Caramel filled Apple Cider Cookies

My fourth annual Xmas cookie exchange at work is this Thursday, so I decided to give a new cookie a trial run tonight.....Caramel filled Apple Cider Cookies.  Turned out completely dreamy....of course they're best when they're warm out of the oven, but still fantastic when they've cooled off.  Why did it take me so long to start putting caramel in cookies?!?!

Ingredients:

1 cup softened butter

1 cup granualted sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1 box (7.4 oz) Alpine Spiced Apple Cider Instant Original Drink mix -not sugar free- all 10 packets (I found this in my grocery store near the hot chocolate mixes.)

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

3 cups all purpose flour

1 bag Kraft Caramels (14 oz)

 Directions

• Preheat oven to 350° F. Line cookie sheets with parchment. (You really need the parchment!)
• In a small bowl whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder and cinnamon.
• With your mixer (or an energetic spoon) cream together butter, sugar, salt and all 10 packages of apple cider drink mix powder, until light and fluffy.
• Beat in eggs, one at a time. Add vanilla and mix well.

• Gradually add flour mixture to butter/egg mixture. Mix until just combined.
• Refrigerate for about an hour. (If you're really impatient you don't have to do this, but it makes it so much easier to work with.)
• When you are ready to bake, unwrap your caramels. 
• Scoop out cookie dough ball about the size of a walnut. (I used a rounded cookie scoop-full. My scoop holds about a Tablespoon.)
• Flatten the ball of dough slightly in the palm of your hand. Press the unwrapped caramel into the center of your dough and seal the dough around it, covering it completely. Place on parchment covered cookie sheets 2 inches apart.

 Bake 12-14 minutes, or until very lightly browned around the edges. Please don't over-bake! Once the cookies are done, slide the parchment off of the baking sheet right out onto the counter. Allow cookies to partially cool on the parchment. When cookies are cool enough to be firm but still slightly warm, carefully twist off of parchment and allow to finish cooling upside down (either on the parchment or on a rack.) If you forget about them and they cool too much and stick to your parchment, put them into the freezer for a few minutes and they'll pop right off.

• Yield: about 4 dozen, depending on how large you make your cookies (or how many caramels have been snitched out of your bag before you begin.) Store in an airtight container.

Salted Caramel Chocolate Crackle Cookies

December 1...officially holiday cookie baking time.  Scarlett and I got right to it this morning and made some chocolate crackle cookies.  To mix it up, I hid half of a caramel with some sea salt sprinkled on, in the middle of the cookies.  The end result was unbelievably yummy and of course best while still warm and gooey right out of the oven.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup + 2 Tbsp cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
10 tbsp salted butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed light-brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

 2 dozen caramels (such as Kraft), unwrapped (Rolos would also be good)
coarse sea salt
3/4 cup powdered sugar

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a mixing bowl whisk together flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt, set aside. In the bowl of an electric stand mixer fit with a paddle attachment, whip together butter, granulated sugar and light-brown sugar on medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Add in eggs one at a time, stirring after each addition until combine. Mix in vanilla. With mixer set on low speed, slowly add in dry ingredients and mix just until combine.

Scoop dough out 2 tbsp at a time and roll into a ball. Press one caramel into the center, sprinkle top of caramel with a small pinch of coarse sea salt then fold cookie dough around caramel and salt (make sure the caramel is fully covered with dough around all sides). 

Shape into a ball once more then roll in powdered sugar.  Place cookies on parchment paper or buttered cookie sheets and bake in preheated oven 11 - 13 minutes.

And while the cookies are baking, have your 2 1/2 year old get started with cleaning off the chocolate batter covered beater for you. :-)

A sexy make-over?

Coq Au Vin in my (newish) Le Creuset.  Must have been feeling French tonight.....and I realized the only way I can get close to an entire bottle of red wine is by cooking with it.  I followed the recipe that came in the little booklet thingy that was with the Le Creuset French oven Fre bought me for my bday.  It's a winner of a recipe and the pics turned out like a sexy makeover.....plain and simple before, saucy and tempting after. :-)

BEFORE the oven:

AFTER the magic:

Poppy Seed Cookies - Simple but perfect

I pretty much forget about poppy seeds until the holidays come around and I start dreaming about the poppy seed bread my Grandma Arndt used to make every Christmas (a recipe I'm still working to perfect).  As I was driving home a few nights ago I heard a bit on NPR about these two women who collect old recipes.  They told this great story about an Aunt of theirs who was famous for her poppy seed cookies.  Having never made them, and feeling like it's kinda the beginning of the holidays and therefore poppy seed time in my world, I decided to give them a crack this morning.  They're simple, quick and perfect to eat by the handful.

