Favorite Recipe Friday: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Let me just begin by saying that I made cookies waaaaay too many times this winter. But given the two (or was it three?) sets of snow days we had, I don't really feel it was my fault. I'm stuck in the house, I shouldn't go anywhere, what am I gonna do? Bake, of course. And eat.

I love love love classic chocolate chip cookies, and I've never bothered to find a recipe other than the one from the back of the Nestle bag. And when I discovered that even when I threw away the bag, I still had access to the recipe on the Nestle website, Very Best Baking, I was thrilled.

So, without further ado, my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Chocolate Chip Cookies


Original recipe from Very Best Baking

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, room temperature
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
2 1/4 c. all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 12 oz. package milk chocolate chips
3/4 to 1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

The only change I make to the original recipe is to only use half a package of chocolate chips. Because I'm cheap. And I like a rather large ratio of cookie to chocolate chip. When all you can taste is the chocolate, you lose the wonderful cookie flavor, and that makes me sad.

Start off by beating together the butter and both kinds of sugar. You want to beat it until the whole mixture becomes light and fluffy. I had a wonderful picture of this; unfortunately, my computer hated it, so it's gone now. Just take my word for it. It was beautiful.

Next, add the vanilla and eggs.

The eggs should be room temperature; the easiest way to get them there quickly and safely is to fill a bowl with warm water and submerge the eggs in it for no longer than two minutes.

After you add the room temperature eggs, and the vanilla, beat it all together. Resist the urge to taste the dough because of the possibility of salmonella (unless, of course, you're not pregnant and don't have a paranoid husband. In that case, go right ahead)

Then add the flour, baking soda, and salt.

Mix it all together and add the chocolate chips and nuts.

Mix it for the last time.

Drop the dough onto a greased cookie sheet. If you want more cookies but smaller ones, only do about a tablespoonful of dough. For larger cookies, use larger globs of dough

Bake at 375 degrees (Fahrenheit, obviously) for 9 to 11 minutes. If the edges are golden brown, that's usually a good time to pull them out, unless you're one of those weirdos who prefers their cookies crunchy and half-charred. Let the cookies cool on a cooling rack, and try to avoid eating them all at once

In case anyone was wondering, the mixer in the pictures is a Bosch classic mixer. My mom got a new one, so she gave me her old one to see if I could get it functional. There's nothing wrong with the mixer itself, but after Mom using it for 20 years or so, the little plastic pieces that keep the bowl in place while the beaters spin have worn completely off. Like so.

And here you can see the grooves on the bottom of the bowl that are supposed to slot into place on the base.

We tried replacing the plastic pieces with JB Weld; it held long enough to make this one batch of cookies, but that was about it. Now we need to see if we have any welders in our friends or family who can run a bead that will work. Or I need to find $400 to buy a new one. To any of my family members reading this, the answer to "what do you want for your birthday" is "money to save up for a Bosch. I hate to retire the old one when the motor on this one is just fine, but I'm not sure if there are any other options. 

Rotisserie-Style Chicken Breast for Sandwiches

Right about this point in my pregnancies, I usually start really missing sandwiches. I know that the risk of listeriosis isn't huge, but it still makes me nervous enough not to want to eat even toasted subs; I'm not a huge fan of warm sandwiches anyway. So when I started thinking about what to take for lunch this week, my mind naturally turned to sandwiches and sandwich meat.

Even when I'm not pregnant, I'm tempted to make my own sandwich meat, just because that way I know what actually went into it (and I'd really like a meat slicer as well :). I had some boneless skinless chicken breast in my freezer that needed to be cooked and eaten before it freezer-burned, so I set out to search the internet for recipes on how to make your own lunch meat.

I was disappointed.

Oh, there are lots of blog and forum posts about how much better it is for you to cook meat at home and use it for sandwiches than to buy overly processed, overly salted deli meat. But recipes? I found one recipe for roast beef, which didn't really help me with my chicken dilemma. The only recipes I found were for grilled chicken or chicken salad, neither of which were what I wanted. I wanted a nice, flavorful cooked chicken that I could slice for sandwiches.

I was on my own.

One of my favorite flavors of chicken deli meat is rotisserie-seasoned, and I remembered seeing a recipe for rotisserie-style chicken on Stephanie O'Dea's fabulous blog, so I went searching. I modified the recipe a bit for my taste, and because I was using boneless skinless breasts instead of a whole chicken. I don't think this quite qualifies as a new recipe, since it's almost entirely hers, but I did tweak it significantly.

