Last summer, we avoided baking much at all. Past that it requires another set of ingredients, we didn't have a real cookie sheet or bread pan. Having accumulated a few more items for our kitchen this year, we decided that we could branch out and put the oven to better use.
We've used a tremendous amount of cheese and hence have a lot of grated cheese. Constantly looking into the fridge reminded me of a recipe for cheddar biscuits that my mom has that was absolutely delicious.
2 cups (500ml) AP flour ½ tsp (2ml) salt ¾ (175ml) milk
1 Tbsp (15ml) baking powder ¼ cup (50ml) cold butter
1 Tbsp (15ml) sugar 1 ¼ cups (175ml) shredded Cheddar cheese
In a mixing bowl/food processor, mix dry ingredients. Add the butter to the flour mixture, cutting it in with a pastry blender until the mixture looks like a coarse cornmeal. By hand, stir in the shredded cheddar & toss to combine. Add the milk all at once & stir until it forms a soft dough. Dump onto a lightly floured surface & knead by hand 10-12 times. Roll out the dough to ½ inch (1cm) thickness. Cut into rounds (2 inches/5cm) and place on ungreased baking sheet. Bake 450F (230C) for 12-14 minutes, until lightly browned on top and nicely puffed.
They don't have a really strong taste, but baked into cookie size pieces, they're really addictive. The baked cheese is fantastic, so if you're looking something light on the side of a main dish, I highly recommend them. Sadly, I forgot to take pictures that day, but the leftovers will appear in a picture below.
Yesterday, we figured we should use the chicken that we had in the fridge. Since we end up going shopping weekly, don't have a lot of freezer space, and aren't stalked for Y2K, our meat tends to go week-to-week. We'll buy something on Wednesday and try to eat it by Saturday while it's still fresh. This week, we hadn't touched the chicken breasts yet, and with last week's bread leftover, breaded chicken sounded good. I knew the steps to do breaded (flour, eggs, bread crumbs), and with salt, pepper, italian herbs, garlic powder, and parmesan in our pantry, I figured we were set.
And it all went well. Again, I forgot to take pictures until we were done, but everything went smoothly. It was absolutely delicious; the breading tends to lock in liquids against the meat, and since chicken breasts are lean, you get the juices but not the fat. Put with pasta and marinara sauce (with some vegetables cooked in) with leftover cheese biscuits, it was a very filling meal.
For our final trick, we baked cookies for the 4th. That's celebration, right? Unfortunately, I forgot that we're missing just 1 or 2 things for baking cookies. Most notably, we don't have brown sugar or molasses. Looking over recipes on allrecipes without either brown sugar or vanilla extract, we came across a
gluten-free recipe for peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. I've never baked flour-less cookies, but the recipe got high reviews, so we tried it.
Of course, we halved all the amounts, but we put it together and came out with a mass of sugared peanut butter with chips thrown in. Definitely not conventional dough
We had scooped out most of it by the time I got there, but you can see that it looks a little thick and un-doughy. Also note that the best mixing bowl that we have is the bowl for my rice cooker. Go figure.
Anyways, we baked them and tried them. The massive amount of peanut butter means they came right off the sheet, and actually probably even fried the cookies some.
Since we don't have any nuts, we went with m&ms, so more chocolate. They're actually pretty good, but it's like eating a rock. After two, I was done.
We'll see what other people have to say about them, but we'll probably want to get more ingredients before trying any other cookie recipes.
0 comments:
Post a Comment