3 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 cup poppy seeds

1 cup peanut oil ( I used canola, turned out just fine)

1 cup sugar

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Cover a 14 X 16-inch baking sheet with foil, shiny side up. Coat the foil with vegetable spray or use a silicone liner.

Sift together flour and baking powder; add poppy seeds.

Separately, whisk peanut oil, sugar, eggs, and vanilla in a medium bowl. Add sifted dry ingredients and mix to combine. Chill the dough in the refrigerator one hour, or until firm enough to handle.

Using your hands, break off teaspoon-size pieces of dough and roll into small balls. Place dough balls on baking sheet about 2 inches apart, or 12 cookies per sheet. Pat into circles with your fingers (rather than rolling or stamping). Bake 10 to 12 minutes, or until lightly browned around edges. Let cookies cool 1 minute on baking sheet on rack and then transfer cookies to a rack. Cookies will become crisp as they cool.

Butternut Squash Pasta

Last weekend it was a little "chilly" ( ya know, in the low 70's) here in FL, so I was in the mood to make something that felt like fall.

I improvised a butternut squash pasta sauce (roasted the butternut squash in the oven, pureed it in the food processor with some buttermilk, thyme, salt, pepper, sauteed onions & garlic and a tab bit of nutmeg).  To up the veggie content of the dish I used half pasta and half steamed cauliflower.

Of course I added some Parmesan cheese into the pasta sauce, threw it all into a dish with some fresh basil chicken I had roasted in the oven, sauteed mushrooms and topped it off with a decent amount of munster cheese.

It was a completely made-up recipe/dish, but it's a keeper!  And if you go with low-fat cheese, or lower the amount of cheese, this is completely guilt-free but really creamy and satisfying.

We're so hip, urban, and green

This is my first blog posting ever. Interesting, eh? The youngest and only male Arndt kid, who preferred math and sports over books (unlike his sisters), doesn't maintain an online journal? Crazy, I know. Also, Jen and I don't have a camera right now, so pardon the mediocre phone pictures.

This weekend Jen and I grew up a bit. And by that I mean, we started a garden. While apartment hunting a few months ago, we actually picked our new unit within the complex based on two things: how our sectional couch fit into the living room (think left-handed vs. right-handed), and more importantly here, which balcony received better sunlight.

We began with herbs. While I appreciate beauty, at my core I'm all about utility. So, on a beautiful Saturday afternoon here in Houston, Jen and I drove to a nearby garden store. After walking around for a while as if we knew what we were looking for, we finally asked an employee for help. We picked out pots and herbs (rosemary, basil, and dill), and then super luckily got to plant them (for free!) at the store. 

Getting our hands dirty planting our herbs.

Back at home, Jen and I put our pots on the balcony and are adjusting to the new responsibility of "watering."

Jen enjoying the smell of basil and rosemary on the balcony.

 

Basil, rosemary, and dill in the back.

 Stay tuned for posts about actually cooking or eating food. They're a' coming!

Fresh Pasta - I'm not afraid anymore

For some reason I had this fear of making fresh pasta....it could be due to a pretty much inedible gnocchi attempt on xmas eve a few years back, but whatever the reason, I was nervous to give it a shot.  Well, when it doubt of your own skills, buy things to supplement your feeling of inadequacy, right?  So I headed over to William Sonoma on Sunday and picked up a pasta roller, figuring if I could at least get the dough right, I could bypass the whole "old-italian-grandma hand rolling pasta" thing by using a hand cranked roller. 

Armed with my shiny new roller, I decided to give it a try.  Heaven forbid I just try something easy on foodnetwork, so I hauled out my French Laundry cookbook and decided to give Thomas Keller a run for his money. I settled on a sweet potato ravioli and figured I would concoct my own white wine mushroom sauce.  The filling was fairly easy (roasted some sweet potatoes, added a bunch of butter, some buttermilk, nutmeg, salt, pepper and of course some bacon).  I finished that first and set it aside to cool while I gave pasta dough a shot.

I read the directions in Kellers book, but in the end decided I need a more visual demonstration of his technique for kneading the dough as he said you don't knead it like you would a bread dough so I headed to YouTube.  Found a few great videos and armed with my new knowledge, gave it a shot.  It was crazy easy!

 About 10 minutes of kneading and then I let it rest for about 30 minutes before I rolled it through my shiny new pasta roller into sheets for ravioli.  I threw the filling on, folded it over and sealed them closed with some egg wash.

Overall a lot more simple than I thought.  That said, my ravioli technique needs a ton of improvement.  The mushroom sauce turned out fantastic, but I should have used white button mushrooms instead of baby portabellas....once the portabellas were cooked and I had blended the sauce with an immersion blender, the sauce took on a bit of a grey color, which I wasn't a huge fan of.  Lesson learned.

