Stacerella

A couple of steaks I marinaded the other night in lemon juice, smashed garlic, jalapeño peppers, salt, soya sauce and olive oil. Very tasty. ‘Mmmmmmmmmmmm, steak.

We were lucky enough to have the in-laws share their baking apple bounty with us recently. I cored, peeled, soaked, dried and vacuum sealed two huge bagfuls of slices before freezing them to use in pies, cakes, crumbles, etc. over the winter months. Lovely tasting apples, too. The bath, btw, is nothing more than water with 2 teaspoons of coarse or sea salt. The salt leaves them tart enough to stand up to the sugar they will be baked with eventually, creating the perfect balance up front.

Leftover steak, mini portabello mushrooms and white onions from the other night, paired with fried eggs. Num!

So, apparently a certain blogger would like me to blog him a recipe for a few (and only a few) cookies at a time batch. His cookie of choice: oatmeal. I can get behind that. I love me some oatmeal cookies. Very healthy. I’m not a fan of honey, but I do make this one exception in oatmeal cookies if I have to. Most recipes you use today will give you a large yield, but I have a recipe that will allow him (as well as the rest of you) to make as little as one cookie per batch, without having to use a calculator or your brain. I know, some days basic math is just too hard, right? Hee.

Okay, here we go. This an example of a full sized cookie dough batch:

BASIC OATMEAL COOKIES
1 cup margarine
1 1/3 cup packed brown sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp vanilla:
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda, dissolved in 2 tbsp hot or boiling water
2 cups quick oats (don’t use instant oats or oatmeal cereal)
1 cup of chocolate chips/dried cherries/dried cranberries/shredded coconut (all optional)

Pre-heat to 375 degrees. Cream margarine and sugar in a bowl by hand or with an electric mixer. When it’s creamy, add vanilla and then dry ingredients. Mix well. Dissolve baking soda in the water and pour soda water over mixture until well blended (mixture should be sticky and tacky to the touch). Gently fold in optional ingredients if using any. Don’t overmix the dough - you want soft cookies, not door stops.

Aside: I made half the batch as soft round mounds that I baked for 15 minutes, and the other half I used the back of an offset spatula (or you can use a spoon) to flatten out each mound so they would bake in 12 minutes.

Using an ice cream scoop, drop soft mounds onto parchment paper lined cookie sheets with at least 1 1/2″ around each mound so the cookies have adequate room to spread out and enough air around each one to bake evenly. Bake each sheet for 12-15 minutes before cooling on racks. Makes 20 large cookies.

And this is an example of a micro batch:

SINGLE SERVE OATMEAL COOKIE BATCH
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp white granulated sugar + 1 tbsp brown sugar
1/4 cup flour + 1 tbsp flour
1/8 tsp vanilla
Pinch of salt
1 tbsp. Water
Pinch of baking soda
1/4 cup quick oats (don’t use instant oats or oatmeal cereal)
1 - 2 tbsp chocolate chips/dried cherries/dried cranberries/shredded coconut (all optional)

Mix the ingredients in a cereal bowl with a fork. Use parchment paper to get a softer cookie, and for quicker clean up. Flatten the dough down a bit with your fingers or fork so the cookie bakes evenly. Bake at 350 degrees, for 12-13 minutes.

Megan’s Microwave Instant Oatmeal Cookie. Megan has posted two other variations of, not only small oatmeal cookie batches, but batches that can be made if a microwave or toaster oven. This is especially interesting to me because we don’t have a stove at work, but we do have a microwave and a toaster oven, to I’m thinking some Saturdays I might be making use of her recipes.

Joe dropped me off at home the other night to head back to work in some fruitless, frustrating bid to make a dent in the workload that came in that day that he couldn’t get to before we closed. While in the car, he said he didn’t think he’d be longer than 2 hours. Since I planned to be out power walking for half of that time, I thought I would wait till he got home to see what he felt like having for dinner instead of making whatever I wanted. You know, like a good little wife.

Four hours later, however, he walked in an announced he was hungry. I assumed he would have ate something at one of the fast food joints near work after the first two hours like he normally does, so I ate some pistachio pudding I made and puttered around online the rest of the time, not bothering to make any dinner for him at all. Much to both of our surprise, he was starving and I had nothing made for him.

