Of course it tastes good; I made it!
That was my sister’s youngest boy, Cory. He likes to cook and is actually pretty good at it. He takes after her, but manages to learn from her past cooking mistakes in ways that actually help. Unlike me.
Check out the original One-Liner Wednesday.
Today I am grateful for cookbooks. I like to bake and, sometimes, I even like to cook. I am not good at cooking something out of the box with little instructions on the back. (I’m not the only one in my family with this problem, but there are only two of us out of our eight siblings with this problem.) I can, however, follow a recipe on a little card from the recipe box that our mother has spent the majority of her life collecting or from a book.
I’ve gotten pretty good at it, as long as I don’t leave the kitchen and forget that I’m cooking something. The kids are always really happy when I bake and they’ve grown to like when I cook as well now that dinners during the week have to be made by me and their Granny Mary (Mom). We have a nice system where we switch off who makes the main thing plus one side dish while the other makes the other side dish.
So I am grateful for cookbooks and that my mother made sure I knew how to use them.
Check out the original Thankful Thursday. (I will update the link when able.)
EDIT: The correct link has been added.
Spent my morning like this until my younger brother came over and used cookie making as an excuse to get me warmed up. It wasn’t for the cookies because he knew he wouldn’t be able to stay long enough for them to finish cooking. Now I’m warm and I have cookies!
Several years ago (I forget how many), my sister and I acquired a new cookie recipe that was little more than a list of ingredients as well as what temperature to cook them at. Nothing else. It was a fairly easy recipe to follow and through some trial and error we found a way to make them low-sugar without sacrificing any taste or even how the cookies look. (They are delicious crisp looking/tasting cookies.) Still we like to make little changes to different batches now and then, which is a given for us most of the time. grins
My favorite way is to switch out the butter for some applesauce. It tastes soooo good.
I recently ran out of applesauce and wasn’t able to get to the store, but had heard that you could use mashed bananas and/or mashed peaches instead of butter as well. I tried the bananas first because, let’s face it, they’re easier to mash. The batter was too liquid-y to actually hold its shape as a cookie after being baked. When I tried to move the baked cookie off the cookie sheet, it crumbled into banana flavored granola. It didn’t taste bad per say, but they were horrible cookies, structurally.
I eventually added flour and baked it all at once in a cake pan. My eldest niece dubbed it ‘cookie cake’ and most everyone enjoyed it quite well. I didn’t and my eldest nephew didn’t, but we both have problems with things that taste and/or smell very strongly. The smell of lavender, for example, will completely knock me out and give my nephew a headache.
Today I tried using peaches instead of the butter. It wasn’t quite as liquid-y as when I used the bananas, but it still wasn’t quite right. After baking they stayed stuck to the sheet; with a lot of scraping I was able to get them off and they didn’t crumble. Instead they crumpled up into a cookie cluster (as my mom called them). They were also quite delicious and chewy, but the effort to get them off the cookie sheet was not worth it. (I’m weak, it’s kind of a running joke/truth in my family.) Trying to use wax paper was a complete failure and we didn’t have any parchment paper or cookie sheet liners other than the wax paper. (I couldn’t get the cookies off the wax paper at all. It made an interesting taste to the ‘lace cookies.’)
I added some flour, once again, and baked it in a bigger cake pan as there was more dough this time around. After it was done, it looked an awful lot like brownies and tasted so incredibly rich and delicious. (I am aware that I’m using that word a lot, but it definitely applies.)
I’ve made crisps, cookies, cake and brownies all from the same recipe with only slight adjustments. It’s a very interesting thing for me as I am not the cook or the baker in my family. I’m just the manager.
Breathing In 