Broccoli packets for roasting or grilling

Blackberries, lemon-thyme salmon
and broccoli packet

This doesn't have to be done with broccoli or Boursin.  It's just a framework for an easy make-ahead/freezable side dish.  You could do carrot slices, cauliflower, asparagus, squash or zucchini and any kind of soft, flavored cheese.  To make it freezer-friendly, use pre-frozen vegetables and omit the extra liquid. 

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Cookie Freezer Stash

Color plate from The American
Woman's Cookbook, 1944

I feel naked without dessert in the house.  Just gastronomically naked.  So I like having frozen cookie dough to make dessert fast when we find ourselves in a dessert emergency situation.  But when I want fast cookies, I don't want to have to roll, cut out, shape, drop, dust or engage in any verb other than "bake".  OK, maybe "slice", but that's my limit!  As it turns out, just about all drop, shape-into-balls, roll-in-sugar, slice and bar cookies freeze beautifully in their unbaked dropped, shaped-into-balls, rolled-in-sugar, sliced and barred states.  Yay!

The lime cookies are my signature cookie, although the recipe isn't mine.  It's from Herbst's The Joy of Cookies, but the author does NOT share the secret that these little gems can be prepared in vast batches, shaped, rolled in sugar, flattened and frozen for future cookie needs.  This recipe doubles very nicely.

The Molasses Softies are oldies but goodies too, from Natalie Haughton's Cookies.  I amend the recipe slightly to include my dad's trick of rolling "brown" cookies (like peanut butter drops or these molasses guys) in brown sugar instead of white sugar...it's a much richer flavor and more complementary to the "dark" sweetness of the cookies themselves. 

The coconut kisses are new to me though not new on the cookie block, again from my husband's grandma's 1944 home ec cookbook, The American Woman's Cookbook.  Only four ingredients and no mixer required...perfect!

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Pasta mezzavera

Everyone knows pasta primavera...the heavily sauced pasta dish with tender early spring veggies.  This is pasta mezzavera, made with heartier mid-summer veggies, fresh herbs and a light lemon-infused olive oil.  I like using zucchini and broccoli, but any combination of fresh, seasonal produce will work.  For a slightly more rib-sticking meal, add a cup or two of cooked white beans.

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Fried Green Tomatoes

I couldn't wait for all these gorgeous tomatoes hanging on our tomato vines to come ripe (and I'm a little scared of how many tomatoes we'll have when they do), so I thinned the herd and made fried green tomatoes. 

I prefer Paula Deen's buttermilk-and-flour recipe to the cornmeal-dredged recipes I've eaten before.  Using actual buttermilk (rather than reconstituted from dry buttermilk powder) produces a thicker batter coating, but you can get tasty results with the thinner reconstituted buttermilk as well.  The upside to a flour-egg wash-cornmeal coating, however, is that you can do all the dredging ahead and freeze those guys.  Just fry them from their frozen state.  The flour coating will turn into glue in the freezer.  So pick your process and product.

You can also can sliced green tomatoes for future frying.  If you still have a bumper crop of green tomatoes right before your first killing frost in the fall, you can put them up same as you would ripe tomatoes.  Slice them, pack them into clean canning jars, add 2 tbsp of lemon juice to each quart canned, fill with hot water and process for 45 minutes in a boiling water bath.  They'll come out softer than if they were fresh, but they're still dredge-able and fry-able. 

Lastly, an A.Ma.Zing thing to do with leftover fried green tomatoes is make paninis with bacon and provolone...put a few fried green tomatoes on a hoagie roll with a slice of provolone and a couple slices of bacon, and toast it up in a sandwich press (or a George Foreman grill, which is our ersatz panini press).

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Cafe au lait jello

I ordered a small iced coffee this morning at Dunkin' Donuts (my sin wagon of choice).  Unexpectedly, the chap at the drive-through window handed me a vat of coffee big enough to bathe in and said it was on the house.  As nice as a freebie is, I can't drink that much coffee (after the two at-home cups ::blush::) without serious damage to my stomach lining but I hate to waste free anything.  So we have grown-up jello for dessert tonight :D

This is a good idea for using up partial pots of coffee, or you can make some coffee special for it if you really want.

