means 7") for two and a half days now, so I thought it might be nice to bring some cookies to work tomorrow, to power us through a Friday where we might not otherwise be terribly productive. So I take these out of the oven, put them on the cooling racks, and check my phone... and we're closed tomorrow. But they came out really well!

Brown Sugar Cookies

Ingredients
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp salt
12 Tbsp (that's a stick and a half) butter, room temperature
1 1/4 cups dark brown sugar, packed
2 eggs

Equipment
mixer (I used a hand mixer)
baking sheets
cooling racks (optional but highly recommended)

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 375F. In one bowl, whisk together your flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, and salt. In another bowl, beat the butter and brown sugar together until it's creamy. Add one egg, and beat until it's incorporated. Add the flour mixture and beat until it's incorporated, too. If you find that it's too powdery/crumbly to be cookie dough (like I did), add another egg and beat until incorporated. Grease your baking sheets (the original recipe called for parchment paper but I like crispy-bottomed cookies, and that's what I got) and drop heaping spoonfuls of dough about an inch or two apart. Bake for ten minutes.

Yields
I forgot to count before we started eating them, but if memory serves, I made about two dozen cookies.

Total time
30 minutes: 10 minutes to let the butter sit out and get soft; 10 minutes to measure and mix ingredients while the oven heated; 10 minutes to bake the cookies.

Cleanup rating 3/5
Cookie dough is sticky, and it's on a lot of things here: mixer beaters, bowl, spoon, the counter, my hands... Plus I tend to have "poof!" moments when measuring things like flour and just total messes with brown sugar, so the counter needed a complete wipe-down as well. And don't forget cleaning the baking sheets as well. But hey... you can lick the beaters if you aren't mortally afraid of salmonella.

Difficulty rating 4/5
As far as baking goes, this is pretty simple. The trickiest thing would be using the mixer without decorating the walls with cookie dough, followed by making evenly sized drops of dough so everything bakes the same. Not too hard.

Flavor rating 9/10
These are soooo good. They aren't insanely sweet (considering that about 1/3 of their weight must be in sugar) and - because I greased the pans - I got the crispy bottoms I like, but still a soft cookie.

Look, Birk Made Dinner! Sate and Curry Edition

So this is a couple days behind, but on Monday night, I worked til 9pm, so Birk made dinner. I ate at least half of it before I thought to take a photo and tell you guys about it... Thus the major closeup in the photo.

I can't share recipes or anything, since I didn't make it so I don't really know what he did, but the basics are...

He pan-cooked the chicken with sate seasoning (and it was soooo good), the rice had curry in it, and so did the veggies (carrots and cauliflower). YUM!

Leftovers Update: Honey-Beer Bread

Delicious though it was on the first night, this stuff does not hold up. I'd recommend making it for some kind of dinner party or a large dinner where it will all be eaten within a few hours of coming out of the oven. It got really tough overnight (not necessarily dry, but the top and edges are an ordeal).

I'm going to look into the cooking science of the recipe though, because I feel like I can fix this somehow. If anyone knows something that might be helpful, let me know!

Cinnamon Honey Butter

I have been trying to find cinnamon chips (they're chocolate chips, but with cinnamon instead of chocolate) to make a cinnamon bread with cinnamon honey butter, but I have yet to track the darn things down in this city. So I was flipping through some food Pins and saw that I had found a honey-beer bread... and we happened to have all the ingredients in the kitchen! Well... that will go well with cinnamon honey butter, right? Absolutely right.

Cinnamon Honey Butter

Ingredients
1/2 cup butter, softened (I half-melted it...)
3 Tbsp honey (microwave it for a few seconds for easier measuring/mixing)
1 tsp cinnamon (I used Vietnamese cinnamon... stronger and sweeter!)

Equipment
bowl, whisk (microwave, optional)

Instructions
Whisk your ingredients together and stick it in the fridge.

Yields
1/2 cup of butter

Total time
5 minutes (nuke the butter in a measuring cup for a few seconds instead of leaving it out to soften, which takes ages... you need cinnamon honey butter now, dammit!)

Cleanup rating 1/5
You're going to wind up licking the bowl clean anyway, so just stick it in the dishwasher when you're done doing that.

