Cantaloupe Cookies

It all started with a 99-cent cantaloupe from Aldi. It smelled good; it looked good. It did not get along with pregnant digestive track. I was burping cantaloupe all day two days ago. Because Joe isn't fond of the orange melon, and Stephen also tried and rejected it, I decided I would need to transform it into something else. My mom got me a copy of Gourmet's Cookie Book for Christmas, and I've been getting inspired before bed several nights now. (Even Stephen likes to look at it with me. He'll say: "How 'bout we read the cookie book?") What about cantaloupe cookies? I thought either a thumbprint or kolachky or bar cookie might work. Recipes for cantaloupe quick bread and cake abound on the Internet, but I couldn't find any cookie recipes. So this morning I decided to chop the thing up into tiny bits and cook them over medium with a big mound of sugar and a big shake of cardamom and a little tiny shake of ginger powder. I also added the zest of one lemon. Surprisingly, it turned into a very thick jam. I guess cantaloupe has a lot of natural pectin? I made a bar cookie base of a cup flour, 1/3 cup butter, some sliced almonds and a 1/4 cup instant oats, which I pressed into a square dish and baked for 18ish minutes until it was very lightly browned. I spread the cantaloupe mixture over that and then beat 2 eggs, the juice of one lemon and 3/4 cup sugar and 2 Tbs flour in a bowl and poured it over everything. It baked at 350 for maybe 20 minutes and came out like....

Not terribly pretty in my estimation, but pretty good for a completely experimental cookie. It's intensely lemony and sweet and rich and gooey. I'm pretty sure they need to be refrigerated. I think I could have upped the cardamom and ginger to give it a more obvious exotic flavor.

gingerbread

Quesadillas, cake mix cookies and anniversary

After having the chicken quesadilla at Coffee And... the other day, I decided to make my own with shredded chicken breast (baked in the toaster over in olive oil and lemon juice) and diced red bell pepper, tossed with salsa and sprinkled with cheddar.
And I've been craving both chocolate and cookies lately with the weather starting to act like it should in November. These are uber easy... inspired by Kai, who first turned me on to cake mix cookies. Just dump a chocolate cake mix in a bowl (on sale at Kroger for $1!) add two eggs, 1/2 cup oil and mix. Then plunk heaping spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet and bakeuntil the tops look set at 350 degrees. I ate three of these soft giants before Joe got home from work to take me out to dinner for our unofficial anniversary.

more cookies at work

These cookies actually came before last post's cookies. I made them from a recipe in "Another Serving"... yet another Kentucky cookbook sent to me by a publisher.


Here's the review I wrote for the New Era:

Title: Another Serving: The Kentucky Monthly 10th Anniversary Cookbook What’s inside: As with other southern cookbooks, “Another Serving” offers up dishes replete with down-home comfort and calories. But amidst the cheesy dips and creamy casseroles there are a few healthful surprises like Fat-burning Cabbage Soup on page 30, Grilled Veggie Burger on page 100 and Faux Potatoes on page 122, which uses pureéd steamed cauliflower in place of spuds.
The recipes range from formal, such as Crème Bruleé French Toast and White Asparagus Vinaigrette with Country Ham Crumbles, to fit for a backyard barbecue, such as Beer Can Grilled Chicken and Fried Green Tomato Sandwiches. None of the
recipes run over a page and most use common ingredients, or offer substitutes (such
as beef for the bison meatloaf on page 64.) All the recipes come from select
food columns in Kentucky Monthly magazine,which celebrates 10 years this year.
How it looks About every third recipe in the 122-page perfect-bound book contains a full-page color photo, usually cropped in close to show the details.
In the kitchen: Several of the recipes require only a handful of ingredients and often use packaged convenience foods.
Paula Cunningham, the cookbook’s publisher and compiler, calls the recipes in the book “embarrassingly easy,” and I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I was
able to make these cookies from page 176. To avoid too much bingeing, I cut the recipe in half. Also, I didn’t have selfrising flour on hand, so I used 1 ¾ cup all purpose flour and 3 teaspoons baking powder. They came out crunchy, but light
and not overly tough on the teeth. I usually go for the soft and goey cookies,but I like the variety of textures that the coconut, cereal, oats and nuts bring to these hearty cookies.