Rotisserie-Style Chicken Breast for Sandwiches


Original recipe for Crockpot Rotisserie-Style Chicken 

4 boneless skinless chicken breast pieces (approx. 2 lbs)
2 tsp. coarse salt
1 tsp. paprika
1 tsp. onion powder
1 tsp. Italian seasoning
1/2 tsp. thyme
1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp. black pepper
2 heaping Tbsp. minced garlic
2 Tbsp. liquid smoke
1/2 10 oz. can chicken broth

I partially thawed the chicken breast so it would cook faster, and to facilitate rubbing it down with the spice mixture. You could probably do this just as well with frozen; it would probably need more cooking time, though.

Combine all dry spices in a bowl. Generously rub the chicken breasts with the spice mixture and place them in the crock pot.

Sprinkle minced garlic over chicken breasts and pour liquid smoke and chicken broth into the bottom of the crock pot.

I cooked this on high for 4 hours because I was afraid I'd end up with chicken too falling-apart to slice or too dried out to eat if I cooked it on Low. It seemed to work out okay.

Then I put the chicken breasts in the freezer to cool for easier slicing. I couldn't wait too long, though; I needed lunch. I had a picture of my scrumptious sandwich, but my weird memory card for the camera managed to lose it; I really have to reformat that thing.

Conclusion

Yummy! The bit with the seasoning on it was a bit spicy for my taste, with the cayenne and the black pepper, but the rest of the breast has a nice flavor. I couldn't taste the liquid smoke at all; I think I'd need more if I want a smoky flavor.

Also, do not leave the breasts in the freezer for too long before trying to slice them, or you might cut yourself while trying to cut them. On two fingers. At the same time. Not that this happened to me or anything. I would never be so foolish. I shudder to think what would happen if I had a meat slicer.

After some experimentation, I determined that what works best for me in slicing is to lay the chicken breast flat and cut it in half so I have a flat surface to stand the chicken up on. Then I can stand it up and slice some relatively thin slices, although still not at all uniform. The little crumby bits that fell off while slicing should make an excellent chicken salad. I just can't escape it :D

Pioneer Woman's Cinnamon Toast

I've made this recipe a couple of times recently; not too close together, because I'm afraid of what it will do to my arteries, and my midwife warned me about too much sugar. But it's soooooo good. Sorry for the lack of pictures, but mine looked almost exactly like the pictures in the original recipe post over at The Pioneer Woman Cooks.

Pioneer Woman's Cinnamon Toast

Original recipe here (I usually halve it, because even when we have company, 16 pieces of cinnamon toast is too much. So....)

8 slices 100% whole wheat bread

1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, softened

1/2 cup sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a small bowl, mix together butter, sugar, and cinnamon (as a side note, if you end up with some chunks of unmixed butter, as I did when I was in a hurry, it still comes out delicious. Just mix it until it's sort of a uniform brown color.)

Spread butter mixture across bread from edge to edge, arranging slices on a cookie sheet or other baking pan. Bake for 10 minutes. I skipped the broiler step, because I was a) paranoid (I tend to burn things under the broiler) and b) starving. 

Conclusion

This is amazing. The butter soaks in to the top half of the bread and caramelizes there. It's fabulous and wonderful and I love it. Which is why I can only make it every so often, and only when there's company, so I can avoid eating it all myself. Even telling myself how much harder it will be to push out a 10-pound baby than a 7- or 8-pound baby doesn't help. You probably shouldn't start making this recipe if you're at all concerned about sugar. Fat? Oh, I guess so. But you can't beat real butter. You really can't

Note to self: should stop browsing the Pioneer Woman site if I'm actually serious about not gaining 50 points this pregnancy

Pie Crust with Butter (aka Reason #572 why I love my food processor)

It's been awhile! I have a longer draft post waiting for some time when my daughter isn't attacking my keyboard. But I'm super excited about how easy this crust was to make, so I wanted to share.

I wanted apple pie. My brother has been taunting me with pie on Facebook (okay, so he wasn't actually taunting me, but posting pictures of your pie on Facebook when your sister is in the third trimester is basically the equivalent of taunting). I NEEDED apple pie. But my standard pie crust recipe uses shortening, which is basically partially hydrogenated oil in solid form. I'm trying to avoid the partially hydrogenated stuff. So, in my handy-dandy Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook I found a recipe for a tart crust that is basically pie crust, but with butter instead of shortening. I modified the recipe a bit from the original, but it still worked rather well

Pie Crust with Butter

1 1/4 c. all-purpose flour
1/4 c. sugar
1/2 c. (1 stick) cold butter
1 egg
1 T. cold water

Here's the exciting part; I made this pie crust in the food processor. I had seen on other sites how you could use the food processor to cut the butter into the flour mixture, and I wanted to try it, given how time-consuming it is to use a pastry blender to cut in butter or shortening. I don't have any pictures of this part, because I was afraid it wasn't going to work, but it was AMAZING.

