Variations on a Theme

So, we’re getting close to the end of the semester; midterms are done. I’m really looking forward to the end of this year. I’ve had just about enough of school already and being done this year means I’ve only got (hopefully) two more to go.

It also means that the guys at work are going to get their weekly dose of cookies.

The new cubes we have at work (yes, I’m in a cube; I can’t wait until summer when I can work on site again – I much prefer a construction trailer to a spot in a cube farm) each have their own whiteboards, and mine of course has a “Cookie Requests” spot. The estimators have been hounding me for peanut butter, and the accountants have been begging for creamsicle cookies.

I don’t know what it is about peanut butter cookies, but people seem to want them more than other kind of cookie. Whenever I ask for suggestions on what to make, I’m bound to have at least 2 people tell me “peanut butter.”

I don’t like peanut butter cookies. At all. Never have, never will. I conceded last summer and made a peanut butter oatmeal no-bake cookie for them (I’m not fond of oatmeal either and thought I’d kill two birds with one stone), and while they were well received, I was getting requests for more peanut butter the next week! These people are insatiable.

So, I know I’m just going to keep getting hassled by these peabutt nutters, and I’m hoping I can hold them off for a while with a variation.

Almond Butter Cookies

What you need:

• ¾ c butter
• ¾ c almond butter
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla/almond extract/amaretto liqueur
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 ¾ c flour
• ¾ c dried cherries

Oh yeah, the sliced almonds... I didn't bother using them. You can try adding them if you'd like.

What you gotta do:

WARNING: I'm totally winging it here and taking you along for the ride as I make up a new cookie recipe.

So, I had about ¾ of a cup of butter and didn’t want to bother actually measuring half a cup (the usual amount I use for cookies) so I just dumped it all into the bowl. I’d been thinking I’d use a full cup of almond butter, but as I was pouring it into the measuring cup I realized that 1 cup would probably be too much.

Plus, I like recipes where all of the ingredients have similar or proportional measurements. It’s a bit of an OCD thing for me, but I don’t mind because I find that it usually simplifies recipes nicely. (Go look, you’ll see, I rarely mix halves and thirds)

Once the butters are combined, add the eggs

and then the extract. I’ve been soaking dried cherries in amaretto liqueur for a while now,

and used some of the cherry tinted liqueur.

Since I was totally winging this, and not entirely sure how much flour I’d need, I added it half a cup at a time, starting with a full cup. And sprinkled the baking powder on top of the flour, rather than sifting them together. I know sifting is considered very important by some people, but I rarely bother and things usually work out just fine.

Okay, so, one cup is not enough.

One and a half, not quite either.

I was really hoping to make a drop cookie, with a dough as soft as something like a chocolate chip cookie… um, I have no recipe that I can link back to! WTF. How did we make it through an entire year without making brownies or chocolate chip cookies?? ah ha! Taneasha kinda did chocolate chip... still, I think we're going to have to do a chips only post.

Anyway, drop cookie. That’s what I was going for. But that last half a cup…

Really should have been only a quarter cup.

Huh. That means that rather than 2 cups of flour, I need 1 ¾. Awesome.

So, I chopped up the ¾ c dried cherries and stirred them in.

But since I used 2 cups, I had a firmer dough that didn’t “drop” well onto the cookie sheet. I really didn’t want to go with the shaped ball pressed down with a crisscross of forks, so I just “dropped” the balls onto the sheet.

Yeah, totally dropped the ball on this one. They didn’t spread at all. And 12 minutes at 375 was too long.

Yes, 375 degrees. Preheat your oven now.

So, the next set, I rolled into balls and then flattened a bit with my hand, and baked them for only 10 minutes.

Better.

By the end of the dough, I’d given in and was rolling and flattening the cookies into symmetrical discs before baking them.

So much for drop cookies.

Also, after tasting a few, I realized that it’s not just peanut butter cookies I don’t like. It must be something about the nut butter… it just doesn’t make sense. I like peanut butter on toast. I like using it in hoisin sauce. I even like almond butter on toast and in amarettis, which are a cookie… but they’re more of a meringue/macaroon than they are a cookie…

Sigh. I’m so weird.

Oh well, at least the guys at work liked them.

 What kind of cookie don't you like?

