I wanted to use up the Hershey's white (what we generally call "white chocolate" - love them!) chips that I had opened a week ago to decorate the Philadelphia Indulgence Chocolate Mousse Cheesecake, so tonight I am making Hershey's Perfect White Chip Chocolate Cookies. The recipe is on the back of the bag, so pretty convenient.
Clearly, I am not using cookbooks as much as I had planned, but this is how I roll in the couple of months before Passover - use up what I can when I can.
I had a whole bag minus the 1/2 cup or so I had previously used, so I added a cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips too. The cookies came out fantastic!! I used real butter, and I think that made a big difference in flavor quality. I'm not a huge chocolate cookie fan, but these are really good - not working towards my effort of losing the NY weight I gained, so I had cooked cabbage with some margarine and salt for dinner (yum!).
Further comment on the macaroons...my 17-year-old son (who is not a "foodie") is addicted to the macaroons! He says they are "amazing." I think he likes the ones with the chocolate on the bottoms best, but he loves them all!
For anyone considering making them, they definitely taste even better the next day! The coconut and almond extract flavors really have time to meld together :)
I looked in my baking supply cabinet tonight to see what I might be able to use up in some recipe (realizing that I am definitely doing more baking than cooking for this blog...whatever...). I was really looking for a bag of chocolate or butterscotch chips, but I saw a nice, fresh bag of coconut that I bought only 2 months ago, so that's the winner! Anyway, it's a nice change from cheesecake (though there are plenty more of those to come, I'm sure).
The Baker's One Bowl Coconut Macaroons recipe was right on the back of the bag, and they are baking right now - love the smell of almond extract!
Here's how they came out - very delicious, actually! The browner parts have that yummy toasted coconut flavor, and the centers are nice and chewy.
I dipped half of them in melted chocolate chips, but they now have to stay in the fridge to keep the chocolate from getting too melty to the touch. Both kinds are good, but I think I prefer the plain ones best - sometimes simpler is best!
- Prep time: 15 minutes (maybe a bit less)
- Cook time: 25 minutes (the recipe says 20 minutes, but given the size of the macaroons, it really needs the extra 5 minutes)
I was making vegetarian soft tacos (with MorningStar Farms Meal Starters Grillers Recipe Crumbles, which is like a tofu version of ground beef), and I wanted a nice side dish. Tonight, I went with Benihana Japanese Fried Rice from the Top Secret Restaurant Recipes cookbook.
I made several changes to the recipe, including:
- Using basmati rice instead of regular white rice (because that's what I had!)
- Using 3 eggs instead of 2 (these get scrambled and added in, and 3 is better than 2)
- Not using any grated carrot (because I'm out, and it's more for color than flavor, considering you're only using 2 tablespoons)
- Sautéing the diced onion (because it seemed insane not to - raw onion in fried rice??)
- Not adding any additional salt & pepper
Bottom line - the rice was really delicious. The recipe says it makes 4 side dishes of this rice, but I would say that 6 servings is more accurate.
- Prep/cook time (because you're really doing both simultaneously): 60 minutes (this is because you have to make the rice, scramble the eggs, heat up the peas, sauté the onion, and then stir fry it all together)
- Top Secret Restaurant Recipes, 1997, pg. 43
Pesach (Passover) is two months away, so that means I have to use up as much of my non-Pesach food as possible before then, so I am realizing that this will entail much more baking than cooking - at least as far as new recipes go. I still need to use over 10 pounds of flour and about a dozen packages of cream cheese.
Today, I am making this Rainbow Candy Cheesecake because I was looking through the Ultimate Philadelphia Cream Cheese Cheesecakes cookbook last night, and I found one that will use up several things I have and need to start using up: cream cheese, Cool Whip, and M&Ms.
We have tons of M&Ms - at least half a pound left from Joshua's Bar Mitzvah (last May!) and of course at least another pound we just "had" to buy at the M&M store in NYC last month. Also, with M&Ms on the cheesecake, there is a much better chance that Joshua will eat some of it, and he always could use the calories (as opposed to me!). The recipe said to put the M&Ms on after the cheesecake cools,
but I really don't see how they would stick, so I put them on while it
was still a bit warm.
