World’s best brownies. I need these in my life, right now.

Sometimes, I just gotta bake. I’m not much of a baker–or, as someone on the internet said, a bakist–but from time to time, I just need to crank up my oven.  Because I’ve been trying to be less fat lately, and because this recipe caught my eye at Joy of Baking, I opted for oatmeal cookies. I love oatmeal cookies, and even more importantly, I had all of the ingredients for oatmeal cookies.

These cookies are very oaty.  In fact, they’re so jam-packed full of oats, dried fruit, and nuts, that I wish there were a little more batter to hold it all together; my cookies are quite fragile, and a couple of them cracked in half.  On the plus side, they taste good–not too sweet–and are actually quite filling.  The only thing I did differently from the posted recipe was to use margarine instead of butter (yeah, I know, it’s not the same–but dammit, I didn’t have any butter) and to sub in macadamia nuts for walnuts or pecans.  The cookies featured above are the actual cookies I made.  Shocking, I know–I took photos of my actual food for once.

Overall, I’m going to rate this recipe a solid B-plus. Even though they’re just a tad on the dry side, this is a good, serviceable recipe. Update: After letting the cookies cool for several hours, I stuck them into a plastic zip-top bag to preserve freshness.  The next day, they have softened so much that they’re totally crumbling apart  I’m downgrading this to a B-minus.

I also learned that you should NOT eat oatmeal cookie batter. Bleh.

Got a better oatmeal cookie recipe, or any good cookie recipe? Have you tried this recipe with different results? Leave it in the comments below!

I don’t have another name for this chicken. As you can see, it’s GREEN. Like, green.  Deliciously green.

Today was one of the last cookouts of the season, if not the last. Even though it was gloomy all weekend, and we almost got rained on while finished up the corn, we squeaked inside just in time with a cornucopia of grilled foods–hot Queen City smoked sausage, grilled corn, asparagus (not grilled), and my special green chicken.  We usually do burgers, but we already had some chicken breast, so I decided to whip up a batch of my vibrant, herbaceous poultry.  I love the flavor of this chicken–it’s a little sour, a little spicy, and very fresh.

I always do this chicken on the grill, although it could be baked or sauteed; if you need another dish to round out your cookout menu, check out the recipe after the jump.

Chicken Verde

Ingredients:

• 4 chicken breasts (up to 6 if you have small chicken breasts)
• 1 poblano pepper
• 1 cup basil leaves, firmly packed
• 3 cloves garlic
• juice of 1 lime
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• salt and pepper

I committed basil murder.

The first step of green chicken is the marinade.  I use a food processor to chop up the garlic and the poblano pepper, then add the basil, lime juice, and olive oil and take it for a spin until it’s a relatively smooth mix.  (If you have to toss in a little more olive oil to make this happen, so be it.)

The end result looks like this. It’s on the thick side, but still liquidy.  Coat your chicken in it and let it sit in your fridge for a couple of hours before cooking.  (Don’t add salt into the marinade or the chicken yet.  It will draw liquid out of the chicken and make it tough.)

When it’s time to cook the chicken, season it with salt and pepper and grill it up.  I tend to flip it more than once to cut down on the char, but cooking it is pretty straightforward.  Cook until it hits 160F and pull off to rest and coast up to 165F.

You can also do this chicken with other herbs. I usually make it with cilantro and scallions also ground up in the marinade; jalapeno could substitute for poblano for more heat.  I like this chicken by itself–because of the marinade, it doesn’t need sauce or condiments.  This dish is not only great cookout fare, but the leftovers would be excellent in a wrap, in a quesadilla, with rice, or in tacos.  Or by themselves. If you have any leftovers, which is doubtful.

[Note: You may be noticing that this is, in fact, not my chocolate ice cream.  This is a really good approximation of my chocolate ice cream, but I do not have a photo of my own chocolate ice cream--yet--for the following reasons: 1) my food photography situation is super lame.  I have almost no space to work with in the kitchen (or anywhere) and I also have crappy lighting--I'm working on this; and 2) my husband snarfed down all of the ice cream before I could get a photo.  But it looks like my chocolate ice cream.]

Inspired by the publication of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams At Home, a book written by a woman that I can say with authority is the ice cream goddess of the universe, I have been working on my own ice cream recipes.  Partially because . . . well . . . Jeni’s at-home recipes don’t work so well for me all the time.  It’s the inclusion of cream cheese into everything–it makes everything taste like cheesecake to me.  I can’t make a peach ice cream with her base without it being peach cheesecake.  I have also noticed that her at-home recipes don’t freeze quite as well as I want them to, and yes, I did follow the directions (for once)–to the letter.  At first.  I swear.  I made several batches and came to a few conclusions: 1) the cream cheese is very helpful, but the flavor is way too dense; 2) the corn syrup is making the ice cream freeze way too soft; 3) the boiling step is weird and unnecessary because it causes the proteins that help the ice cream texture to coagulate and stick to the bottom of my pot–plus, I can add a wee bit more starch to bind up those water molecules instead of boiling them out.

I was also a little baffled by most of her chocolate ice creams.  I had success with the Darkest Chocolate Ice Cream in the World, but the milk chocolates turned out runny and not-that-appetizing.  I don’t like using chopped-up chocolate in my ice cream for the same reason that Alton Brown suggested against it in “Churn Baby Churn, II“–that is, that once you take the sugar, extracts, and salt out of a chocolate bar, all you have left is cocoa powder and cocoa butter, and cocoa butter doesn’t freeze so deliciously.  I especially can dig this because I hate chocolate chips in ice cream.  I know, I’m a freak, but I hate the waxy texture of the chips and how they get stuck in my teeth because they’re too cold to melt on contact with my mouth.  I really wanted to make a good “everyday” home-version of chocolate ice cream, so I set about doing so in my Cuisinart 2qt. capacity machine.

