I am a procrastinator baker. If there is dusting to be done, I bake cookies. Pictures to be hung? I make bread. Toilets to cleaned? I must find a use for those browning bananas.
So this weekend when the floors desperately needed to be swept and mopped, I found myself in the kitchen once again baking up this week’s Tuesday’s with Dorie selection, Coconut Butter Thins.
No, these aren’t oatmeal creme pies! But they look like them, don’t they?
Kate at the clean plate club has a baking group called The Cookie Carnival. She will be posting around the end of every month a round-up of all the bloggers that make a chosen cookie recipe.
I’ll tell you, I’m all for celebrating the cookie! I probably make cookies more than any other dessert, just because they are fun, family friendly, and freezer friendly. So this week I’m going to have my own Cookie Carnival and post cookie recipes all week.
Let’s just get something out of the way right now, before going any further. I have a serious love for food, and I don’t discriminate. If you read through all these posts, you would definitely notice the words I LOVE in probably every one.
My kids have been into this game lately where they say, “If you had to choose between chocolate and cake, which would you choose?”, “How about cake or ice cream?”, or “If you had to choose one food to eat for the rest of your life, what would it be?”. They can’t seem to understand when I say I don’t know, that for Mommy, this is the hardest question in the world. I just can’t choose favorites when it comes to food. It would be like choosing between my children.
There’s a boy in my son’s second grade class who is constantly making up stories. And my son, bless his heart, believes every word he says. Most recently, my son reported, this boy made up a new crayon color, sent it to Crayola, and they are going to start putting in their box of 64.
I had to explain to him that sometimes other people don’t always tell the truth. “You mean he LIED??”, he asked, horrified. “Well, this is more like a tall tale”, I told him. So now he’s never sure he wants to tell me the latest from the tall tale teller, ’cause he knows I probably won’t believe him. Bless his heart.
My husband’s favorite food is cereal. He could eat it for every meal and snack, with a little chocolate thrown in for good measure, and never get tired of it. Doesn’t allow me much room for creativity, does it?
Thankfully, he is willing to change it up at dinnertime and eat what I cook. Lucky for him, he can now get his vitamins from something other than the powdered ones sprayed on his Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
His second favorite food is shrimp, which was his only request for our wedding reception (after being told we couldn’t have a cereal bar). He loves them in any form (except jumbo) and any flavor, but loves them the most with a big helping of creamy grits.
Okay, are y’all ready for some more biscuits?
This is the second batch I made in my ongoing quest for the perfect buttermilk biscuit. You can find Batch Number One, made with unbleached all-purpose flour and shortening here. Batch Number Two was made with bleached, enriched flour and shortening, and actually turned into sub-batch a & b (how disturbingly obsessive is this?).
It really just blows my mind when I think about the number of books in the world. I feel like I’m in a race to read as many as I can before I die. There’s just not enough time.
That’s how I feel about recipes, too. I have tons of cookbooks (and keep buying them!), piles of recipes I have clipped or printed out, a computer file of saved recipes, and a list of my own recipe ideas. JUST NOT ENOUGH TIME! I think I need some kind of a plan of action to help me tackle some of these recipes and gain a little sense of control in my kitchen.
Last summer I came across a reference online to a cookbook called Screen Doors and Sweet Tea by Martha Hall Foose, and well, the title had me at ‘screen doors’. I promptly went to Amazon and ordered it, and it turned out to be even better than I imagined.
This book is full of traditional and contemporary Southern recipes from the author’s native Mississippi and I am slowly making my way through each one. Since I love to read and to cook, I really enjoy cookbooks like this one that have stories and history along with the recipes. Continue reading
Dear Williams-Sonoma,
You are one of my favorite places to shop. I love to look at your great selection of gourmet kitchen accessories and food products. The recipes from your catalog and website are always exciting and delicious. I have really enjoyed building a relationship with you.
It hurts me to say, however, that there is one thing that bothers me about your store that I just can’t get over.
Get next to someone you love when you make this Chicken Piccata recipe from Ina Garten, ’cause it’s gonna make you pucker!
Super lemony and super tart – that’s how I would describe the sauce for this dish. If that’s how you like your piccata, go for it! If not, you’d better tone it down a bit.
I laughed so hard when I saw this…I had to rewind and watch it about 6 more times:
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Finally, a light at the end of the long, cold, winter tunnel. I do believe I suffer from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), and would never make it anywhere farther north without a blue light.
After enduring a weekend of cold rain and two children with the flu, I think a celebration is in order. With temperatures in the 70’s this weekend, I have cracked open my bottle of Firefly Sweet Tea Vodka, bought a few weeks ago with dreams of enjoying it on my back porch.
In the town where we lived previously, I used to get my fish from a man who would travel on Thursday from Greensboro to Topsail Island and pick up loads of fish and shrimp and bring them back to sell on Friday and Saturday. I discovered him one day set up across from the Farmer’s Market and bought some shrimp that turned out to be the best shrimp I had ever eaten. After that I was hooked (pun intended).
I started getting all my seafood from “the fish man”, as my children called him, and would pick it up on Fridays after school (which caused no small amount of moaning and groaning in the back seat). It was all fresh, never frozen, and top quality. I found out that I could cook fish at home that tasted better than even what I ate at most restaurants. Spoiled is what I would call it.
I don’t know what food embodies the South more than the Buttermilk Biscuit. And just like most other foods of the South, the biscuit recipe is one that is handed down through generations and every family has their own way of making them. A marriage in the South often leads to a little (or a lot) of argument discussion over what makes a good biscuit.
My mom’s mother could throw together a batch of biscuits in a matter of minutes, cutting hers out with a can and baking the scraps into little pieces for us to snack on. My dad’s mother would use what I’ve seen referred to as the pinch method – she would pinch off pieces of dough, roll them up and flatten them in the pan with her knuckles. My mother, a terrific cook and baker, was surprisingly not much of a biscuit maker, preferring the yeast roll or sometimes (gasp) biscuits that came from a can. Continue reading
This is the time of year I begin to despise weather reporters. All I want to hear when I watch the forecast is “Sunny, with a high of 69”, or something along those lines. But what I get instead is “Freezing rain and snow, high 38.” That’s when I growl and turn off the TV.
I know it’s not their fault, and it’s nothing personal, but who else can I take my frustrations out on? I’ve had enough of putting on coats and sweaters and socks – oh, the endless socks I have to wash and sort in the winter!
Shortbread 