Egg-Free Cookie Dough

I like cookies.

I do. I prefer them to cake, for instance. There are few things more indulgently delectable than a chocolate chip cookie fresh from the oven, served with a tall glass of milk (or bowl of vanilla ice cream).

But do you know what I honestly sort of like more than cookies?

Cookie dough.

Yes. My cookie recipes never make quite as many cookies as advertised, because I eat several cookies' worth of dough.

I do not discriminate in my love of raw baked goods--my brownie pan is never quite as full as it should be by the time I'm done spooning tastes out of the batter, and cake batter is far, far superior in every way to finished cake.

I tend to pooh-pooh my way past raw egg warnings. Doughs and batters, fresh Caesar salad dressing and homemade mayonnaise--I enjoy them all with nary a thought to spare for food poisoning.

Now that I'm pregnant, however, I have resigned myself to a more cautious approach to food. Goodbye, alcohol; goodbye, sushi; goodbye, cookie dough.

Until the internet graced me with a recipe for egg-free dough, of course.

Yes, please.

Egg-Free Cookie Dough
Adapted from this recipe at DisneyFamily.com; this recipe from Love & Olive Oil is similar, but requires more ingredients and I haven't actually bothered with it yet. Note that normal people use these recipes to form adorable little cookie dough balls that they drizzle/coat in chocolate and serve on fancy platters at parties. I just stick the bowl of dough in my fridge to eat as the mood strikes me.

Soften 1 cup (two sticks) butter by leaving it out on the counter for an hour, or hacking at it with a knife for fifteen minutes, or, if you like to live life on the edge, microwaving in 5-10 second intervals.

I bought a one pound block of butter from a local dairy,
so it wasn't in neat little sticks. If you, too, lack stick butter,
remember that 1 pound = 2 cups = 4 sticks.
So this is a half pound of butter (aka 1 cup aka 2 sticks)
 in pieces that I hacked apart and weighed on my kitchen scale.

You should be able to easily leave a thumbprint in softened butter, but it should not be in any way melty or liquid.

Thumbprint.

Put your butter in a large mixing bowl, one that will happily accommodate a beater. A deep bowl is a good idea, as butter and sugar in a wide, shallow bowl will go flinging about your kitchen and into your hair. Not that I know this from personal experience or anything.

Add to your butter 1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar.

Sugar and butter.

Cream your butter and sugar together. This means beat it with your beater until it's a creamy, coherent substance. The DDH is exceptionally good at this, and the batch he made was smoother and more delightful than the one I did. I tend to get impatient and stop before everything is really and truly creamed, leading to a grainier (and, after being refrigerated, harder) finished dough.

This is okay, but another two minutes would make it better.

Add 1 tsp. vanilla extract

Vanilla.

and 1 1/2 to 2 cups flour. I add a cup, mix it in, then add more until it's the consistency I like. When you're making dough to bake, you want to be careful not to overmix the flour, as this will make for tough cookies. But if you're just eating the dough, it doesn't matter as much.

Flour.

Once your dough is mixed and the consistency you like,

Dough!

add 1 to 2 cups chocolate chips. In other words, add chocolate chips to taste, or according to how big your chips are or how many you have left.

This is a bit less than a cup of chips.

Mix together and enjoy!

No need for baking.

The dough will keep in the fridge for a week or so, not that it's ever stuck around that long at my house. To help keep your leftovers soft, press plastic wrap directly onto the surface of the dough.

You can of course form this dough into balls, drizzle and coat with chocolate, and take them to a fancy party.

But I won't tell if you just eat it all with a spoon straight from the bowl. ;-)

Homemade Biscuits

I make things more difficult than they really are.

I make bread (admittedly mostly in my breadmaker) and pizza dough and all kinds of things from scratch. I make cookies and cakes and brownies and pancakes not-from-mixes (and also from mixes, especially if the mix is Trader Joe's Truffle Fudge Brownie Mix).

But somehow I always thought biscuits were complicated. So we didn't eat them, except on the exceedingly rare occasion that I would buy the little refrigerated tubes o' biscuit.

