Monday Recipe - Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

As I said last week, one Monday a month is going to be a recipe day. So today I'm sharing with you my favorite chocolate chip recipe. The cookies are nice and chewy, though I always make them bigger than they suggest.

Chewy Chocolate Cookies

1 ¼ c granulated sugar

1 ¼ c packed brown sugar

1 ½ c butter, softened

2 tsp vanilla

3 eggs

4 ¼ c all-purpose flour

2 tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

1-2 bags semisweet chocolate chips (2-4 cups)

Heat oven to 375 F (190 C). In large bowl with electric mixer, beat both sugars and butter until ight and fluffy. Beat in vanilla and eggs until well blended. Beat in flour, baking soda and salt. Stir in chocolate chips.

On ungreased cookie sheets, drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls 2 inches apart. (This is where I go a little bigger.) Bake 8-10 minutes or until light golden brown. Cool 1 minute. Remove from cookie sheets to cooling racks.

I have a convection oven, so I only need to bake them for 8 minutes. If you don't have a convection oven, you may have to bake them for the full 10 minutes.

Next month I'll have another recipe for you. Have fun with this one. I hope you enjoy the cookies as much as we do.

A short post on autumn

October is here. It contains so many wonderful things: Halloween. Fall colors. Cool weather. Spiced apple cider. Pumpkin pie (and pumpkin cheesecake.) My 13^th wedding anniversary.

October is the first full month of autumn in the year. September is still winding down from the heat of summer. But October...October brings with it a fuller effect of autumn. Leaves that were just barely thinking of turning colors in September begin to change with a much stronger force. Nights bring frost (in my neck of the woods, at least). Days bring cool but sunny days.

Autumn, for me, is one of my favorite seasons in the year. When I still lived in southern Idaho, spring and fall were my favorite seasons because the weather was blissfully cool compared to the scorching summers. Here on the Oregon coast, we haven't seen the kind of heat I'm used to seeing in the summer. But the cooler days and seeing the frost on windshields when I get up in the morning is still as wonderful as it always has been.

Autumn also brings harvest time for many plants. We're still getting peppers, both sweet and hot. Our tomatoes quit producing a while ago. But we still have artichokes growing, and we're getting more than I thought we would from a small handful of plants. We got some peas and green beans from our plants over the last couple months. We even got a few tiny onions and some nice carrots. The farm my husband and his partners started is beginning to, pardon the pun, bear fruit for us.

I'm loving Oregon and the lovely weather here. Autumn is getting under way and it's reflected in everything around me. I love seeing the world shift and change as the seasons turn. Each season brings with it something new. Each season tells a different story. For me, the stories of spring and autumn are my favorite. Their tales are woven with sights, scents, and sounds that evoke good memories for me.

What is your favorite season? What reminds you most of it?

Freaky Food Friday - Cheese Biscuits, Cucumber Salad and Chocolate Chip Cookies

Today is three 'C' foods I love to make: my Cheese Biscuits, Cucumber Salad, and my Pounder Chocolate Chip Cookies.


Cucumber Salad


2 small cucumbers, thinly sliced
2 medium tomatoes, chopped
1 small onion, diced
4 celery stalks, thinly sliced
1/4 c. cider vinegar
2 T olive oil
1 T honey
1/2 tsp. dried basil
1/2 tsp. dried oregano
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. garlic powder

Put all vegetables in a bowl and lightly mix.  Mix together vinegar, oil, honey, and spices.  Pour over the vegetables and mix until veggies are coated.  Refrigerate for at least 4 hours.  For best results, let sit overnight.

Cheese Biscuits


2 c. all purpose flour
2 1/4 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/3 c. shortening
1 c. sharp Cheddar cheese
3/4 c. buttermilk

Preheat oven to 450 F.  Mix dry ingredients.  Cut in shortening until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs.  Mix the cheese.  Pour in the buttermilk slowly and mix until just blended.  Turn onto a floured board.  Roll to 1/2" thickness and cut 12 biscuits.  Place 1 inch apart on a lightly greased baking sheet.  Bake for 8-10 minutes until golden brown.

Pounder Chocolate Chip Cookies


4 c. flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
4 sticks butter, softened
3/4 c. brown sugar
3/4 c. white sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
4 eggs
1 pkg. semi-sweet chocolate chips (or milk chocolate, or bittersweet...whichever you like)

Preheat oven to 350 F.  Mix dry ingredients and set aside.  Cream together butter and sugars.  Add vanilla and stir in eggs one at a time until mixed.  Slowly add the flour mixture.  Add chocolate chips.  Bake for 10-15 minutes, until golden brown.

Freaky Food Friday - JAPANESE CUISINE

Hello my fellow foodies!

This week I’m doing something a little different with my FFF post.  This week, instead of talking about eating on a budget I’m going to talk about food in a different country.  Most specifically, Japan.

