cookie d'oh!

It's round, pink, has a hole in the middle, and is covered with sprinkles.

Apparently to my coworkers, that means something dirty. And telling them it was Homer's doughnut didn't help.

A little while ago one of my coworkers offered to bring me some sprinkles that were taking up space in her cupboard.  I'm never one to turn down offers of ingredients, even sprinkles, so I accepted. I had no idea exactly how much space was being taken up by sprinkles. 

The next day I found one of those large "gallon" sized zip bags on my desk.

A large zip bag can hold a lot of sprinkles.

And since I was still kinda feeling like making other desserts into cookies, I decided to do doughnuts. Homer's doughnuts. Round, pink, with a hole in the middle, covered in sprinkles.

Also, it just so happens that "National Doughnut Day" just passed. Once again, we at Authors Kitchen are totally on top of all the important holidays.

Plain old sugar cookies are perfect for doing silly things to. (perv)

Sugar Cookies

What you need:

• 1 c butter
• 1 c sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp milk
• 3 c flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt

(this is a double batch which makes about 4 dozen cookies, and easily cut in half if you are looking to eat them all in one night)

What you gotta do:

In a large bowl, cream the room temperature butter with the sugar until it's all soft and fluffy. You'll start to lose the gritty feeling from the sugar if you do it long enough.

Add the eggs, vanilla, and milk.

Beat this again with your Popeye arms, or your fancy schmancy mixer that has its own speshul place on the counter, until it's shiney and kinda looks like cake frosting. (Really, it kinda is cake frosting).

Normally, I'd just dump the flour, baking powder and salt into the bowl and stir, but I had a minion with me, and so I employed him to sift the dry ingredients together in a small bowl.

I also had him crack the eggs into the creamed butter. No shells this time!

Add the sifted flour to the creamed butter and egg mixture in two batches.

After the second one, you'll have a soft, but not quite sticky dough. In order to handle it and roll it, you'll need to chill it a bit first.

Divide it in half, wrap it in plastic, and let is sit around in the fridge for at least half an hour. I don't like to leave dough in the fridge too long because it becomes too stiff to handle. It should be pliable, and not too cold to the touch.

Liberally flour your counter, your rolling pin, and the dough. At first, you're going to want to move it around and reflour everything regularly so it doesn't stick to the counter. If your dough is stuck to the counter, there will be no saving the shapes you cut, and you'll have to do it all over again.

Roll the dough to just under a quarter inch thick.

If you don't have cookie cutters, a wine glass works nicely to make round cookies.

I'd finally found a doughnut cutter so I cut doughnuts and holes. Either save up and reroll the holes to make more doughnuts, or bake them all separately so they don't get overdone.

You want the cookies to lose their gloss, and be just barely golden on the bottom.

7-8 minutes at 350 will do that. I know you already preheated your oven. You're smart like that. Just like me.

"I am so smart. S-M-R-T."

To make the pink glaze you need:

• Icing (powdered) sugar
• Milk
• Red Dye
• Some kind of flavourant (vanilla is best, but I'd managed to run out, so I used peppermint)

One of these days I'll actually measure how much icing sugar and milk I use to do this kind of thing. Really, just dump a bunch of sugar in a bowl. Add milk a tiny splash at a time, a few drops of flavourant, and keep stirring until you have something the consistency of really thick laundry detergent.

It should blob off the end of a spoon at first, but then turn into something ribbon like.

Two bloody drops was all I needed

to make Pepto-Bismol Pink!

Lay the cookies out on parchment paper as close together as you can. Dribble and blob the glaze all over the cookies. Then add sprinkles by the handful.

If you don't have a gallon of sprinkles, you might want to work on accuracy in your application. It also might help your cookies not look like they were made by a five year old.

I'm okay with my cookies looking like they were made by a five year old.

Let these set on the counter for about 20 minutes. The glaze will harden just enough that it holds onto the sprinkles and looks solid, but it will still be soft and gooey when you bite it.

 Did you know there was a National Doughnut Day??

Extreme DIY

I'm not cooking.

Well, I am. Last night we grilled crooknecks, reduced some wine, added butter, and tossed it all with pasta, chicken breast, basil, and cheese. Tonight, pork filling for tacos. I do like pork in tacos.

I also made date muffins again (turns out the recipe actually works and wasn't a total fluke), and sauteed chard to go into biscuit pastry for lunchy spanikopita-type things.

But I didn't take a single picture.

But I did take pics of food. It's just that it's food in a somewhat less familiar format.

The garden.

Yes, food comes from dirt.

And while Taneasha and I are fans of DIY cooking, Recipe Guy has gone one step further and is DIYing his own food.

I've had gardens in the past, but right now I'm trapped in my student apartment without even a balcony on which to grill things. Man, I love food cooked on fire.

So, as I said, we grilled crooknecks last night. But first we had to harvest them. Squashes are fuzzy, and the fuzz is sharp and sticks in your fingers like fibreglass.

Tasty things always have ways of protecting themselves. Note that the broccoli has no thorns, no fuzz, no dangerous parts to navigate around. That's because it's not edible. Contrary to what his housemates seem to think.

Behind the broccoli is the remnants of the iceburg lettuces. There was romaine too. There's red leaf on the way. There's also chard.

A lot of chard. I'd already taken 2-4 leaves off each of those plants. That got me about 4 grocery store sized bundles of chard. Sautee that shit in bacon fat with a bit of browned onion... goes perfectly with fried chicken. Holy yum.

I need to make fried chicken.

Some would recommend frying these little green tomatoes,

but I think I'll wait until the sun turns them red (better them than me) and then eat them warm off the vine.

TIP: As soon as your tomato plant starts fruiting, defoliate it. Pervert, it means take the leaves off. If you remove the leaves around the fruits, the sun will ripen them faster and the plant will put more energy into fruiting since it no longer has leaves to feed.

And, if you let your cilantro go to seed, you'll attract all kinds of flying insects that will help pollinate the rest of the garden,

and those little green burrs in the bottom left are actually corriander seed, a component of garum masala. Let them dry, harvest them by putting a paper bag over the seed head, turn it upside down and shake; all the seeds fall into the bag. This works for dill seed too.

If you're lucky, you'll have a neighbour with honey bees

(can you see the bee butt in the flower?) who shares the hibiscus scented honey that results from his bees spending all their time in your bushes.

Of course, if you have a garden you need a compost heap.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04Zz-GRPAzA

(still don't know how to embed vids)

Now, you may not end up with a blues-singing, advice-giving heap, but what you might get are a few volunteers. I don't think I've ever seen a compost heap that didn't have things growing in it.

We're pretty sure this is a butternut squash.

There are onions just to the left out of the frame too. Which is good because Mowing Man keeps mowing down the wild onions in the horse pature.

Speaking of wild things, remember the wild beans that appeared last year during the drought? Well, if you let wild beans go to seed in your garden, they will happily come back and demand trellises the next year.

How does your garden grow?