And I basically nailed it the first time.*

*(First time meaning, after I had made half a dozen failed batches of non-chocolate flavors to test out various factors of the base.)

Recipe after the jump.

Everyday Milk Chocolate Ice Cream

If your machine holds at least a quart, you’ll be good to go with this recipe.  If you have a smaller machine, you could run it half a batch at a time–but make the whole recipe first, then split it into half batches.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups milk
• 1 cup heavy whipping cream
• 1/2 cup ricotta or mascarpone cheese (or 1/4 cup cream cheese)
• 1/2 cup nonfat dry milk
• 2 tbsp cornstarch or tapioca starch or arrowroot starch (highly recommend not using cornstarch as it doesn’t freeze as well–but on the other hand, it is readily available and cheap)
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 7.2 oz sugar by weight, less 1 tbsp (or just do a cup less one tbsp)
• 1 tbsp light corn syrup or other glucose syrup
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla

Directions:

Making the base:

• If you’re not a good multitasker, start by preparing your ricotta, mascarpone, or cream cheese by whisking it smooth.  If you have a ricotta that has large-ish curds in it, you may want to blend or food process it with a little of the milk to get a smooth texture; otherwise, your ice cream will be grainy.  (I have noticed that store brand ricottas are sometimes a little grainier.)  If you are a good multitasker, you can do this step when you are bringing the milk to a simmer.  You don’t have to use the cheese, but I included it to add the rich mouthfeel that you get from cocoa butter when you eat chocolate at room temperature.  Soft cheese, unlike cocoa butter, will melt in your mouth quickly even from frozen temps.
• Pour approximately two tbsp of milk into a bowl to mix with the starch.  Stir into a smooth slurry.
• Add the remaining milk, heavy cream, sugar, corn syrup, nonfat dry milk, salt, and cocoa into a large pot.  I like to use a soup pot to make double-damn sure that if I walk away for a minute, it’s not going to boil over onto my stove.  Otherwise, you’ll need a pot that will comfortably hold 3 cups of liquid and the rest of the ingredients, plus give you a little head room–I’d suggest at least a 3 qt. pot.
• Bring this mixture up to a bare simmer over medium-high heat, whisking to dissolve the sugars and cocoa.  When it starts to bubble like it’s on the verge of boiling, kill the heat.  (If you’re paranoid about it boiling over, you can use medium heat to slow down the process.)
• Whisk in the vanilla extract.  Slowly whisk in the starch slurry and watch it thicken before your eyes!
• Add about a cup of the hot mixture to the cheese and whisk to thoroughly combine.  Then add remaining hot base and whisk.

Now that you have your base ready, it needs to chill down in the refrigerator. Do this for a few hours (stir it a couple of times if you are home and you remember, that’ll help); Alton Brown says this is crucial to allow the proteins to relax, but also because ice crystal formation will be smaller and more uniform if you start with a cold mixture.  This makes sense to me.  The base is really quick to whip up, so this is something you can do in the morning, even, to leave to chill while you do other things.  Like go to the gym to work off your ice cream.

Once the base is chilled down, you can churn it in whatever kind of ice cream machine you have.  My ice cream maker promises tasty ice cream treats in 20 minutes, but I am pretty sure I churned mine to closer to 40 minutes.  Jeni says the ice cream is done when it is “pulling away from the sides [of the ice cream machine]“; it’s difficult to describe that look of done-ness.  For me, it almost seemed like a ribbon stage of a custard (but frozen); the mix had stiffened up from its initial liquidy state, and I could easily grab a spoonful from the churning device [note: only do this if you are confident that you will not lose some fingers or injure yourself] without it sliding off the spoon in a melty mess.

After churning, the ice cream needs to be frozen hard if you want it to be frozen hard at all.  If you don’t freeze it hard now, it’s not going to freeze right; it’ll melt down a little and some of it will deflate and it’ll have a gross texture.  At least four hours is what Jeni says; if you can wait longer, I’d give it overnight.  Some recipes recommend four days.  I think overnight is long enough to torture yourself wait.

(That doesn’t mean you can’t eat the ice cream off of the dasher and the sides of the machine.  Because you totally can.)

After your ice cream is frozen hard, you may do with it what you will.  For me, it meant piling up a big ol’ scoop on an ice cream cone like my great-grandmother used to do for me when I was a wee girl.  (I have graduated to sugar cones from cake cones, but I find it’s still just as exciting.)

If you try this recipe, please leave me a comment to let me know how it turned out!  If you’re having trouble, I’ll do my best to help sort it out.

This was a pretty popular blog on my other blog–bringing it here, to you, as a hello offering.

I have another food blog that I started early this year and lost steam on.  I thought it was going to be fun, but it turned out not to be so much fun.  This  blog will be different, though; I’ve been blogging recipes and cooking for-practically-ever now, and this blog is to separate the food stuff from the political/religious/controversial stuff that I write at my main blog.  In fact, the nature of what I write over there is what causes me to start new blogs when I have a new idea of something to blog about that could be its own ‘thing.’  I get a lot of people over there who find me for the food and are probably put off by the other stuff I write.

So, welcome to Geek Girl Recipes–my online foodie home.  With no politics.  I swear.