Difficulty rating 2/10
Did you see the instructions? Put stuff in a bowl and whisk it. If you have a wrist, you can make this.

Flavor rating 9/10
YUM. The recipe I Pinned was for double this recipe (I just didn't have enough honey to do that) so I halved the butter and honey but kept the cinnamon the same (and used Vietnamese cinnamon, which is stronger - and sweeter) and I think I made a good choice. It could actually stand to be cinnamonier. Totally a word.

In action, on the honey-beer bread.

Honey-Beer Bread

This is a total deviation from the kind of thing I usually make, so it was very exciting! I don't do a lot of baking, but I plan to expand my horizons in that field, starting here, with honey-beer bread.

Honey-Beer Bread

Ingredients
3 cups flour
2 T white sugar
1 T baking powder
1 t salt
2 T honey
1 (12-oz) bottle of beer (I used a Carolina blonde)
4 T (half a stick) butter, melted (divided in half)

Equipment
loaf pan (pictured above)
oven
whisk
mixing bowl

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 350F. Put your dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, salt) in a mixing bowl and give them a quick whisk. Add the beer and honey (it's a lot easier if you microwave the honey really quickly... I went with 10 seconds inside the plastic bear and everything was fine) and stir until mixed thoroughly. Pour half of your melted butter into your loaf pan (turn the pan until the bottom is coated). Pour in your batter (this action is more like "move the batter into the pan" because it's not very liquidy; it's kinda sticky) and then pour the rest of your butter on top. Bake for about an hour (until you can stick a knife in the middle and it comes out clean).

Yields
A loaf.

Total time
A little over an hour.
The prep work takes no time at all and it bakes for an hour.

Cleanup rating 3/5
I haven't had to clean the loaf pan yet, but I had some sticking issues (perhaps I should have greased the pan better?) so I anticipate a little scrubbing. The batter is sticky, though, so the mixing bowl and my wooden spoon were easy to clean (it's sticky in that way where you can just pull off all the pieces, not sticky in the way where you can't get it off of anything).

Difficulty rating 2/10
If you can measure accurately, mix with a spoon, and listen for a timer, you can make this.

Flavor rating 6/10
I really like this... but it has room for improvement. It's kind of hard to cut (it's a little crumbly, as seen in the photos below) and a little tough on the bottom/sides (which may have to do with the aforementioned pan-greasing problem). But the actual flavor is spot-on, and goes really well with my next post, cinnamon honey butter.

More photos:

Dry ingredients = big pile of white powder, which is basically what is
outside on this snow day!

Batter in the pan, waiting for the melted butter (right) to be poured on top.

Pictured: crumbly (but not dry) bread.

Paired with cinnamon honey butter... yum!

Look, I Made Breakfast

Since Birk and I both had Martin Luther King Jr Day off, we slept in, I made a big breakfast, and he studied while I worked on wedding invitations.

Some of the pancakes were a total mess.

Some looked closed to normal.

And the result.

That's pancakes, sausage, scrambled eggs, and Allie potatoes (yes, they're for breakfast too!).

The only tricky thing about a breakfast like this is timing. The eggs and sausages got cold while I figured out the right pan temperature for pancakes. (To be fair, I used the same pan for sausage, then eggs, then pancakes, so something was going to suffer, temperature-wise.) The potatoes were the warmest thing on the plate because I started them first and they were JUST ready to come out by the time I finished making everything else.

Sausage and Veggie Bake, Revisited

I faced a dilemma today: make something new for dinner so I can blog about it, or remake that incredible sausage and veggie bake from the other night? Well, if you can read post titles, you know that you missed out on reading about red pepper chicken (at least for a few more days).

But I made two little changes to the sausage and veggie bake this time, and they were both improvements.

Change 1:
Instead of cutting the red pepper into strips, I cut it into larger square-like shapes. This kept them from devolving into mush and sadness, and some of them actually got a little bit of char on the skin, which is just... so great.

Change 2:
This one is cheating actually, because it's two changes that led to the same better outcome. First, I lined the pan with foil because the stuck-on bits of potato from last time were brutal. Then - and this one was actually sort of by accident - I put the potatoes in the pan last. Last time, they went in first, so the flat edges of potato were stuck down to the pan and no oil/broth mixture got between them and the pan, making them (say it with me) get stuck to the pan. Almost nothing stuck to the foil, partially due to spraying the foil with Pam and partially due to the potatoes not being flat-side-down to it, allowing the liquid to get all up under everything.