YOU GUYS.

Biscuits are not complicated to make.  I don't know why I thought they were. If you skip the resting step (and have a magically fast preheating oven), you could have warm biscuits on the table in thirty minutes or less. And even given resting and preheating the oven, these take less than an hour.

Also, they're delicious.

With honey.

Biscuits and honey.

Homemade Biscuits
Adapted from The Simple Homemaker's Sleeping Baby Biscuits recipe. You should check out her cute post, especially if even this is sounds like too much work--she also has a recipe for Screaming Baby Biscuits (one-handed dump-and-mix process), which might show up here in a few months! ;-)

Mix in a nice big bowl 2 cups flour (I used white but will be experimenting with ratios of whole wheat), 3-4 tsp. baking powder, 1/2 tsp. salt, and 1/2 tsp. cream of tartar (for a fluffier biscuit; if you don't have cream of tartar, make sure to use 4 tsp. of baking powder. I used 4 tsp. baking powder AND the cream of tartar 'cause I like my biscuits fluffy. And because my cream of tartar is ancient and I have no idea if it actually still works anymore).

Ingredients.

Cut in 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter. Cutting means using a pastry cutter (pictured) or a couple of table knives in a rocking sort of motion. The end result will look like coarse crumbs, with tiny bits of cold butter coated in flour. You can also just soften the butter in the microwave and stir it in with your spatula, but that will make the biscuits less flaky. And a flaky biscuit is pretty much the ideal for me.

Cut your cold butter into smaller pieces and scatter them
in the bowl of flour+.

Pastry cutter. Rock it back and forth to simultaneously
chop and mix the butter into the flour mixture.

It resembles coarse crumbs when you're done, but still may
have larger chunks of butter and loose flour.

In a measuring cup (or a small bowl), mix 2/3 cup milk (or water) and 1 Tbs. honey.

Mixing in the measuring cup saves you a dish.

Pour liquid ingredients into dry ingredients, and mix until moistened and it holds together somewhat.

This time it was a little gloppy; with wheat flour it's often
a little dusty. Fine either way.

Around this time, depending on your oven, you should preheat your oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Lightly flour your counter and dump the dough out onto it.

I flour a silpat just to help define my working area and
because who knows how sanitary my counters really are.

Pile o' dough.

Knead approximately twelve times. To knead, you gather your dough into a mound, then punch it in the middle, pushing half of it back away from you.

Mound o' dough.

 

Kneading is good stress relief.

Then pick up that back half, fold it back onto the rest of the dough, and repeat, changing the direction from which you fold the dough.

Pick up the back half and fold forward.

New mound o' dough.

Punch again, maybe toward one side.

Pick it up and fold again.

Flatten the dough and use a biscuit cutter or the top of a glass to cut out a dozen biscuits. Or eleven biscuits and one the-rest-of-the-dough-mashed-into-a-rough-biscuit-shape runt. It will depend on how thinly you flatten your dough and the diameter of your biscuit cutter/water glass.

No need for a rolling pin. Just stretch and mash it a bit.

Drinking glass biscuit cutter.

Place on a baking sheet (I advise a Silpat thing, if you have one) about two inches apart. TSH says you can stick them all close together in a pan for softer, pull-apart style biscuits. If you'd like, brush the tops with melted butter or milk.

Resting.

Let rest twenty minutes before baking, though they will be perfectly edible if you toss them in the oven right away.

Bake at 450 for 10-15 minutes or until slightly browned (or however you like your biscuits).



Lightly toasted. Whole wheat biscuits will be darker, and
these could have been left in a little longer with no problem.

Eat plain, buttered, with jam, with honey, topped with an egg and bacon...however you eat them, they're delicious!

I've been making them in the evening and eating them with honey or eggs for breakfast, and with honey for an afternoon snack or a dessert.

Nom nom nom.

What's something you thought was "too hard" to cook that turned out to be super easy?

Reality Dinners, Day 1

Do you want to know a secret?

Are you sure?

I don't make fantabulous home-cooked meals every day.

