Sigh, I really wanted to take pictures of our apartment/art today but it’s really grey and gross outside and that means our apartment is extra extra dark inside. It’s already very dark on a normal day, so now it’s like a cave. The lack of light may be my biggest complaint about this place. I really like all the big trees and flowers and plants around our building, but bye bye sunlight.

Instead I will leave you with two Katrina recipes.

Katrina’s Modified NY Times Cookies

My new go-to cookie recipe. The recipe is a bit picky, but you should have seen the original! I simplified it in a few different ways and think that these are still REALLY good, and quite a bit easier. You do have to plan ahead for them though, as they need to sit in the refrigerator for 3+ hours. They’re worth it though!

I like this recipe because the cookies turn out soft and chewy, and they don’t spread as much as Fannie Farmer cookies. I guess they look pretty humongous in the picture above but they’re not! Our oven is really tiny, we even had to buy a new smaller baking pan because the old one couldn’t fit. You can see that our silicone mat is too big now. :(

Yield: 50 cookies! This recipe can be halved fairly easily.

Time: 15 minutes of prep, 3+ hours of waiting! 15 minutes baking time.

INGREDIENTS

• 3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 1/2 tsp course salt
• 1 1/4 cups butter
• 1 1/4 cups brown sugar
• 1 cup + 2 tbsp white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla
• chocolate chips/disks (white, milk, semi-sweet etc), skor pieces, as many as you prefer

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and course salt. Set aside.
2. In a separate bowl cream together the butter and sugars. I don’t have a mixer so I soften the butter a bit in the microwave.
3. Stir in the eggs and vanilla.
4. Add in the flour mixture. I do it in several phases to minimize mess, since this recipe makes quite a lot of dough.
5. Add in your chocolates chips/disks and candy pieces
6. Cover the top of the bowl and put it in the fridge for 3-4 hours.
7. Preheat oven to 350º F. Pry of chunks of dough and roll into 1″ diameter balls and bake for 15 minutes.

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Ummmm… Mexican THING

This monstrosity is what happens when it is my turn to cook. Hehe.

Layered from bottom to top: diced tomatoes, tortilla, black beans, tortilla, cheese, chipotle peppers and sauce, diced tomato, tortilla, cheese, green onions, and two eggs cracked on top. Basically whatever you ingredients you like.

Bake for 20 minutes. Top with a bit of sour cream and some sliced avocado.

We’ve done a lot over the last few days! Unfortunately I don’t have many good photos because I keep forgetting to put my memory card back into my camera. MEGA DOH.

Friday Scott got his gross tooth pulled. This is a good thing. I made him a room temperature vegetable madras rice smoothy for dinner.

On Saturday I dragged Scott into the city to get a free pair of pants. Roots was having a promo where if you brought in an old pair of pants for charity they would give you a free pairs of pants. We got in line right at noon, in the blazing sun. Only then did I overhear that you actually have to take off your old pants in the STORE WINDOW. Bahaha. I asked him if he still wanted to do it and he agreed. It was pretty funny. An hour later, he walked away with a very nice new pair of khakis worth $75! I took a picture but I’ll leave that for Scott to decide if he wants it posted.

Later that day we went to a baseball game. This is instance #1 where I brought the camera, but no memory card. It was a work event for Scott so we got to eat and sit in the BBQ area. The best part was the free popcorn. Other than that I was pretty bored. I really don’t like baseball. I had no idea where to look or what was happening or if I should cheer or boo when anything happened without looking at the scoreboard. So you’re constantly looking all over the place and missing things. I would rather watch football than baseball.

They had a fireworks show at the end that was pretty good. They went for QUANTITY and had so many of the same fireworks going off at the same time that I laughed out loud.

On Sunday I baked bread. This time turned out much better than last time. I used this recipe. Those onions fell off as soon as you touched them though.

We had yummy roasted zuchini and eggplant sandwiches, with mozarella and tomato and ham.

Yesterday we went to the PNE after work, but I’ll make it into its own post because this is long enough!!

I tried a new recipe the other day, another thing I found on Pinterest. Homemade Peppermint Patties. It was a pretty easy recipe, with pretty normal ingredients that I mostly had already. I didn’t have (or know what is) shortening so I just used cold butter, and that worked perfectly fine. They taste great, but I have zero skills in chocolate coatings so they look a little rough. Need practice. Here is my slightly adapted recipe.

Yield: 24 patties

• 2.5 cups icing sugar
• 1.5 tbsp corn syrup
• 1.5 tbsp water
• 0.5 tsp peppermint extract
• 1 tbsp cold butter
• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate
• 2 tbsp butter
• splash of milk

Mix the icing sugar, corn syrup, water, peppermint extract and cold butter in a bowl. I smushed the butter with a wooden spoon until it was in pretty small pieces, although it’s not important to get it totally totally mixed in. It should be a crumbly mixture.

Then dump it out on the counter and knead it until it makes a nice smooth white blob. Sprinkle icing sugar on the counter if it is sticking.

Roll/press it out on wax paper to about 1/4″ thick and put it in the freezer for 10 minutes.

Use a cookie cutter to cut out shapes. I highly recommend just using a simple circle shape. I didn’t have that so I used my star cutter, but it made it hard to coat in chocolate later, so I wouldn’t do that again. Put your cutouts on wax paper and then put it back in the freezer for 10 minutes.

Melt your chocolate, butter and a splash of milk if necessary in a metal bowl over a pot of boiling water. Dip your minty pieces in the chocolate, lay on wax paper and put back in freezer for another 20 minutes to firm up. Store in fridge.

As you can see, my chocolate skills are kind of lacking. My second batch of chocolate seized up. Ugh. Also the mint parts warm up when you put them in the chocolate and some of them broke. Circles would be a lot easier.