Combine flour and sugar in food processor with the chopping blade and process for about 30 seconds to mix. Add cold butter (yes, put it in straight from the fridge; thermodynamics says so) and process for about another 30 seconds. Check to make sure you don't have any huge chunks of butter left; if it's working right, it will look like the butter disappeared into thin air. In a separate bowl, beat the egg and add the cold water. Add the egg mixture to the food processor and process for about 1 to 2 minutes, until the dough comes together. It won't form a ball, but you should have several larger lumps of dough.

I ignored the original recipe instructions to refrigerate the dough for 30 to 60 minutes to make it easier to handle, which is why my pie crust looks slightly zombiefied in the pictures. It doesn't affect the taste at all, but the dough did have a tendency to come apart as I transferred it to the pan. I would highly recommend chilling the dough, and using extra flour to reduce the stickiness.

Conclusion

I was a little afraid to try this, having only had crust made with shortening in my entire life. But it was delicious, and didn't taste noticeably different from the crust I was used to. I will need to experiment with if it's possible to get pretty crust from this recipe, but for me, taste is a much, much higher priority than looks.

You gotta have ice cream with your pie!

Pioneer Woman's Ranch Style Chicken

I have another new recipe for this week, but I was surfing through Pioneer Woman's site, trying not to drool on my keyboard, and I found her Ranch-Style Chicken. Amazingly enough, I had all the ingredients on hand (a minor miracle, since I usually only keep plain mustard around, but I had bought Dijon for the other new recipe). So I decided to try it, although combining the words Ranch and Chicken seemed like a bad omen, considering what had happened in the past.

Pioneer Woman's Ranch-Style Chicken

Original recipe here

Given that I wasn't sure how well I could pull off the recipe, I decided to cut it in half

3 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves
1/2 c. Dijon mustard
1/2 c. honey
1 1/2 T. lemon juice
1/2 lb. thick-cut bacon
1/8 c. canola oil
shredded cheddar

While the chicken was thawing (I had the individually flash-frozen chicken breasts) I mixed up the mustard, honey, and lemon juice to make the marinade. I forgot to add the spices from the original recipe (I forgot there were spices until the meat was almost done marinating)

It looks really gross here, but less than 30 seconds of whisking later....

At this point, I was highly skeptical. It smelled very mustardy, and I'm not a huge mustard fan. But I decided to see it through. So I pulled out the chicken breasts.

I didn't have any wax paper, so I put them in a gallon-sized zipper bag for the pounding process.

I have a tenderizing mallet, but a) it doesn't have a smooth side, and the little teeth were leaving dents in the bag, so it made me nervous, and b) no noticeable flattening was going on. So I pulled out the rolling pin.

The rolling pin worked much, much better. Within a minute, tops, the chicken pieces were of roughly equal thickness.

I trimmed the excess fat off the chicken and cut the larger pieces in half for quicker cooking and more thorough marinating. Then I added them to the marinade.

Put the lid on the bowl, shook it around to coat the pieces and put it in the fridge for an hour. Meanwhile, it was time for bacon:

I sliced the bacon in half to make it fit better on top of the chicken later on. While the chicken marinated, I cooked the bacon on my handy-dandy George Foreman grill (tied with the slow-cooker for my second-favorite appliance; first place, of course, goes to the food processor!).

I cooked the whole package, so I could use the leftover bacon for Bacon, Egg, and Cheese Biscuit Cups. When the chicken was done marinating, I heated up 1/8 cup of the bacon grease and 1/8 c. canola oil in a large skillet, and cooked the chicken on each side until it started to brown.

Then I put them on a baking sheet which I had lined with foil to make cleanup easier, and baked them for 10 minutes at 400 degrees.

Then I put bacon and shredded cheese on top and popped it back in the oven for another 5 minutes.

Conclusion: This was really yummy. Unlike our flop, and despite my forgetting the spices in the marinade, the chicken was very flavorful. The mustard flavor was pretty much gone; the chicken was moist and slightly sweet-tasting. I enjoyed the combination of flavors you get by eating the bacon bite-by-bite with the chicken; my husband chose to eat it separately, and was rather enthralled by the idea of cheesy bacon. The toddler tried a bite and didn't hate it, but was more interested in the leftover mashed potatoes we were eating along with the chicken (when I got up to get her more potatoes, she stole my plate and started eating my potatoes).

Slow Cooker Spinach Artichoke Dip

This is yet another of my Super Bowl recipes. It doesn't really count as a new recipe, since I've made it a few times before. But this time, I harnessed the power of my food processor to make it much, much easier to prepare. Have I mentioned how much I love my food processor? $30 clearance at Wal-Mart and some of the best money I ever spent. But for those of you poor souls without a food processor, don't despair. This recipe can still be delicious if made by hand.