I would share a photo, but we ate every bite. Seriously. We were hungry, and it was delicious. Still a 10/10 recipe.

Sauteed Green Beans

Whereas the baked potato that went with these is something I've made a billion times, this was a new one for me. I've been wanting to make sauteed green beans for months, ever since I started being really disappointed in the ones from Outback Steakhouse.

I adapted a few recipes from around the internet to suit my purposes.

Sauteed Green Beans

Ingredients:
fresh green beans (I settled for a bag from Target, but just not frozen)
1 clove of garlic, minced
2T olive oil
salt, pepper, seasoning of your choice

Equipment:
pot
colander
pan
stove

Instructions:
Boil a pot of water. Wash your green beans and break off the ends. When your water is boiling, add your green beans and boil them for about 4 minutes. Drain them and rinse them in cold water. (I had one that discolored and got a little mushy so I threw that one out. You want them to be pretty and green like in the picture above.) Heat the oil in the pan for about 2 minutes. Add the garlic and let it stand for about a minute. Add the green beans (well drained!) and stir them around to coat them in the oil and garlic. Sprinkle with your seasonings (I used Penzey's shallot-pepper and some salt) and stir around again. Cook for about 3-5 minutes, stirring to keep them coated and keep them from burning. When the garlic starts to turn golden-brown, they're done.

Yields:
2 servings if you make as much as I did in the photo

Total time:
about 15 minutes

Cleanup rating: 2/5
One pan to clean, a pot and a colander to rinse.

Difficulty rating: 2/10
Really easy, but you have to keep an eye on it. I could have done better on the timing portion (these were done long before the potatoes were done, but I wanted to leave myself enough time to make a new vegetable if these didn't turn out well).

Flavor rating: 8/10
Yum! I could probably improve a little bit, and I didn't use fresh green beans (hey, they're out of season... I think) but they were still really good.

And here they are with the baked potato and cheese sauce:

Baked Potatoes

Tonight's dinner is actually a two-fer but I'm making two posts. First up: baked potatoes! Super easy, but super yummy.

Baked Potatoes

Ingredients:
potatoes
kosher salt
vegetable oil

Equipment:
oven
foil
baking sheet

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 425F. Line a baking sheet with foil. Wash your potatoes and pat them dry. Stab them several times with a fork (don't stab your hand). Coat with vegetable oil (usually I just hold them over the sink, pour a little bit of oil on the top, and rub it onto the rest of the potato with my hands) and put on the pan. Sprinkle with kosher salt and bake for an hour.

Yields:
Depends on how many potatoes you use.

Total time: about an hour

Cleanup rating: 1/5
Remove foil; throw away. It does not get easier. It really does not. Unless somehow you could eat the pan, too. I don't recommend that.

Difficulty rating: 1/5
If you can remove a hot pan from the oven without disaster, you can make baked potatoes. Oh and avoid stabbing your hand with the fork. But I only did that once. And it wasn't tonight.

Flavor rating: 10/10
To be fair, this is pretty much my favorite food ever. Plus, it sort of depends on what you put on the potatoes. I use butter, salt, and this time, leftovers of Elaine's cheese sauce, which I must get the recipe for and make for you guys some time. By which I mean make for myself and tell you how to make.

Here it is in all its cheese-sauce-y glory (along with the sauteed green beans):

Chicken

There's really nothing else to call this... it's just chicken.

I'm not writing an official recipe for this, because... it's just chicken. But it turned out pretty and it's what we ate for dinner so I wanted to show you the pictures. We used the Northwoods seasoning from Penzey's (pictured... blurry) and had Stove Top stuffing with the chicken. I know, I skipped the veggies, but wait until you see tomorrow night's dinner and you'll see plenty of veg.

In progress picture:

For the beginners in the audience, this is what you do:

- Wash your chicken breasts and pat them dry.

- Put a little oil (I use vegetable oil... and there's too much in the photo, if you can tell) in a pan. Put it on medium heat.

- When it's starting to get hot, add the chicken (carefully... water + hot oil = ouch).

- Season the top of it and wait. Keep waiting. This is thick chicken... wait a little longer.