This ticked him off. He was in a shitty mood from that point on. He started getting in my way in the kitchen and I had to kick him out. He wasn’t pleased. That displeased me. I don’t like when we bicker. I hate it. I hate him being in my dinky kitchen even when I’m in my best moods, so forget when I’m rushing around and annoyed with him for not calling ahead of time to let me know he was going to be hungry when he arrived.

So, in my anger, I grabbed the first few things that I spotted and went to work, putting all of my anger into his dinner, hoping it tasted like bitterness and spite. I boiled the water, cooked the pasta, cracked the eggs into a bit of milk with seasonings and heated up the meatballs. When it was all done, he had a quasi Penne Carbonara. I didn’t care if it tasted like something a dog dropped on someone’s lawn. I was pissed off.

After he finished eating, he brough me the bowl and fork to wash, thanked me and made a point of stating how yummy it was. And then he asked me what happened to the Kraft Dinner he thought I was making him. I stared at him for a second, trying to figure out what he was talking about. And then it hit me, we had bought four boxes of KD the day before. They were still in the cupboard where I absent mindedly stuffed them the night before. I had completely blanked. Kraft Dinner was the very last thing I would have thought to make him at 11:00 PM.

He giggled at me, kissed my forehead, and thanked me for being so forgetful. “D-oh,” I said.

End of story. All is right again.

Basic Bread:
2 C bread flour
2 Tsp table salt
2 Tsp white sugar
1 Tsp cold butter or margarine
2 1/4 Tsp (or one 8g packet) active yeast
1 - 1 1/3C (depending upon the humidity and time of year) 120 degree warm water

Bake bread for 35-40 minutes at 425F degrees (200C). Preheat the oven for at least 20 minutes. Bread dough bakes best in really hot ovens, not cold ones.

Measure out and dump the first 3 ingredients into a large bowl. Add the butter or margarine to the bowl and start pinching it into the dry ingredients tll a small crumble forms and everything is mixed well.

Add the active yeast and mix well. Add the water starting with 1 cup first, the rest only if you need it. Using a large wooden spoon or heavy plastic spatula, start mixing and stirring the flour mixture with the water, smearing it along the sides of the bowl to incorporate all of the dry ingredients until a ball of dough forms.

Throw more bread flour onto a counter top and dump out the ball onto it. Add a bit more flour to the top of the ball and start your kneaded. This won’t take longer than 5 minutes. You will see how quickly the ball becomes springy to the touch. When that happens, and the ball is no longer wet or sticky to the touch, you’re done kneading.

Spray the same large bowl with cooking spray, going up the sides to the top rim. Drop the dough into the bowl and flip over a couple of times to coat both sides. Cut off a sheet of plastic wrap big enough to cover the bowl, but before you place it over the bowl, spray the underside with more cooking spray. This will allow you to peel it off the wet, tacky dough as it rises easily.

Set the bowl, covered, aside for 30 minutes. When 30 minutes have passed, life the plastic film and push the dough down in the centre so the dough deflates as it releases the air trapped in it. Cover the bowl with the same sheet of film and let it rest another 30-45 minutes before you do this same punching down once more.

After you punch down the dough 3 times, throw some bread dough onto the counter once more and turn the dough out of the bowl again. Lightly top the dough with more flour and start kneading it. This time you will only need to knead 2 minutes till the tackiness or stickiness of the dough disappears. Drop this dough into a baking dish or bread pan that’s been sprayed with cooking oil and lightly floured.

Cut two or three slits into the top of the dough on the diagonal or down the length to help release trapped air in the bread as it bakes. Right before placing the pan in the oven, top the dough with sprinkles of milk for moisture.

If your oven is like mine, old and cranky at high temperatures, you can create a tin foil tent to place over the bread pan while the dough bakes. Take a sheet and fold it gently in the middle down the length and place it over the pan so that it loosely sits above the dough, resting on the rim of the pan on either side.

Let the bread rest in the pan after it’s baked and taken out of the oven. Once the pan is cool enough to handle, turn the bread out onto a wire rack to cool completely before even thinking about slicing it up. This should take about a half hour. Wrap the loaf in plastic film and store at room temperature or freeze for the future. This bread is so amazing, it doesn’t last long enough in our two person household to go bad, but should it go stale, fear not for this bread will make wonderful bread crumbs for other cooking purposes.

Variations: Add some dried, crushed herbs to the dry ingredients before as you add the water. This will make lovely savoury bread that would be ideal for holiday stuffing or leftover meat sandwiches.