Biltmore Beauty

Jack and I are road tripping through the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway this week. It is our first time seeing this beautiful part of the country. Today we toured the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. What can one say about a "house" that has 250 rooms, 175,000 square feet, and covers four full acres (just the house, not the grounds)? All I could think of was "king's castle." It was magnificent, yes, but I guess I understand a little better now why the common people and peasants left Europe to escape the aristocracy.

What I loved more than the house was the grounds. We walked through some of the eight thousand acres, which included forests, gardens, ponds, and meadows. Most of it had been professionally landscaped when the estate was first constructed more than a century ago, so everything now mature and lush. I was told by one of the employees that more than 1800 people work on the estate. I wasn't surprised to hear his estimate, considering that the Biltmore also has a working farm with livestock, vineyards, and a winery. It is certainly a beautiful and fantastic place to visit and is rich (pun intended) in American history.

Jack and I worked up an appetite from all of our walking, so we ate at one of the restaurants on the grounds. Cedric's Tavern was named after the Vanderbilt family's St Bernard. The restaurant was an Irish pub, and you all know how much Jack loves those places! He ordered Shepherd's Pie and a beer sampler tray. I had a wonderful grilled beef and pork meatloaf, which was drizzled with chipotle ketchup and rested on buttermilk-and-roasted-garlic mashed potatoes. Delicious! But even more tasty and unique were the beer battered green beans. They had a slightly sweet coating, which lightly covered each bean...just enough to give a little crunch and flavor. I'll have to figure out how to make them at home.

I've included a few photos of our day.

                                             Today was also Jack's birthday. Happy 61st!

                                            This was the beautiful Italian garden.
                                           

                                             The gardeners planted thousands of mums
                                             for a spectacular autumn display.

Monday morning we start on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I excited to see the colorful vistas which I've heard so much about.

Pork and Portabella Grilled Skewers & Maple Stout Bread

Fall in Florida isn't exactly jeans and sweater weather (I think it was 85 today) but following a trip to Conners farm this morning with Fre and Scarlett to run through the corn maze, ride the tractor and pet the farm animals, I felt like trying something "fall like" for dinner. After checking what I had in the fridge and the pantry, I came up with an idea for some grilled pork skewers with mushrooms and a basil/garlic sauce.  I marinated some boneless pork chops in white wine, olive oil, fresh thyme, rosemary, salt, pepper and garlic for about 2 hours.  While that was working in the fridge, I decided to try making a celery root puree as a side dish. On a complete whim this morning I bought some celery root for the first time at the grocery store so I wanted to try it out.  I boiled two celery roots (after peeling and chopping into about 1 inch cubes) with two russet potatoes....and instead of boiling them in salted water, I boiled them in milk, knowing it would tame a bit of the bite of the celery root.  After about 15 minutes I drained it all, threw it in the food processor and added garlic, about a 1/2 cup of buttermilk and salt and pepper.  

Finally, I stuck the pork on the skewers with some portabellas, hit the mushrooms with a little olive oil so they wouldn't stick to the grill, and threw them on there for about 5-6 minutes.  While Fre was watching the grill, I missed up aboutg 1/2 cup of finally chopped scallions, 1/2 cup of basil, some olive oil, minced garlic, salt and pepper as a little "sauce" to top the skewers.

To finish it all off, earlier in the day I came across a recipe for a Maple Stout quick bread in the new Cooking Light issue.  The combo of maple syrup and a Guinness sounded interested so I gave it a try.  This is an amazingly easy and delicious quick bread. I mixed it up, headed out for a run, and by the time I got back it was just about ready to take out of the oven.  Top it off with a drizzle of a maple syrup glaze (i just mixed maple syrup and some powdered sugar) and you're set.  Eat a slice with a cold Guinness.....perfect. 

Always Perfect Turkey Meatloaf

I discovered this perfect turkey meatloaf recipe about 2 years ago.  The recipe is huge (5lbs of turkey) but somehow only lasts in the house for 48 hrs at most.  Add some garlic and more worcheshire than the recipe calls for and you'll be set.  And this is the first meatloaf that I kinda free formed into a loaf shape and baked on a cookie sheet instead of a loaf pan.  There's something about the turkey that turns out way better when you cook it on a cookie sheet instead of in a loaf pan.  of course be sure to cover the whole thing with ketchup before you bake it....yum.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/turkey-meatloaf-recipe/index.html

I've been thinking about the South and art and blues and history and Elvis today...the Elvis shown above...the South because I'm always half-thinking on a move and while I like the change of seasons, I grow weary of only being able to be half dressed outside for less than half of the year...and how is a lady to wear great dresses when it's mostly 30 degrees F outside? The Trashy Diva dresses in my closet are being cheated. Which is a serious offense. And the blues 'cause I've been reading about it for fun (as usual) and with an eye to slowly seeing out a dissertation topic. And Elvis...godDAMN what an alien, that voice like butter and velvet and a sweet as pie seduction...and that ridiculously handsome face.  And so was thinking about warmer temperatures, Memphis, Nashvile, and then, naturally, New Orleans. But I just made jambalaya and black-eyed peas a few days ago, so that seemed too soon. So instead of cooking Southern, I just daydreamed southern and made beef stew (with some SUPER hot peppers given to me by a good friend today).