- Turn them over, season again. Wait some more.

- Turn them over a couple times. Eventually, cut into the thickest part of one of them to see if it's done. If it's not, keep waiting and turning. If it is, take them out and eat them.

Ta-da! Chicken.

For tagging purposes...

Total time: 15 minutes

Cleanup rating: 2/5 (If you clean the pan after you eat, you won't have to scrub hard or soak the pan, so don't forget!)

Difficulty rating: 1/10 (I didn't even bother writing a real recipe, so it must be easy!)

Flavor rating: 7/10 (I'm not crazy about the Northwoods seasoning, but it's pretty good. Also, the thick chicken breasts stay juicy, whereas smaller pieces cook faster but dry out a little more.)

Allie Potatoes

My family calls me Allie, not Alex. That is - probably obviously - where these potatoes (or at least their predecessors) got their name.

When I was little, I'd stay over at my grandparents' house, and my grandfather would be posed with the challenging task of making a dinner I would eat. I was a super picky eater before about mid-high-school or so.

So one of the tried-and-true foods he figured out I loved no matter what you did to them was potatoes. This holds true today, but below, you will find my favorite method of preparing potatoes to be put into my mouth.

The original Allie potatoes were sliced thinly (but a little thicker than if you wanted crispy chips) not diced, and he used, if I remember correctly, garlic and onion powder and paprika. I use basically whatever spice I grab first. But the basic idea is still there, and it's totally customizable, which is one of the best things about it.

Allie Potatoes

Ingredients:
A potato (russet or white is what I usually go with)
Oil (vegetable oil is my favorite, or use canola, peanut, olive... whatever)
Spices/seasoning (literally whatever you want... in this batch I used Penzey's Sate seasoning which is just so oh-my-gosh-yum)

Equipment:
Cookie/baking sheet
Foil (optional for easier cleanup)
Plastic bag
Knife & cutting board for dicing potatoes
Oven

Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 375F. Dice your potatoes into even-sized pieces. (If you're cooking something else to go with it, make larger pieces if you need to use more time or smaller pieces if the other thing will cook faster.) Put them in the plastic bag. Add oil (enough to coat the potatoes) and spices/seasonings to the bag. Seal the bag and shake it up to evenly coat the potatoes. Open the bag and dump them onto a foil-lined baking sheet. (I also spray my foil with a little cooking spray but that's probably overkill... the oil usually keeps them from sticking.) Spread the potatoes out evenly on the sheet, and sprinkle with a little more seasoning. Bake for about 25-30 minutes (baking time will depend on the size of your potatoes... the pieces seen in the photo above - I know there's nothing there for scale - took 30 minutes).

Yields:
2 servings as a side (1 serving if you're a potato nut like me and could eat a bag of potatoes alone)

Total time:
a little over 30 minutes (depends on the size of your potato pieces)

Cleanup rating: 1/5
If you use foil, cleanup involves rinsing your knife and cutting board, and throwing away a plastic bag and a piece of foil. I would give it a 0/5 if that made sense.

Difficulty rating: 1/10
This is literally one of the handful of things I could make all by myself when I left for college. (I could make a lot of things after checking the details with my dad or grandfather, but this one is idiot-proof, or at least as idiot-proof as real cooking gets.)

Flavor rating: 10/10
This is one of my favorite foods, so of course I think it's a solid 10. Sometimes I try a new seasoning and it falls a little flat. My favorite is the basics: garlic powder, onion powder, paprika and a little salt. This time, with the Sate seasoning, was really good too. I've also used taco seasoning, garlic and cumin, Italian seasoning from a package, nothing but salt... the possibilities are endless. Another great addition? Use one potato and one sweet potato. YUM.

Simple Stuffed Shells

Can you believe it? I made a real dinner two nights in a row! Now, tonight's wasn't nearly as exciting or delicious as last night's but it was dinner.

In cleaning out and reorganizing the kitchen cabinets the other day, I found that we still had half a box of large shell pasta... not something we use often. (Pasta in general, that is; and especially large shells.) Since we also had a jar of sauce and a block of gruyere and all the seasonings we could ever need, I asked Birk to pick up some ricotta on his way home so I could make this!

