Sunday, October 27, 2024

Cookies...

One of my favorite things to bake, and eat, is cookies!  My Mom's most used cookie recipe was this one:


I used to stick pretty closely to this recipe, but over the years I have changed up what I do a bit. 

Incidentally, Mom once told me she would add the word "cowboy" to any recipe to make sure my older siblings would eat it if it had dodgy ingredients.  "Cowboy Delight" is mac and cheese with tomato sauce and hamburger.  I guess my siblings disliked the tomato sauce.  And "Cowboy Chocolate Chip Cookies" contain dreaded oatmeal.  

Always cream the sugar and fat a lot before you mix in the eggs, and then mix a lot more with the eggs.  This advice was given to me by Jerry, the head pastry chef at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building when I worked as a gardener at Temple Square, and we would sneak down to the kitchens so he could give us chunks of frozen cookie dough...  He said the fluffier the better for cookies, but only up through the eggs.

I have an old flour sifter that I scoop up the flour in, then add the salt, baking powder, and baking soda so the sifter mixes them together.  If you don't have a sifter mix the dry ingredients together with a whisk in a separate bowl.  You don't want to get all the salt in one cookie...

Mom's COWBOY CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

1 3/4 c sugar
1 3/4 c brown sugar
2 c shortening
4 eggs
1 t vanilla
4 1/2 c flour
1 t baking powder
2 t salt
2 t baking soda
2 c quick oats (must use quick oats!)
1 bag chocolate chips
1 bag butterscotch chips
-Mix it up!  Drop onto cookie sheets.  Bake at 350 for 7 to 10 minutes.  Makes about 100 cookies.
-When I make this version, I use a cup and a half of shortening, and about a half cup of vanilla or plain yogurt.  And I don't use the full two cups of quick oats, only about three handfuls.
-I always use 2 teaspoons of vanilla.  I don't know where I got that, because Mom's written recipe only has one, but it's been working well so, whatever.

Here are my variations:

PEANUT BUTTER COOKIES
1 3/4 c sugar
1 3/4 brown sugar
1 c shortening
1 c peanut butter (I use creamy because I don't like nuts)
4 eggs
2 t vanilla
~3 1/2 c flour
2 t salt
2 t baking soda
1 t baking powder
1 bag peanut butter chips
1 bag chocolate chips
-sometimes I add Reese's Pieces as well

"HEALTHY" COOKIES
-use 1 c shortening and 4-6 ounces vanilla yogurt
-use wheat flour instead of white
-add about a half cup almond meal
-add some flax seeds
-use chocolate and white chocolate chips
-add dried cherries and dried cranberries

APPLE COOKIES
-use 1 c shortening and 1/2 c applesauce and one small container (4 oz) plain Greek yogurt
-omit all chocolate chips, instead dice up about 4 apples and put in
-add 2 t cinnamon and 1 t cardamom to dry ingredients

NEW BUTTERSCOTCH COOKIES
-Make the basic cookie recipe, but use either 1 cup butter, very soft, or 1/2 cup butter very soft, with about 1/2 cup vanilla or plain yogurt.
-Don't add oatmeal.
-You might need to add a bit more flour, but not too much.

RASPBERRY COOKIES (My new favorite...)
-Use 1 cup shortening
-Add 1/2 cup butter, very soft, and a heaping half cup of vanilla yogurt.
-Use 1 bag white chocolate chips and 1 bag milk chocolate chips.
-Scrunch up (slightly) a 1.2 oz bag of freeze dried raspberries.  I get mine at Trader Joes.  Add them with the chocolate chips.
-This is my new favorite variation, because they have an amazing real raspberry flavor without being overwhelmingly sweet.  So good!

Friday, March 22, 2024

Book Review: There's No Cream in Cream Soda...

 

I got this book on a whim at the library, and it was so fun to read!  Each chapter is about a different beverage.  The information was well told- tons of fun stories about things we interact with all the time.  A great mix of nutrition, history, and culture!

Here are some facts I want to remember.

-"Lead is the eighty-second element on the periodic table and is represented as Pb from the Latin word for lead, plumbum." 