I don't! Do you?

I like to post my favorite recipes, the fancy things I make and the delicious successes, because hey, we all like to brag a bit.

But this blog is called Reality Chef, not Sitcom Chef. Some days I make a dinner completely from scratch with produce I've grown myself, followed by a fancy dessert. Other days I rely on canned and convenience foods, cheats and mixes. Yet other days we just scrounge for leftovers or pull something from the freezer, and way too often we eat out.

Sort of the way, I imagine, that you all eat.

The point is, you don't have to make a grown-yourself, from-scratch, four-course meal every night in order to save money and eat more healthfully. You can make quick from-scratch meals some nights, and semi-from-scratch meals other nights, and sometimes you will still eat Steakhouse Burgers from Carl's Jr. and that's okay.

In the spirit of forcing this little blog to live up to its name, from now until Easter I will post at least a quick pic of every dinner I eat.

Sometimes I'll be sharing a (totally awesome, obvs) recipe. Sometimes it will just be a snapshot of some takeout. I might collate the posts so there's not one every day, depending on my schedule.

But for Lent, basically, you'll get to see this chef's really-real Reality.

Guten Appetit.

So what did I eat last night?

The wet dog-food looking stuff is pulled pork from the DDH's law school graduation party last May. I made two giant crockpots of the stuff and froze the leftovers in quart size ziploc bags. Over the last year, those little bags of pre-cooked pork have been my go-to desperation dinners. Sometimes I actually cook them up into a new dish; last night, the DDH reheated it with some barbecue sauce and that was that.

The DDH was off yesterday for President's Day. He went to Sam's Club and picked up the white stuff in the back of the plate, which is jalapeno artichoke dip. It was okay, though surprisingly spicy. I wasn't a huge fan, but he seemed to like it.

I was, however, a good girl and ate my dip with celery. The DDH? Tortilla chips.

Technically it was a half home-cooked meal--I did make that pulled pork, even though it was almost a year ago. The Internets suggest that making double of a dish and freezing the extra is a Good Idea, but this is the only time I've really done it. Guess I'll have to do it again when I run out. ;-)

It was just one of those days: work, meetings, running all over the place. At least we ate something, and I like to think it was marginally better for us than fast food. Certainly it was cheaper (though I refrained from asking how much he paid for the dip).

So there's Reality, Day 1: Frozen leftovers and store-bought dip.

Coffee Chocolate Chip Cupcakes

I'm not much of a baker (really).

I mean, I make a mean oatmeal chocolate chip cookie, decent biscotti, and I've gotten a good bit of use out of my breadmaker (thanks, Mom!).

But while many of my friends mostly bake, more than cook, I definitely cook, more than bake. I am partial to the slapdash, improvisational fun of the stovetop versus the measured precision of the oven.

Just in general, the DDH makes more desserts than I do. I have a serious sweet tooth, don't get me wrong. That's actually why he makes most of the desserts--so we have fewer of them. I could eat muffins and coffee cakes and all manner of breakfast pastries all day long forever, which is why I rarely make them: I would, in fact, eat them all day long forever, and I would weigh three hundred pounds.

All that to say, I saw this muffin recipe in Cooking Light yesterday and promptly made a batch.

We had the instant coffee granules on hand, leftover from a DDH baking experiment. And...coffee chocolate muffins with my morning coffee...who could resist?

Plus, they're caffeinated, so I'll only eat them in the morning. ^_^

Coffee Chocolate Chip Muffins
Adapted (barely) from Cooking Light January/February 2012

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Melt 5 Tbs. butter in a saucepan or microwave safe bowl.

Fun fact: instant coffee is dehydrated brewed coffee.

Combine with the butter: 2/3 cup whole milk, 3 Tbs. instant coffee granules, 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract, and 1 large egg, lightly beaten.



Pretend this is a picture of mixed ingredients instead of just its aftermath.

 In a separate bowl, whisk together 9 oz (2 cups) flour (I used half all-purpose and half whole wheat), 2/3 cup sugar, 1/2 cup chocolate chips, 2 tsp baking powder, and 1/4 tsp salt.