Start with just a silly amount of garlic...for me, silly is somewhere between a half cup and more (seriously) and a large diced onion with a bit of olive oil in a pot. Let 'em cook down for a while then add the stew meat and some bouquet garni. ("'Some,' Sheila? Um, that's far from specific." True, dear reader, but go with it. As in, I like garlic, onions, spices, spice, etc. You, however, may not. So if you're a bit inexperienced, just go to taste for your palette gradually. I usually go all in and then some, but that's me.) Brown the beef until it's cooked through and tasty.

At this point I generally turn the heat on this way down/off and set aside for a few minutes. I then saute mushrooms in a separate pan as I prefer them browned before adding them to the stew (and cooking garlic and onions and mushrooms all together, in my experience, often leads to too much moisture to actually brown/carmelize everything.)

Add mushrooms to the pot. Now, add equal amounts butter and flour to the pan and return to heat. Stir this combination, the roux, until it is gently browned...I prefer to have the roux take on some color, but I don't go all the way to super dark. You don't have to if you don't want to...let it brown/golden a bit, but it is another easy way to add another layer of flavor.

Add the roux to the pot. At this point, I add beef stock VERY slowly, stirring it into the pot at rather high heat to help the roux and stock combine and thicken. Then add the rest of the stock. I also like to add about maybe 3/4 of a cup of red wine. It's delicious. (And now it's only wise to have a glass or two yourself or it'll just go bad eventually. Waste not want not and all that.) At this point I add peas, corn freshly cut off the cob, a few diced VERY spicy peppers (with minimal seeds), and a handful of brown rice. Let it hang out at low heat, just a few bubbles coming to the surface every so often.
It's simple. Tasty. Not all that bad for you. And it reheats/freezes beautifully if you need to put some up. Now if only Elvis or someone with similar skills who looks good in black could come over to have a bowl. 

It's pretty tasty. Simple. Really delicious. (I don't think I forgot anything. I hope.)

Stay warm, all you from northern climes. I'll be dreaming of a front porch and a rocking chair with strains of Leadbelly in the background. If you stop by, please bring rye. xo-

Post-run Pancakes

After a 4 mile run this morning I came home in the mood to carbo load.  But I felt motivated to eat (somewhat) healthy, so I looked up a recipe for whole wheat pancakes.  99.9% of the time I'm a Bisquick pancake girl, (the shortcake recipe on the box can't be beat either), but I decided to try pancakes from scratch.

I found the below recipe and I wouldn't change a thing, although I didn't have buttermilk on hand so I used that powdered stand by I grew up with (saco cultured buttermilk blend).  A stack of these satisfied my carb and sweet tooth craving. Next time I'm going to try adding some peanut butter to the batter and top a stack with some banana slices.

http://www.food.com/recipe/whole-wheat-pancakes-47669

I got the new issue of Cooks Illustrated in the mail on Thursday and decided to test out their Shepherds Pie recipe today. It wasn't a difficult recipe but did take a decent amount of time.  After 15 minutes under the broiler it came out brown and bubbly.

Overall I'm gonna say the Cooks Illustrated recipe was good, but could use a little jazzing up.....more garlic,  baby portabellas instead of white button mushrooms and a bit more salt would help.  Oh, and maybe using that new thick Worcestershire instead of the regular kind would add some extra deep flavor.

We're Arndt kids and like everyone else on the planet we love to eat, but what we love even more is cooking and baking what we eat and drink.  It's rare that two or more days pass without us chatting ( or emailing, texting, facebooking, etc) about what we cooked the day before, a new recipe we found, a funky ingredient or a new restaurant we checked out.

Our love of the kitchen came from our mom Bonnie, who was lucky enough to work from home during our younger years and spent every afternoon preparing dinner for the family. We were always lending a hand, and as we got older we took on some of the cooking ourselves when we had time between piano lessons, soccer practice, homework, yadda yadda.  Our lives have all gone in different directions and we have different and exciting things in our lives that inform and influence our cooking. Shawn and I now live in the south (Texas and Florida respectively) and Sheila is holding down the fort in WI, where we all were born and raised. Shawn and I are workout junkies ( although with baby #2 on the way for me, I sneak in plenty of junk food these days) and Sheila is a full time PhD student and TA who tends a mean bar (actually about 3 different bars) and therefore is in charge of cocktails at every family get-together.

Hope u enjoy!