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Strawberries + white chocolate = new summer cookies

Posted in CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged , , , , , , , on June 18, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Even after making jam, I had at least a quart of strawberries left yesterday. Enter Facebook, where one of my friends had recently posted a recipe for White Chocolate and Strawberry Cookies. They were reported to be pink and delicious, and while I’m no great fan of pink food, I am quite fond of all things delicious.

The dough turned out a bit thinner than most cookie dough I’ve worked with — I think it’s difficult to add strawberries to some foods without watering them down. Thus, the cookies spread out a bit during baking more than I would have liked, but they were still delicious.

They have more of a cake-like texture than your average cookie, and the white chocolate chips almost make them cloyingly sweet, but not quite. I’m tempted to make them without the chips, but I don’t think the strawberry flavor will shine on its own.

I used the shorter baking temperature for softer cookies.

White Chocolate Chip and Strawberry Cookies

1 1/2 cups strawberries, cleaned
1 cup butter
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
2 eggs
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups white chocolate chips

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
  2. Clean, trim, and slice berries.
  3. Crush strawberries with a potato masher. (You should end up with 3/4 cup of crushed strawberries.) Leave some larger chunks if desired; set berries aside.
  4. In a large bowl, beat butter and sugars.
  5. Beat in one egg at a time.
  6. In a separate bowl whisk flour, salt and baking powder.
  7. Add dry mixture to creamed mixture, about 1/2 a cup at a time.
  8. When well mixed, slowly add berries, about 1/4 cup at a time, while mixing at the same time, ensuring berries are spread well throughout.
  9. Add the white chocolate chips and stir to combine evenly throughout batter.
  10. Drop batter in tablespoons about 1-inch apart on a greased baking sheet.
  11. Bake at 350 degrees for 11 to 12 minutes for soft cookies, or up to a maximum of about 14-15 minutes for crunchier cookies, watching the edges to ensure they are lightly browned.
  12. Cool on wire racks.

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As Pictured Below: Pump up the jam

Posted in As Pictured Below, CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 17, 2011 | 1 Comment »

The first CSA delivery of the season contained a ridiculously large basket of strawberries, so I needed a quick way to use a lot of them.

I remember jam-making and jelly-making as a hot, time-consuming process, but I also remember my grandmother switching to the easier “freezer jam” method at some point, so I don’t feel like that much of a cheater for using it.

I’ll find out whether it worked in approximately 17 hours.

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Useful unitaskers: rare, but invaluable

Posted in CSA, Eats, Home, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 21, 2011 | 3 Comments »

Today, a friend sent me a link to Unclutterer, a blog about getting organized. The posts preach minimalism: the less stuff you own, the less stuff you have to organize. Every Wednesday the site mocks “unitaskers,” items that only serve one function while taking up valuable space. These products are often the worst of the “as seen on TV” club, and invariably enable you to do things that you can easily do without them, such as washing your feet or cracking eggs.

I admitted earlier this week to owning my own unitasker, an awesome cappuccino maker that, after a scroll through Unclutterer to see the ridiculous things that other people own, I’m liking more and more. While preparing dinner tonight, however, I realized that I’m actually the proud owner of two more unitaskers, both of which I needed for the substantial amount of produce in my CSA:

  • The Oxo Good Grips Strawberry Huller, which pierces the strawberry, scoops out the hull and releases it in a couple of quick moves. Using a knife to cut out stems is tedious and a bit slow, and poking a straw into the center of each strawberry simply makes a mess and often doesn’t remove the entire stem. This unitasker is also small and easy to clean, so it stays.
  • The Oxo Good Grips Corn Stripper, which strips and collects corn kernels as you move it down the corn cob. Sure, it does what a good sharp knife will do, but it does it without making a huge mess. Stripping corn with a knife results in flying kernels. The easy-to-clean container on this gadget is what makes it worth having. Fill it with corn kernels, dump them out into a bowl, then start filling it again.

So, in my kitchen a unitasker must perform its task much better than other multitasking accessories can and it must be easy to clean. (In fairness, apparently it also must be an Oxo product or an Italian import.)

I have this paranoid idea that most unitasker products are given as gifts by people who are hating on the clean, efficiently run kitchens of their recipients. What other explanation is there for the s’more makers that rampaged across American Christmas shopping lists a few years ago?

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Sweet alternative for using sweet potatoes

Posted in CSA, Eats, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 21, 2010 | 4 Comments »

True confession: I have never liked sweet potato casserole, that impostor of a side dish that shows up on the table every year at Thanksgiving. It always seemed more fitting as a dessert, but it in no way could compare to the pecan, egg custard or chocolate pie that sat in the kitchen waiting for the turkey to be cleared.

Sweet potatoes are put to much better use in pies; sweet potato pie, after all, tastes astoundingly like pumpkin pie.