Ready to go.

Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and pour in your wet ingredients. Mix until just moistened.

Spoon into twelve greased or lined muffin cups. Bake for 15-18 minutes or until done (toothpick test). Don't overbake them or they'll get tough.

Remove from pan immediately and cool on wire rack.

Nom nom nom.

They are good. Very coffee-y, and dense. They do in fact go well with your morning coffee, or I'm sure they'd be a hit at a brunch meeting.

Caramel Popcorn

So it's January, and theoretically we should not be baking cupcakes and cookies and all manner of buttery rich delectable dessert goodness, because theoretically we should be celery-munching treadmill hamsters right now.

But come on. You still need a sweet treat to end the day, or to motivate you to go to the gym, or just because, let's be real, you're addicted to love sugar.

Let's compromise, shall we?

Air-popped popcorn is pretty much the healthiest snack food you can find, right? I mean, technically it's a whole grain.

So if the base is healthy, slathering it in butter and sugar doesn't disqualify it from being a health food.

Right?

Right.

Caramel Corn

First, you need to have just plain popcorn that's not all microwaveified. You can find it by the normal popcorn (or possibly the drink mixers, don't ask why) in any grocery store. Or you can buy fun multi-colored stuff from the bulk bin at Whole Foods.

It doesn't make multi-colored puffs, though, sorry.

Anyway. Then you need to pop this nice plain corn. If, like me, you have inherited an electric air popper from a kind friend who had about three of them, you are in luck.

If not, you have to do it on the stove and I can't really help you with that, but Google can. For instance, here is a nice summary of some different popping methods. Stovetop methods of necessity involve some sort of fat, so far as I can tell; vegetable, peanut, or coconut oil should work fine. I think olive oil has too low a smoking point.

Back to the recipe.

Pop some corn.

While said corn pops, or after, if you're popping it on the stove and only want to wash one pot, melt some butter. We usually use one stick to about a half cup (unpopped) popcorn.

Add a few shakes of vanilla.

Stir in some brown sugar. We usually use about 3/4 cup.

Turn up the heat nice and high. It will get really frothy and bubbly:

But eventually should get all melty and gooey and yummy looking. You'll know when you've finally gotten the brown sugar to actually melt and not just dissolve.

Constant stirring is necessary so it doesn't burn up and die. Play around with the ratios, heat level, etc. until you find perfection according to your own tastebuds.

You can add flavorings, too: a dash of vanilla is always good. We brought some to a Christmas party and added nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon for Christmas Spice Caramel Corn. A++.

Pour the caramel on the popcorn.

If you don't turn the heat up high enough, it will be more clumpy and grainy:

If you used a higher heat, it will be smoother and liquidier:

Now, if you are clever and thought ahead, you will have put your popcorn in a big bowl with a lid so that you can pop that lid on top and shake it like a Polaroid picture.

If you are less clever, or lack a sufficiently large lidded bowl, you will need to stir it all together with a big spoon.

Either way, you end up with this:

Lower heat.

Higher heat.

You can see that cooking the caramel on a higher heat and making sure to get it thoroughly melted result in a more liquid caramel that coats the popcorn more evenly. It's also not as grainy, though still more so than commercial caramel.
Homemade deliciousness.

And I will totally back you up on designating it as health food.

Some notes.

This doesn't exactly turn out like commercial caramel corn. That would necessitate corn syrup and greater finickiness. I personally think this is amazing, but I'm a sucker for butter + brown sugar.

It tends to be a bit grainy, and depending on your shaking/stirring skillZ, you might find lots of big clumps of sugar while other kernels have nothing. I do not complain about this. If you are liable to complain about it, adjust your shaking/stirring accordingly. As noted, cooking for longer and on a higher heat helps with this.

And, seriously, this is about as easy and fast (and cheap!) as it gets. It really is, oh-we're-supposed-to-be-at-that-party-in-thirty-minutes-and-I-haven't-bought-a-present-for-the-gift-exchange-yet-either-so-we-need-to-go-to-the-store-on-the-way-to-the-party-so-I-have-ten-minutes-to-toss-something-together-without-a-recipe-from-what-I-have-on-hand easy.