Slow Cooker Spinach Artichoke Dip


Based heavily on this recipe from A Year of Slow Cooking. The tweaks are mostly things that happened accidentally when I had more or less of a certain ingredient, or was just feeling adventurous.

10 oz. package of baby spinach
14 oz. can artichoke hearts, drained
8 oz. mozzarella
4 oz. Parmesan
8 oz. cream cheese
8 oz. sour cream
3 T. minced garlic

I make this recipe in my 6 quart crock pot, but there's enough extra space that it could probably fit easily in a 4 or 5 quart.

First, chop or tear the spinach; I usually tear it by hand, but this time, I decided to use the food processor.

Before

After

I had to do it in three batches, but it still took about two minutes, as opposed to the 5 or 10 it can take if tearing or chopping by hand. I dumped the chopped spinach into the slow cooker, getting so excited by my cleverness that I forgot to put in the liner at first (no, I didn't take a picture of that).

Then I used the food processor to chop the artichokes, because who wants a big slimy piece of artichoke in their dip?

Before (no, I didn't clean the food processor. Why do you ask?)

After

Then the artichokes joined their chopped spinach brethren in the slow cooker. 

After that, I shredded the cheeses in the food processor, and added the cheese, cream cheese, sour cream, and garlic.

And I cooked it on high for 3 hours until the guests got there, stirring it at about 2 hours to mix everything together once the cheese was all melty.

Before stirring (big, gloopy mess)

After stirring (lovely, edible dip)

It was a big hit, and there was enough for me to have leftovers :D Mwahahahaha! And have I mentioned how fantastic the slow cooker liners made by Reynolds are? I know they're non-renewable, but after a big party, being able to just pull the mess out of my slow cooker and throw it away makes me very, very happy.

Bacon-Wrapped Lil' Smokies

This year for the Super Bowl, I decided to branch out a bit from my standard appetizer fare and try this recipe. I'd seen the recipe before, but I was skeptical. Until one day, in the hospitality room at an academic team event, I found them. I tried them. My life was forever changed (okay, not really. But they are really, really delicious). One online review called them "meat candy," which sounds really gross until you try it, and then you completely understand.

Oh, and lest I give you the wrong idea about me, I should point out that our annual "Super Bowl" party is really just an excuse to get together, eat food, and play nerdy games while watching the occasional commercial. This year, the Super Bowl was not on the one network that our cruddy antenna picks up (nope, no cable) so we had a football-free Super Bowl party.

Bacon-Wrapped Lil' Smokies

Original recipe at Allrecipes

14 oz. package lil' smokies (I used all beef; I prefer the cheddar, but the store was out)
12 oz. package center-cut bacon (some was left over)
3/4 c. brown sugar
Toothpicks (not really an ingredient, but I didn't have any, so I had to buy some)

After reading the reviews on Allrecipes, here's how I did it.

Line an 11 x 13 pan with aluminum foil; spray foil with cooking spray.

Slice enough of the bacon into thirds to wrap around all the lil' smokies. I overestimated a little bit, and still had 4-5 pieces of bacon left over. Put bacon slices, lil' smokies, and brown sugar into a gallon zippered plastic bag. Mush everything around until the meat is coated.

Wrap each sausage in a piece of bacon, pinning the ends together with a toothpick. Set the wrapped sausages in the prepared pan, leaning the toothpicks over to the side so the pan can be covered. Once all the sausages are wrapped (if you have any extra bacon, just roll it up and stick a toothpick in it) and placed in the pan, cover the pan and put it in the refrigerator overnight (at this point, you can bake them right away if you want to)

After wrapping

Just before baking

I preheated the oven to 375, since I needed to bake other things at the same time, and people who had reviewed the recipe had varied the temperature a lot. I sprinkled a bit more brown sugar over the top, since there was none visible (all the brown sugar from before had kind of melted into a sort of liquidy marinade). I baked it for about 30 minutes on 375, then upped the temperature to 400 for another 30 minutes, since I wanted the bacon to be crispy. I could have broiled it, but if my oven is much above 400 it can set off the smoke alarms, so I wussed out.

Conclusion: As it turned out, another 30 minutes at 400 was a bit too long; I smelled something scorching and the bacon got a little blackened, as you may or may not be able to see. However, they were still the first thing guests grabbed, and the first thing to be completely wiped out, so I really think we can call this one a success, just one that needs careful watching I managed to snag two or three for myself before they disappeared, and they were delicious. They didn't taste burned at all. Oh, and my slow cookers were all occupied by other things (I'll share one recipe tomorrow) so I just set them out in the pan. They weren't there long enough to get cold. If I make these for a large gathering, I'd need to double the recipe.

What did you cook for Super Bowl snackage? Or, if you didn't cook for Super Sunday, what's your go-to appetizer?