Grocery store rant: meat.

Grocery store rant: meat.. A post from my main blog.  I’m kind of infamous for ranting.

Sweet: Recipe Review, Joy of Baking Oatmeal Cookies

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!

Spicy + Fresh: Chicken Verde

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.

Indulgent: Milk Chocolate Ice Cream

[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.