foodiefanatics

I've been looking for something relatively healthy for a mid-morning snack. I came across this recipe for flax cookies taken from Everything Flax and adapted it a bit.

Flax Seed Cookies
Preheat oven to 375, line two cookie sheets with parchment paper

1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 T hot water
1 egg
1tsp vanilaa

Beat butter and sugar. Add water.  Mix in egg and vanilla and beat until light colored.

1/2 cup ground flaxseed (or flaxseed meal)
1/2 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4t salt

Add to butter mixture.

1 cup old fashioned oats
1/2 cup walnuts
1/2 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup dried cranberries

Stir into mix.

Put by tablespoon onto cookies sheets and bake for about 12 minutes, switching trays half way through.

Last night we had a great Indian meal using recipes from Madhur Jaffrey's Flavors of India.  I made Beans with Roasted spices (using pinto beans and coconut milk).  This tasted great but it almost seemed Mexican.  Very spicy (total cooking time was about 1hr 45 minutes using canned beans).  Boatman's curry was a spicy fish curry (cooking time is brief, but prep time is at least one hour).  Flavors are fantastic but lots of blending and frying. I used coconut milk for the grated coconut in this recipe as well. I love this sauce and would like the sauce on rice without the fish! The third dish I made started with the recipe for potateos with mustard seeds and onions but I significantly adapted this recipe. Instead of tomatoes, I added 1 cup peas. I also added two chopped carrots with the potatoes. The dish was loved by all and it's very colorful.

We had an unusual combo tonight. I made spicy chocolate thighs (the recipe called for wings but we like thighs better) from RAchel Ray mag (Feb 09, I believe). These were really good if you like mole. Lots of chocolate flavor. I would have liked a bit more spice next time around. Then I also made a green curry soup that we poured on udon noodles (and when the noodles ran out, ate on rice). The sauce was excellent. I invented it (probably not even remotely authentic).

Green Curry Sauce a la Vasudeva
Mix 1/2 t turmeric, 1 T chopped garlic and 1/2t salt in a mortar and pestle until paste. Add 1 T green curry paste and 1/2 T red chile paste (if you have it).  Mush it up.
Heat 1 T canola oil in a large skillet and add the mush. Fry for about 1 minute.  Add one can coconut milk and 1/2 can water and 2t sugar.  Stir until the sauce thickens somewhat (about 5 minutes). Add 1 T fish sauce and 1/2 squeezed lime. Taste for salt. If  too salty, add more sugar until the tastes are balanced. Put your noodles or rice in a bowl (probably could do some quickly steamed veggies as well or tofu) and ladle the sauce over. 
I'm just finished up a turtle ice cream pie so I haven't tried it yet. It's from bon appetit march 09 and features a graham cracker toasted pecan crust with ice cream and home made caramel topped with chocolate ganache (which is what I'm working on right now).  The caramel is made of brown sugar which I'm not sure I favor when making caramel. But we'll see.

I've been cooking cookies. My son keeps asking for cookie dough. So I've made cookie recipes, cooked half and let him have the rest (I know all the concerns about raw eggs, but I've decided not to worry about that).  First, we made peanut butter with peanut butter filling (Martha Steward everyday March, 09). Vive loved the cookies. They are very rich and he even liked the filling which was peanut butter blended with sugar and added to a cooked milk/flour mixture.  Then we made chocolate chip from the NYT. They recently (well, it's probably been over a year) had a feature of three different types of chocolate chip cookies. We did the soft version and they were great as well (but I have to say, I don't like Trader Joe's chocolate chips they are more sweet than chocolate).  Today, we made sugar cookies from the Betty Crocker Cookie book. This is an eggless cookie with corn starch that, when cooked, bakes up light and soft.

This has been a busy couple of weeks.  I've made spicy carrots with parsley and cilantro from food and wine (march, 2005) with my CSA veggies. I actually added broccoli and it was really tasty. I'll make that again. We served it both warm and cold and liked it better cold. 
I made a pea shoot stir fry which was kind of just like green things with garlic. I still haven't found a pea shoot recipe I really like.
Traditional hashbrowns "21" club from gourmet Nov. 1995. These were very yummy. You boil potatoes then fry them with onions, butter and oil. 
German Apple Pancake from Cooks Illustrated (Jan/Feb 2003) which actually wasn't very good. It didn't puff but instead was kind of like a firm custard (sort of). Didn't have a lot of flavor.
Pasta with vodka and cream.  The kids liked this but I found it a bit too mild.  Plus my Parmesan cheese didn't really melt which was strange. 
I made my own Caesar dressing (well, I don't think it's really Caesar) but it works and it uses what's in the fridge. I took mayo, dijon, worcestershire a bit of olive oil, garlic and bal vinegar and whipped it up.  It needed to be thinned with a bit of fresh lime (lemon would probably work too). Very flavorful and everyone loved it.