It's also wow-that-actually-turned-out-really-well-let's-make-it-all-the-time-now addictive.

Granola Bars

For a long time, I cooked my dinners (and by extension, my lunches, since those are just leftovers), but I was still buying snacks and breakfast foods. Primarily, I bought granola and granola/protein bars and used them both as mid-morning snacks and meal substitutes on days when I was too busy or unmotivated or whatever to cook dinner.

Then I realized this was stupid. Here I was, endeavoring to make frugal, healthy, whole food meals, but eating expensive junky granola and protein bars. Seriously, that was the largest part of my food budget. Those things are freaking expensive.

And I thought, I can make soup from tomatoes I've grown myself. I can make bread and pasta and enchiladas and cookies from scratch. None of this stuff is actually hard to do. Why the heck am I shelling out all this money on granola bars when surely I can make healthier ones myself for much cheaper?

Yeah. It is ridiculously easy to make these things from scratch. I seriously probably spend as much time on prep for these as I used to spend dithering in the aisle at Sam's Club trying to figure out which box of bars provided the best nutritional value for the money (answer: none of them).

I bought the e-cookbook Healthy Snacks to Go by Katie Kimball at Kitchen Stewardship, and the below granola bar recipe is adapted from there. I highly recommend the book (I mean, it's only five dollars apparently I got it on sale. It's actually $6.95.) to anyone interested in homemade snacks. I usually use her granola recipe and protein bars recipe, as well, and if you are a Larabar fan, she has pages of recipes for making your own versions of their different flavors, too. Someone gave me a bag of dates recently and I think they are destined for a Larabar experiment. Also: homemade Wheat Thin crackers.

Alternatively, you can google a lot of this for free. So. You know.

Without further ado:

Homemade Granola Bars

Honey!

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Melt 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, 2/3 cup honey (Katie's recipe calls for a full cup but that was too sweet for us), and 1 teaspoon vanilla in a medium bowl in the microwave (or on the stove if for some reason you'd rather handwash a pot than dishwasherify a bowl). I do this at 30 second intervals, stirring after each, and it takes maybe 2-3 minutes.

(If you want peanut butter granola bars, substitute 1/2 cup peanut butter for 1/2 cup of the butter.)

It will look like this.

Meanwhile, mix together in a large bowl 4 1/2 cups of oats (yes, I just use instant oatmeal oats), 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking soda, and 2 cups of mix-ins.

Dry ingredients.

Mix-ins are whatever you like in a granola bar. For this batch I used chocolate chips, dried cherries, sunflower seeds, coconut flakes, and chopped (well, pestled) almonds. I think it was one cup chocolate chips and then the rest together made one cup. You could use different flavors of chocolate chips, different nuts or dried fruit, whatever. I used all these things because I was almost out of all of them, so I just dumped in the bits I had left. Use what you have on hand, or plot out a delicious flavor combo and acquire those ingredients.

Almonds.

Pour your butter/honey mixture into the dry ingredients and mix well, until all the dry ingredients are moistened.

Before baking.

Press into a greased 9x13 pan. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until golden brownish and somewhat dried out. They will probably still be sort of moist, which to me is a plus. Let cool in the pan for at least ten minutes before cutting. Slice and store in an airtight container in a cool dry place.

(I'll try and remember to take a picture of the finished bars and stick that in here.)

They should last a month or so on your counter just fine (depending, I guess, on what you use for mix-ins) or longer in the fridge.

The DDH loves these things. He thinks they are more filling and satisfying than my homemade protein bars (strangely) and on par with the big Power Bar things he always requested before.

I love them also, but they are definitely sweet. Skipping the chocolate chips would help, but a lot of it is the honey, too. I'm not sure if you can cut back on the volume any more without affecting the consistency of the bar. You could try substituting unsweetened applesauce maybe for some of the honey, or coconut oil maybe? Things to experiment with. ^_^