- Prep time: 15 minutes
- Cook time: 40 minutes
- Post cook finishing: 10 minutes
- Ultimate Philadelphia Cream Cheese Cheesecakes, 1996, pg. 68
I thought I would have tons of time over this 3-day weekend to cook some real food, but I wound up working with my kids endlessly on their homework instead. So this is the only thing I made from a cookbook, Hershey's Homemade.
The recipe says that I should get between 18 to 24 of these lovelies, but I followed the recipe accurately (and mine aren't even as high as in the picture), and I only got 16. Mine also didn't come out as perfectly circular as theirs, and my topping spread out a bit because I didn't cool them completely (my weakness for warm cheesecake being the culprit here). Here's what they look like on average:
They are super delicious, even as imperfect as they look here. The proof is that my oldest pushed his dinner aside to eat dessert first! Also, my middle son (pickiest kid ever!) ate one and liked it too! He thought the sour cream and sugar topping was frosting, so who was I to argue?!
- Prep time: 30 minutes
- Cook time: 25 minutes (each batch)
- Post cook finishing: 10 minutes
- Hershey's Homemade, 1991, pg. 49
We are down to about a slice of the cheesecake. I gave one of the cheesecakes away to friends because I knew we'd never get through it all - plus, I want to make something else! We've been eating a variety of our usual foods because the younger two are so picky (including wanting not much to do with the cheesecake).
The last slice...
OK, so I didn't make anything from a cookbook today, but I did use a new recipe. The problem was that I had (still have) a huge amount of cream cheese I need to start using. I bought quite a bit of it last month when it was less that a dollar each, thinking I would make all these great cheesecakes, but I really didn't have time.
As a matter of fact, I even ripped the recipe for the Philadelphia Indulgence Chocolate Mousse Cheesecake out of People magazine last month as an incentive to get me backing, but it really never happened. I'd always forget something critical to the recipe - white chocolate, Lorna Doones for the crust, etc. I wound up using 2 Keebler ready made shortbread pie crusts, and those worked quite well. So instead of having one large cheesecake using the springform pan (which I have, but 2 pre-made crusts turned out to be both cheaper and easier). I also wound up using white chocolate chips on top for decoration because I already had them (and they are yummy!)
My only criticism about this recipe is that the cheesecake itself was not as sweet as I would like in a cream cheese cheesecake (as opposed to an Italian cheesecake made with ricotta). The chocolate mousse on top (made with Philly Indulgence Chocolate and Cool Whip) was really good though. I think my kids would like that as a dessert by itself, actually. Giving one of these cheesecakes away tomorrow!
So after a full week of not being motivated to even make anything that required the following of actual directions (as opposed to just winging it like most home cooks do anyway), I finally broke down and made something from an actual cookbook.
Tonight, I used the Betty Crocker Cookbook (1987) to make good ol' pizza dough. My 11-year-old has been complaining for a very long time about the circular cardboard-like discs of hardened dough that come hermetically sealed in the package. The cost of one pizza circle is about $2.25, and the ingredients to make the pizza dough probably cost me maybe 50 cents. Big savings and much better flavor! I didn't have any pizza sauce, and the sauce recipe in the book didn't sound like my kids would eat it, so I relied on a jar of pasta sauce (actually called cooking sauce on the jar), but this was actually better than the canned pizza sauce I've been using anyway.
The only issue I would have with this recipe is that it says this is enough dough for 2 pizzas, but they must be small pizzas because I used the entire recipe to make one large pizza...something to remember next time, that's for sure...and judging from the kids' reaction, I would say this will be a definite regular recipe in our house!
- Prep time: 15 minutes
- Cook time: 15 minutes
- Betty Crocker's Cookbook, 1987, pg. 167
I haven't written on a blog in well over a year, but I think with the new year, I am having an urge to start a new one. I have always wanted to do a blog about finding one really interesting recipe from a cookbook - and then moving on to another recipe from another cookbook. I picked up some cookbooks from the library today that I have read bits and pieces of before, but have never made anything from them.
Due to copyright constraints, I will not be publishing any of the recipes themselves, but I will annotate which cookbooks I found them in, what page, etc. in case anyone ever finds this blog and reads it :) Wish me luck!