The menu: tomato soup, Chicken Tikki Masala, spicy broccoli, eggplant and canned dal (which, by the way, is quite good).
The reviews:  Tomato soup was excellent, with the dominant taste that of fresh tomato (so the tomatoes have to be good) (from The ARt of Indian Vegetarian Cooking)
Broccoli was quite simple and incredibly easy to make (Madhur Jaffrey's World VEg) but quite tasty, just garlic, ginger, salt and sesame oil.  The kids loved it.
Eggplant was fantastic, almost like caramelized eggplant (the kids wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole), but I wished we had tons more. It was called Char-flavored eggplant with green peas (also from Art of Indian Veg). You cook the eggplant with spices without stirring until all the liquid evaporates and it starts to caramelize and literally melts in your mouth.
Chicken Tikka Masala was also excellent.  I used the Chicken tandoori recipe from Cooking Light which uses thighs marinated in a tandoori paste and then cooked on the grill. The key to the cooking is not drying the meat out. I cooked it barely 6 minutes a side, checking often, at about 400 degrees. I then used the Tikka masala sauce from 1,000 Indian recipes which was fantastic but I did not have fenugreek leaves and I think it really could have used that. This is close to the sauce from a restaurant (although the chicken itself does not have the charred flavor from a restaurant).
Great Meal.

Last night we tried some creative mex.  Chicken tostados (using the chicken tandoori I'd made a few nights before which was great by the way--more on that later) and carrot mole.  I was the only one who liked the mole, but for a quick dinner side dish, I highly recommend it for those who like mole (it's from The Border Cookbook, by Bill and Cheryl Jamison).  The Chicken Tostados were great, from the quick section of Gourmet (July 2008)

Doing a birthday brunch for my sister in law tomorrow.  This is quite the cooking weekend.  We are having greek yogurt with figs (using that fig tree again!) with honey (from a local purveyor made with thistle) and pine nuts. We had a similar yogurt dish at a restaurant in San Diego for Brunch (Cafe Chloe) We are doing grapefruit mimosas (with a bit of cranberry juice in them, Sunset May 08), puffy pancake with nutty banana butterscotch (Rachel Ray, I've made it now about 5 times and we love it), lamb sausage (from our farm, deck family farm), and wrinkled potatoes with spicy chile mojo (this is xeroxed from a cookbook but I don't know which cookbook!).  My daughter is making a boxed cake and I'm going to make some kind of Indian dessert as well but haven't decided what yet.

Tonight, I've got an unusual combination of dishes. We're starting with a fig pizza with goat cheese and prosciutto (but I'm actually going to use sopresetta because I'm kind of tired of prosciutto and its texture).  I've got figs on my fig tree so I'm trying fig recipes. And, I'm retrying the pizza crust recipe from cooking light that I made such a mess of last time. That starter will be followed by halibut with corn gravy and chive mashed potatoes (Rachel Ray, 7/08).  The corn gravy is a mix of bacon, milk, chicken broth, corn, thyme and red bell pepper.  Dessert is a carrot cake recipe I downloaded from epicurious.com that was originally from Bon 10/04. 
I did a bunch of research before picking this recipe.  I looked through four different recipes trying to get a sense of the differences.  The recipes were quite different. Some had very little flour, other very little carrot. The Martha STewart recipe had 1 1/2 pounds of cream cheese and 3/4 cup of butter in the frosting!  Sounded great but too much.  This recipe had lots of reviews that were very positive and seemed a bit middle of the road.
I'm doing the crust for the pizza on the grill.  Hope it works out.

Thursday, the menu included avocado tomato stacks (cooking light, June 08) and Welsh rarebit burgers (Rachel Ray, 7/08). We had pecan pie for dessert.  The avocado tomato stacks were fantastic and looked good too. If I can ever figure out how to get the pictures on her, I'll post one.  Of course, once you cut into the stack the whole thing falls apart.  They were drizzled with a cilantro buttermilk dressing.
The Welsh rarebit burgers are fantastic if you like the flavor of the rarebit sauce (cheddar/Worcestershire/Guinness).  The burgers are browned in the skillet and then placed on pumpernickel bread with broiled rarebit sauce, tomato and bacon.