Great Crunchy Cookies
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1 egg
1 cup vegetable oil
1 ½ cup oats
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ teaspoon salt
3 ½ cups self-rising flour
1 cup Grape Nuts® cereal
1 cup coconut
1 cup chopped pecans

Cream butter and sugars together in a food processor or mixer until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, oil, oats, vanilla extract and salt and mix well. Add 1/3 of the flour and mix. Continue adding the remaining flour until mixed well. (You may have to transfer it into a larger bowl and mix by hand with a large wooden spoon.) Add the Grape Nuts®, coconut and pecans. Pinch off the dough and roll into quarter size balls. Place dough balls on an ungreased baking sheet and press down with a fork or with your hands. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes or until lightly brown. Cool and store in an airtight container. Makes 6 to 8 dozen and can be stored in an airtight container for two weeks or longer.

Where to get it: The Pennyroyal Area Museum gift shop and Books on Main carry the cookbook, which sells for $21.95.
— Review by features editor Emily Parrino

cookies at work

So I've been insanely busy lately... not by choice. Spending more time "Feeding the Beast" (that's the blank pages of the features section which I'm obligated to fill with words and pictures 6 days a week)than myself and the little stinker.

But I did have time between keyboard clacks to snarf this bag full of oatmeal/almond meal/flaxseed/chocolate chip cookies.

Per Tina's request... I'll try to think of what I did to make these...
I think it was 2/3 cups oats, maybe a scant tablespoon of flaxseed, 1/3 cup almond meal, 1/2 cup flour (sorry Tina, these probably won't work for your family... you might want to try rice flour?), 3 tsp. baking powder, 1 egg, about a half cup sugar, 1/3 cup oil and mini chocolate chips... I didn't measure them, I just dumped. There was some vanilla extract in there too. Again, I didn't measure, but I'm guessing it was about 1/2 teaspoon or so? Oh, and I think I used some shredded coconut, dumped from the bag. Cooked at 350 degrees until they looked set.

For a while in Taiwan I made all kinds of things with a combination of oat and sticky rice flour. The oat flour made things very crumbly, while the rice flour was more gummy. Together they sort of approximated the texture of wheat flour goods. Pancakes, crepes and quick bread recipes worked pretty good with this mix. I think I could use straight rice flour for the crepes.

Cookied

Meringues & Kolackys

One buttery bite courtesy of Poland, a lighter-than-air morsel of meringue from France and a cakey tidbit for dunking compliments of an Italian grandma. My favorite Christmas cookie memories take me around the world even though in most cases, I never left my loved one’s kitchen.

Multicultural treats characterize my holiday gatherings with family: My Chinese aunt specializes in kolacky, a Polish cookie with a pastry base and a sweet fruit or nut filling. My Swedish grandma always made chocolate chip meringues around Christmas. My husband’s Italian grandma just introduced me to tender homestyle biscotti.

I’m far from home this December, so I decided to replicate some of my favorite holiday desserts. After an intensive weekend in the kitchen, my countertops were coated in flour, my sink full of measuring cups and roughly 10 dozen cookies cooled on wire racks and sheets of wax paper and filled tins and Tupperwares.

My first challenge was to create a meringue cookie like the ones my paternal grandma, Nan, used to make at Christmas time. My dad’s side of the family has gotten smaller and more spread apart over the years, so our family gatherings aren’t as regular as they once were. Nan has since lost her recipe, but I haven’t forgotten the taste or the way bittersweet chips keep the teeth from sinking right through the cookies’ cloud-like texture. I toyed with the ingredients from a meringue recipe from my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook and borrowed the cooking instructions from a recipe in the December issue of Gourmet magazine to come up with this recipe.

Nan’s Chocolate Chip Meringues

2 egg whites

2/3 cup sugar

1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar

2 teaspoon vanilla extract

2/3 cup mini chocolate chips

Lightly grease a cookie sheet. In a medium mixing bowl beat egg whites, vanilla and cream of tartar with an electric mixer on high speed until soft peaks form. Add sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time, beating until stiff peaks form. Fold in the chocolate chips.

Drop rounded teaspoons of mixture onto cookie sheet. Bake at 200 degrees for 2 hours or until firm. Turn off oven, wedge door open with the handle of a wooden spoon and allow meringues to cool for an hour. When completely cooled, seal meringues in an airtight container.

While the meringues were slow cooking in the oven, I made the dough for the pastry base of kolacky. My Aunt Susie Wong usually fills them with strawberry or apricot preserves, but as I surveyed the shelves in the baking aisle, I couldn’t resist trying the almond filling.