-"Nakazawa Milk from Japan is the most expensive milk in the world.  It comes from cows that are only milked once a week in the morning because that is when melatonin levels are the highest...  Advertised as milk for stressed-out adults, one gallon of Nakazawa Milk costs the same as forty gallons of regular 2 percent milk, around $163 per gallon."

-"All teas come from a tea bush, Camellia sinensis, but it's how the leaves are processed that determines the type of tea.  First, the leaves are spread in the sun to dry, which is known as withering.  Leaves that are going to be black or oolong teas are then cut or crushed to help oxidation.  During the oxidation phase, the leaves are exposed to air, which turns them darker and strengthens the flavor.  Black teas are fully oxidized, oolong teas are partially oxidized, while green teas aren't oxidized at all.  To keep green teas from oxidizing, they are gently heated or steamed instead.  All leaves then go through rolling, shaping, and dehydrating."

-"Many Asian cultures believe that if a teacup is too hot to hold, the tea is too hot to drink.  They use small bowls instead of cups.  But the Brits liked their tea much hotter than the Chinese, so English potters began adding handles to their cups in the late 1700s."  I had always wondered about that when I saw Japanese tea sets!

-It talks about the great trouble with successfully bottling soda.  Jacob Schweppe was the first to manufacture and bottle a carbonated beverage in 1783.  He designed a cool oval bottle so the sodas would be stored on their sides to keep the cork moist and therefore sealed.  But they were expensive bottles to make, being made by a glass blower by hand.  Eventually a machine was made (1904).  To solve the cork problem, "In 1879 Charles G. Hutchinson created a stopper that used a gasket hanging inside the bottle and attached to a wire.  To seal the bottle, a person pulled the gasket up by the wire.  To unseal the stopper, a person smacked the top, which released the pressure and made a loud pop.  If you ever wondered why we call them 'soda pops,' that's why."

-Cola was invented when pharmacist John Pemberton added the extract from a kola nut to a health tonic.  "To cover up the kola's bitter taste, he dumped in a bunch of sugar."  This became Coca-Cola.  Cocaine comes from the Erythroxylum coca plant, but it hasn't been in Coke since 1903.  Coka-Cola had a bottle design competition in 1915.  A glass company in Indiana went to the library to find pictures of the kola nut for inspiration, but he accidentally found a picture of a cocoa pod." 

And here's a photo of a cocoa pod I just took at the botanical garden.


-Here is a wonderful little story about humility and friendship.  "In 1886, two men, Charles Hall in American and Paul Heroult in France, both twenty-two years old, discovered the same method to extract aluminum from ores using electricity.  They didn't know about each other until they applied for patents.  They became friends and shared the credit.  The Hall-Heroult method is still used today.  Coincidentally, they both died in 1914 at the age of fifty-one."

-"Citrus fruits have been around for eight million years and originated in the foothills of the Himalayas.  All citrus fruits that we have today came from three ancestors:  mandarin (Citrus reticulata), pomelo (Citrus maxima), and citron (Citrus medica).  It's believed that lemons are the result of a cross between lime, citron, and pomelo.  Sweet oranges, such as navel and Valencia, came from pomelos and mandarins.  The English word 'orange' is from the French word for gold, or.

-"According to DNA analysis, the first apples (Malus sieversii) came from the mountains of Kazakhstan around fifty million years ago."

-"The word 'punch' is believed to come from the Hindi word panj for five because of the basic ingredients in the old recipes... citrus, sugar, alcohol, water, and spice."

-"Most natural food dyes are plant-based, such as the orangey carotenoids (carrots, pumpkins), the greenish chlorophylls (alfalfa), and the bluesy anthocyanins (grapes, blueberries).  But one, the reddish carminic, is made from crushing the cochineal insect.  Have you been eating bugs?  Check labels for carmine, carminic acid, cochineal, or Natural Red 4.)"

-"Humans have been using straws for over five thousand years, according to an archaeological discovery in 1897.  Three-foot gold and silver tubes were dug up in Maykop, Russia, which were used to sip from a large, shared vessel."

In short, a fun and interesting book!

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Leap Day Worksheet...

 Here is a simple questionnaire I typed up for my girls to fill out for Leap Day.  Feel free to use if you would like!