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S'mores on a stick

This is NOT my idea.  I cannot claim it in any way.  But I learned enough in the making of it not to take some notes and share them.  Dipping chocolate has ever been my foe, and I learn something new every time I try and fail and retry and fail less badly LOL  If you don't count the time I spent screwing up the first batch of chocolate, going to the store to get more chocolate and starting that part over, it only took me about 20 minutes total to make these.  These can be made a couple of days ahead, if you're making them for a party.

First the DOs:

• DO push the pretzel sticks into the marshmallows until they stick out the other side a bit
• DO thin the melted chocolate with a tbsp of shortening
• DO buy extra chocolate chips, just in case of screw-ups
• DO use parchment paper or a silicone mat to put the dipped sticks on

Now the DON'Ts:

• DON'T use anything except shortening to thin the chocolate (not butter, milk, water, or oil...better to use nothing at all if you don't have shortening)

OK, there's just the one DON'T but it's important.  If water or milk or butter or oil gets into the chocolate, it will "seize" or start to turn fudgy and you will have delicious faux fudge but totally undippable chocolate.  This is true for candy coating as well. 

The set-up is more important than the recipe.  Have your pretzel-stuck marshmallows assembled before you start melting chocolate.  Put them on baking sheets lined with parchment paper or silicone mats.  Melt the chocolate in a double boiler, preferably one wide enough to put your hand down into safely to dip the marshmallows (I have had bad luck with melting chocolate for dipping in the microwave, so I don't try any more).  I rolled just the sides of the marshmallows rather than dipping them straight down as I was worried that the marshmallows would pull off the sticks.  Keep the heat on low under the double boiler to keep the chocolate warm and thin (if you don't have a double boiler, I suppose you could melt the chocolate and put your work bowl over a heating pad to help keep the chocolate from cooling and thickening too much, but I can't swear to the viability of this equipment work-around).  Work with one stick at a time, dipping then rolling then putting it back on the baking sheet before doing the next one.



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Microwaved Beet Chips

These are delicious and cooking them won't heat up the house because it's done entirely in the microwave.  Woot-woot!  Beets are a sweet veg, and the flavor-texture result here is crunchy but melt-in-your-mouth, lightly sweet and lightly salty all at once.

The two in the back left are a leetle burned, but the rest are as they should be

The tricky part is that I can't tell you how long to nuke 'em.  It depends on how thinly you've sliced the beets, how powerful your microwave is, how many slices you're cooking at once.  I can tell you that these will burn between one second and the next if you're not careful though.  Start with a short time frame, then add time in 1 minute or 30 second intervals when you're getting close.  And watch them like a hawk with your finger on the STOP button in case you start to see or smell carbonization.  As usual, I screw up so you don't have to.

What I can tell you is what I did.  I have a "mid-size" microwave (don't know offhand how many watts).  I used 4 2" diameter beets and hand sliced them as thin as possible (pretty thin, but not totally regular or even).  I made the first batch with as many slices as I could fit in the microwave (about 3/4 of the slices).  You'll see the slices go from hard, to softened, to slightly curled to leathery to burned.  I started with 3 minutes.  They were just starting to look softened, so I added 3 minutes.  Then I added 1 more minute.  After 7 total minutes of cooking, they looked a little leathery but I thought they could use more time.  At 7 minutes 45 seconds, they were done but I didn't pull the emergency stop fast enough.  Fifteen more seconds gave me smoking briquettes and a reeky microwave. 

The second batch was much smaller, so at 3 minutes they were looking just leathery.  I gave them 30 more seconds, and stopped the microwave with 12 seconds left to go.  I spread the cooked chips on a paper towel and let them stand a few minutes.  They crisped up as they cooled. 

Four tennis ball sized beets will give you four small (about 1/3 cup) servings of chips.  Or one big afternoon snack.

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