Ingredients:
15-20 large pasta shells
1/2 jar of pasta sauce (ours was five-cheese Bertolli... not my favorite)
shredded Gruyere
ricotta cheese
Penzey's Brady Street cheese sprinkle (to taste)
Penzey's shallot-pepper seasoning (to taste)
frozen peas
butter
salt
granulated garlic

Equipment:
pot large enough for your pasta
colander
pan large enough to hold your pasta
microwave (for the peas)
stove
oven

Instructions:
Boil your pasta shells according to the package. (About 15 minutes.) Preheat the oven to 375F. Strain them and put them in a greased pan. Put a spoonful of ricotta inside each shell. Pour sauce over shells. Sprinkle with the cheese sprinkle and seasoning; cover with shredded Gruyere. Bake, uncovered, in oven for 10-15 minutes (until cheese is melted). Meanwhile, put peas in a bowl with butter and salt, and microwave about 90 seconds until cooked. Sprinkle with garlic. Enjoy!

Yields: 4 servings (but I only made 2 servings of peas... leftover peas are unnecessary when you can just make more while warming up your leftover shells)

Total time: about 30 minutes

Cleanup rating: 1/5
I lined the pan with foil so I don't even have to clean that up. Otherwise, you just have to rinse your colander and pasta pot.

Difficulty rating: 2/10
A beginner cook can make this easily. The hardest thing is knowing when your pasta is done (mine was a little underdone because I am an impatient cook).

Flavor rating: 5/10
To be fair, I wasn't very hungry because I had a late lunch (of leftovers from yesterday's Sausage & Veggie Bake). But also, I'm not a fan of the Bertolli sauce. I've yet to find a jar sauce I love... looks like I'll just have to start making my own sauce... look for that in the future!

Sausage and Veggie Bake

I got this recipe via Pinterest from here. It looked delicious, and since I had today off work, I thought it would be a nice cold-weather, stay-at-home-all-afternoon kind of dinner to make. I was so right.

I promise I'll get better at photographing the food I post here...

I made a few slight adjustments to the original recipe for personal taste, so instead of retyping her recipe, I'll tell you what I did.

Ingredients:
1/2 pound baby carrots
1 pound potatoes (I used white potatoes)
1/2 a large onion
1/2 a red bell pepper
4 sausages (I used beer brats)
1/2 cup chicken broth
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 1/2 tsp Italian seasoning
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp (ish) shallot-pepper seasoning
salt to taste
4 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

Equipment:
Oven
Pyrex baking dish (or roasting pan if you have one... I don't)
aluminum foil
pan (for sausages)

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 450F. Wash, peel, and cube your potatoes (about 1.5 - 2 inch cubes). Cut your onion half into wedges. Slice your bell pepper half into strips. Put all of these in the Pyrex dish or roasting pan. In a bowl, combine the broth, oil, Italian seasoning, and garlic. Mix it together and pour over the veggies in the pan. Sprinkle with salt and shallot-pepper seasoning. Cover tightly with foil and bake for 45 minutes. Brown sausages in a pan (they don't have to cook all the way through). After 45 minutes, the veggies should be fork-tender. (If they aren't, cook them until they are.) Cut the sausages into quarters and add them to the pan. Add the balsamic vinegar evenly across the top. Return to the oven uncovered for 15 minutes. Using a spoon, distribute juices and turn over sausages/veggies. Bake another 5-10 minutes. Enjoy!

Yields: 4 servings

Total time: about 1.5 hours

Cleanup rating: 2/5
The balsamic vinegar makes quite a mess in the Pyrex dish, but other than rinsing out your measuring implements and your sausage pan, this is the only thing you really need to clean.

Difficulty rating: 3/10
There are four skills required: cut vegetables into even-sized pieces, measure things properly, brown sausages, and pay attention to a timer. The only things that would get in the way of me making this would be not having the time (if I'm cooking when I get home from work, I want it done in 30 minutes or less, not 90) or not having the ingredients. Or having eaten it three times that week already...

Flavor rating: 10/10
I think I made a great choice getting the beer brats... they went extremely well with the veggies and the balsamic vinegar and everything. YUM. Of course I had seconds. And the best part is, there are leftovers for tomorrow!

I'll leave you with a few work in progress photos:

Browning the brats

Before putting the veggies in the first time.