Vicki Glowaki’s Kolacky

1 cup butter softened

1 package Philadelphia cream cheese 8 oz., softened

1 tablespoons milk

1 tablespoon sugar

1 egg yolk

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 t baking powder

1 can SOLO filling (any flavor)

Confectioner’s sugar

Beat butter, cream cheese, milk and sugar in medium-size bowl with an electric mixer until thoroughly blended. Beat in egg yolk.

Sift flour and baking powder and stir into butter mixture to make a stiff dough. Cover bowl and refrigerate several hours or overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Roll out dough on lightly floured surface to ¼-inch thickness. Cut dough with floured 2-inch cookie cutter.

Place cookies on ungreased baking sheets about 1-inch apart. Make depression in center of cookies with thumb or back of spoon. Spoon a dab of SOLO filling into center of cookie. Pinch together sides of cookie. Bake 15 to 20 minutes or until lightly browned. Remove from baking sheets and cool completely on wire racks. Sprinkle with confectioner’s sugar just before serving. Makes about 36 cookies.

This past Thanksgiving my husband ate most of a tin full of thumb-sized soft biscotti that his grandma Giammo added to the dinner table. Grandma G’s neighbor, Rose, who is also an Italian grandma, makes hundreds of these dunkable cookies at a time. I’ve halved her recipe to make it a little more manageable (and to keep my husband’s waistline in check.) These biscotti are nothing like the kind you get at Starbucks. Usually, biscotti are twice baked, making them extra crunchy. Rose’s biscotti will stand up to hot coffee or chocolate, but have the texture of a tender scone. The flavor is also very delicate, owing to the relatively small amount of sugar and zest from fresh lemons.

Rose’s Soft Biscotti

4 eggs beaten

½ cup sugar

pinch salt

zest of 2 lemons

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

½ cup heavy cream

¼ cup vegetable oil

2 ½ teaspoons baking powder

3 ½ cups flour

Lemon glaze:

½ cup confectioner’s sugar

lemon juice

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Blend all the biscotti ingredients together, then work into a soft dough on a floured work surface. If dough seems too sticky, knead in a little more flour. Pinch off a small portion of dough and roll into a ½-inch thick log. Divide log into 1 ½-inch pieces and place on a greased baking sheet. If you like, try creating different shapes with dough, rolling ropes to a thinner width and creating an s-shape or twisting two strands together. Bake until golden, then place biscotti on wire racks to cool.

To make icing, pour confectioner’s sugar in a small bowl. Add lemon just a few drops at a time, stirring until icing is a syrupy consistency. Coat cooled cookies with lemon glaze and then let them dry overnight on waxed paper.

I love to try recipes that have roots in other countries and cultures, but I’ll never turn my nose up at a good recipe for all-American treats like Emily’s Chocolate Chip Cookies and Candy Cane Cookies. When I lived in Asia, I went through American cookie withdrawal. It’s hard to find a good, chewy cookie with real chocolate chips there and even harder to make them without the luxury of an oven. My attempts at using a toaster oven and a microwave to make cookies turned out disastrously! So don’t ever take these American treats for granted.

Emily’s Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 eggs

1 cup canola oil

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 ½ cups flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup mini chocolate chips

Cream sugar and eggs, then add oil and vanilla extract. In another bowl, sift flour, salt and baking soda. Gradually add flour mixture to egg mixture. After dough is well blended, fold in chocolate chips. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spoon teaspoonfuls of dough onto an ungreased airbake cookie sheet. If you don’t have insulated baking sheets, stack two regular cookie sheets. After about 5 minutes, watch cookies vigilantly. Remove cookies when they are just set, but not browned. They will still be slightly raw in the center, but they will stay soft and chewy after they cool.

Candy Cane Cookies

½ cup margarine, softened

½ cup shortening

1 cup powdered sugar

1 egg

1 ½ teaspoon almond extract

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 ½ cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

Mix together margarine, shortening, powdered sugar, egg and extracts in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, sift flour and salt. Mix together dry and wet ingredients to form a soft dough. Separate dough into two equal pieces. Add red food coloring to one ball and green food coloring to the second ball of dough.

Pinch off quarter-sized balls of dough and roll into ropes about 6-inches long. Twist together one green and one red rope and bend into a candy cane shape.

Bake at 375 degrees for seven minutes. Remove cookies briefly to sprinkle with sugar or crushed candy cane, then bake two more minutes.

Allow cookies to cool on the cookie sheet.

Emily Parrino can be reached at 887-3235 or eparrino@kentuckynewera.com.