(more…)

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When salad became more than iceberg lettuce

Posted in CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 4, 2010 | 2 Comments »

I still remember the moment I discovered that salad could mean something more than iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, croutons and dressing. I was at a fancy mountainside restaurant in Birmingham, Ala., with my future husband, probably around 1995, when the waiter brought out our small starter salads. They were filled with … leaves. And no hint of the crunchy, flavorless iceberg lettuce my fiance and I had both grown up thinking was the foundation of salad.

I learned that the leaves were baby arugula greens, and suddenly a new culinary world opened for me: Salad was no longer that bland bit of crunch existing only to carry dressing or serve as a low-calorie, tasteless diet option, but a real opportunity for nutritious, delicious creativity in the kitchen. Non-iceberg greens could be sweet or bitter and carry their own weight in a salad without relying on the dressing to make up for lack of flavor.

How did America get so obsessed with iceberg lettuce? Probably the same reason that grocery-store tomatoes and apples taste like mushy cardboard: According to Practically Edible, iceberg lettuce is easy to grow, easy to ship and lasts a long time in the fridge compared to other greens.

Through the early ’90s, it was nearly impossible to find any other kinds of greens in your average suburban grocery store, at least in Mississippi. I only had to remember one lettuce code during my entire six-month stint as a Jitney Jungle cashier in 1990.

I’m working my way through a big batch of Sylvetta Italian arugula mixed with other fresh greens this week, thanks to a winter CSA split with MrsDragon over at Mrs Dragon’s Den.  I even had to wash the dirt and a couple of tiny worms off, since my greens had just been plucked from the ground only two days earlier. Best salad ever.

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Now serving: disappointment cake

Posted in CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 24, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

We don’t eat a lot of cake in the Haggerty household. It’s just the two of us, and we don’t particularly eat a lot of anything, especially sweets. Which is too bad, because I love to bake and can be quite good at it.

So when I DO decide that a cake is forthcoming, it needs to be out of this world.

This cake, alas, was not that memorable.

I found myself with zucchini remaining in the fridge last week, despite the fact that the CSA ended a few weeks ago. (I actually found more zucchini in the fridge yesterday. I fear it has become sentient and is reproducing at will.) I decided to end the season with a bang after I found a recipe for Zucchini Cake With Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting at Seriouseats.com. The recipe promised me a “triple-threat of complementary flavors,” including zucchini, chocolate and cream cheese.

It was … OK. The cake itself was kind of dry, and the chocolate frosting couldn’t make up for it no matter how rich it was. I would have been better off making plain old zucchini bread and wrapping it for the freezer while I made a more fabulous cake.

The cream cheese frosting is pretty delicious by itself, however. After I took the photo above I scraped it off, ate it and threw the cake away. Baker’s prerogative.

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As Pictured Below: Bowlful of Melon

Posted in CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged , , , , , , on August 28, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Banana melon, some 15 inches long. It tasted like a really sweet cantaloupe. I am SO tired of melons that taste like cantaloupe. What ever happened to old-fashioned watermelons that were sweet, juicy and red inside?

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Autumn is such a tease

Posted in CSA, Home, Photographs, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

No, Pier 1 Cat, it is NOT fair for something that is so reminiscent of fall to arrive in the CSA box during the hot, hot first week of August. We should be double-checking the marshmallow stocks and finding new ways to dodge trick-or-treaters with this gem on the fireplace mantel.

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Tomato Envy

Posted in CSA, Eats, tagged , , , on July 24, 2010 | 1 Comment »

I’m finally getting tomatoes in my CSA box–they seem exceptionally late this year. Another farmer occasionally sets up shop out of the back of his pickup truck in the same parking lot where I pick up my goods every week, and I’m more likely than not to add some extras to my produce selection from his offerings. This week, he had a truck bed filled with $3 baskets of ripe, juicy tomatoes.

It’s been positively extravagant having so many homegrown, delicious tomatoes at the ready. I’ve had a sandwich. I’ve made a tomato-filled salad. I’ve served sliced tomatoes with dinner, garnished only with a sprinkling of salt and pepper.

Tomatoes aren’t a rarity, but good ones definitely are. I rarely buy grocery-store tomatoes any time of the year–they have no taste compared to the homegrown delicacies I grew up with at my grandparents’ farm.

I figure I only have three or four weeks of tomato season left, if that much. It’s fleeting, but it’s worth waiting for.

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More eggplant excitement

Posted in CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 14, 2010 | 2 Comments »

I can’t believe I ignored eggplant until this summer.

This weekend’s creation was much simpler than Eggplant Parmesan, taking probably a third of the time to make and leaving me with no baked-on cheese to scrub away. I was worried that my half-Italian, tomato-living husband wasn’t going to touch the weird-looking Eggplant Pasta Sauce that I put on the table, but he gave it high accolades.

A word of warning: Mashed eggplant is a gray, oil-looking mess, but the sun-dried tomatoes and garlic give it a complex flavor that will overcome your initial impressions.

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