Chicken Tortilla Soup

I briefly contemplated making brownies this week as well. But holy crap there's just no way to follow Taneasha's turtle brownies with something sweet. Those things are freaking unreal.

Instead, I opted for something completely different.

Chicken tortilla soup is this weird soup that never seems to be the same and has some strange little quirks to it. I mean, it's chicken soup, but you don't put the chicken in the soup? It's tortilla *soup*, but for some reason the tortilla chips are supposed to be crunchy? I have no clue how I'm supposed to pull that off, but apparently it's such a requirement that people will actually send the soup back in restaurants if the tortilla chips get soggy too fast? wtf?

Some people are very fussy bitches.

So, taking what we could, and what we wanted to, from various recipes we'd found on line, and memories of the soup from restaurants (I've only had it once in a restaurant, but Recipe Guy had a few stories for it) we created what we are calling "Chicken Tortilla Soup"

And now for something completely different.

Chicken Tortilla Soup

What you need:

• 2 L of chicken broth
• 2 tbsp oil
• 1 or 2 onions (one large or two small)
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 zucchini
• 1 poblano or anaheim or bell pepper (but preferrably poblano)
• 1 tin of black beans
• 1 tin of stewed tomatoes, diced
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 lime
• chicken (leftover works quite nicely)
• tortillas
• cilantro
• cheese (cheddar if you must, but ideally monterey jack)

What you gotta do:

So, if you don't have cans, jars, or boxes of chicken broth handy, you can do the next best thing: put a whole chicken (or cut up bits of one) in a pot, cover it with water, boil it for a couple hours.

If you boil a chicken for broth, you'll also find you have a handy source of chicken for the soup too. Leftovers freeze nicely, and once you've stripped all the meat from it, you can actually boil the bones again with some veggies to make a nice chicken stock. (Freeze them in the mean time).

Heat a medium pan over medium heat and then sautee the onions and garlic in the oil for a few minutes. Add the cumin and let it get nice and fragrant; it just needs a couple minutes.

Add the broth. Then tomatoes,

the diced veggies, and the bay leaf.

The pot we chose was getting a little full, so we only used half the tin of diced tomatoes. It was a large one anyway. We used difference in a spaghetti sauce. Tasty sauce is tasty!

Black beans are next! Drain and rinse them first though. They totally sink to the bottom of the pot, but they are there.

Squeeze in the juice of one lime. Whole thing.

Let this simmer just until the zucchini are just done. This does not take long; 15, maybe 20 minutes. Yup, this is actually a fast soup dinner. Totally doable on a weeknight, uses up leftovers, has veggies, and includes chips. Perfect Wednesday night dinner.

While that's simmering, shred the leftover chicken into bowls. Now, I'm not sure exactly why it has to be done this way, but Southern Momma (that's Recipe Guy's momma) absolutely insists that it must be done this way. Must! Shrill objection if it is not.

I tend to look at food from a somewhat frugal point of view, and I'm guessing that since this dish uses leftovers, it was a way to thinly spread the leftover chicken between bowls without any getting lost in the pot and without all of it ending up in one bowl. Whatever the reason, we did it this way.

You are welcome to add the chicken to the pot if you prefer.

The tortillas... in the bowl, on the edge, under the broth, on top afterwards, completely abandoned in favour of masa instead... I don't really know what to say here except that if you think your tortillas are going to stay crunchy in soup, you're a fucking moron.

I was aiming for something to take pictures of so I lined the sides of the soup bowls with them.

Ladel the soup over the chicken and tortillas,

then top with cilantro and cheese.

Oh yeah, some people put the cheese in the bowl with the chicken before ladelling the soup on.

Really, you're going to have to figure out how you want to do your layers on your own. This is a very individualized thing. When Recipe Guy when in for seconds, he crunched the tortilla chips up in his hands

and put them on the bottom, along with the cheese.

Some recipes require that slices of avocado be placed on top of, or in the soup once it's in the bowl. Warm avocado kinda grosses me out, so we didn't do that. Guacamole makes a nice side dish for this though, particularly if you have some non-soup-soaked tortilla chips handy.

Because once you pour soup on them this happens:

Tasty, but not crunchy.

Tortillas don't stay crunchy after you've poured soup onto them.

Seriously! Who thinks this??