Japanese food is something I’ve always enjoyed – from sushi and sashimi to miso soup and tempura.  And many, many, MANY things in between.  My two favorite restaurants in Boise are Fujiyama’s and the Kyoto Steakhouse.  Both are indulgences I don’t permit myself except on special occasions.  Fujiyama’s is a typical Japanese restaurant.  Kyoto Steakhouse is a teppanyaki restaurant – one of those where the chefs come and cook and you’re eating around the grill.  It’s a lot of fun and the chefs really get into it.

One of my favorite recipe books is at the Japanese table by Lesley Downer.  In her introduction, she comments on the fact that she had her first taste of Japanese food in 1978.  She was scared to try the sashimi but when her hosts insisted she tried it.  And she discovered it wasn’t as slimy as she’d thought and was actually very good.

There are several varieties of of Japanese cuisine.  There is the Kaiseki, the specialty restaurants like sushi bars and tempura restaurants, “Red Lanterns” and street food, and temple cooking.  But the heart and soul of Japanese cooking is the home.

Up until recently, meat like chicken, pork, and beef were almost unused in Japan.  They relied on fish, soybeans, rice, and seaweed among other things.  They harvest wild mushrooms and other wild vegetables.  They learned to live within their environment first.  When the Western world began to infringe on their lives, they began to eat more beef and such.  This has led to higher health problems in the younger generations.  It’s also led to them being taller than their parents and grandparents.

Rice is a staple, as is miso soup.  Japanese people have tiny kitchens.  They tend to buy just what they need for the day and prepare it when they get home.  Rice is one of the few things, or so I've seen and read, that they always keep on hand.

Traditional Japanese food is a healthy alternative to our Western cuisine.  I love Japanese food and thought I’d share a few pictures of some of my favorite Japanese foods.  Japanese food is a feast for all the senses.  You start with sight and smell.  Then you move on to taste and texture.

Tempura

Chicken and Mushroom Yakitori

Sushi

Miso soup

Onigiri

Sashimi (YUUUUM)

Bento box (I love Wall E)

There are recipes online and instructions on how to do all of these things.  Take a minute, do some research, and try something new from Japan today.

Many thanks to Lesley Downer for her lovely book at the Japanese table, without which this post would not have been created.  It was reading it that inspired me to do this...not to mention a lot of my facts come from that book.

Food in Fiction - or why I love to feast my characters

Way back when I was a little girl, we'd go visit my grandparents up in WA.  One of my Granma's favorite things to fix was a good, old fashioned Southern dinner.  My grandmother was whiter than Wonder Bread but she was a real Southern granma (even though she only lived in GA for 10 years) and she learned how to fry, barbecue, and boil/steam everything.  Deep fried catfish, collared greens, corn bread, gator (don't know where she got it back in the '80's in WA state), fried chicken, green beans and bacon, etc. I LOVED dinner at granma's.  When granpa had a stroke, granma stopped cooking the southern way.  It broke my heart because that's my fondest memories.  When granpa died, granma stopped cooking much of anything other than basic stuff like grits or blacked eyed peas and ham hocks.

Why am I talking about my memories of my strange relocated Southern Yankee grandparents?  Because I wanted to discuss food in fiction.  Specifically, the use of food as an evocative tool to give you an idea of what the lifestyle and culture of the characters is like.

NY Times article
Amazon has a list of books!
Meals are a great way to describe relationships
An actual website that offers alternatives for fantasy writers
SFWA even includes diet in its world building questions

These are a handful of links that I found.  Granted, a lot of the links I found weren't as indicative of the subject as I'd like but let's be honest - my Google-fu isn't all that great. :)

I use food with Anneke and Raghnall to indicate the troubles the two of them have adapting to life because their mother is an elf.  Elves, in my world, don't eat meat or any other animal products (butter, cheese, eggs, etc.).  Now where Seda could have died by eating it, her children (who are only half elf) have to adapt to society where things like eggs are a staple.  Turning away food is tantamount to starvation in the wild and brutal land that Anneke is living in.  It's a major insult to not accept dinner invitations when you move in the social circles that Raghnall moves in.  I had to come up with a way for them to eat and not die, so I subject them to the food from an early age to the point where they become adjusted to eat it.

Food is completely different in the area where Anneke lives from where Raghnall lives.  Reidar's diet is completely different as well.  There are foods available to Reidar that aren't available to the other two.  The same thing can be said for what Anneke eats compared to what Raghnall eats.  But I also include how the food is cooked, how it's eaten, where it's prepared, who prepares it, etc.  All of these things can paint a picture of a culture that you wouldn't normally see but is still vital in showing who the characters are.

I'm having fun creating recipes and using things I find on programs such as "Bizarre Foods", reading medieval cookbooks (well, cookbooks that showcase medieval style cooking), and a lot of online research about what people of different cultures might be eating.  I'm hoping to one day have a recipe book full of recipes I'll be using/mentioning in my books.  I might not ever share it with anyone but my family but it'll still be fun to have.