Double Chocolate Peanut Butter Brownies

Hello everyone. I've been gone for a variety of reasons - moving, new job, changes in job, no internet - but I'm starting to come back. Slowly. Here's a bit of what I've been doing lately. Brownies.

I found this idea from a Kraft newsletter and they sounded like a good idea. However, once I looked at the recipe, I thought these sounded way too much like the dreaded Buckeye. Remember? Sounds like a good idea with a classic combination, but makes me want to vomit because it's way too sweet and tastes like a 4 year old made it? Yep.

So I went out on my own into the cold world and tried something else.

These brownies are thin but so fudgy and dense. Also, when I make from scratch brownies, I want them to taste like they're from scratch. So my brownies always have coffee and chili powder in them. That's how I roll. They don't add a discernible flavor, they just enhance the flavors there and make them taste like a grown up treat instead of a hunk of chocolate. Word.

In keeping with the trend, my peanut butter filling is simple as is the chocolate topping. Next time, I'll use unsweetened baking chocolate, with butter, and maybe a tablespoon of sugar instead of melted dark chips because I still found that to be a bit sweet.

Moral of the story: these are wow. I cut 20 pieces, but I suggest more because you don't need a giant serving. A tiny bit will satisfy.

How to make:

Make the brownie recipe from Smitten Kitchen. I played with it and added coffee and chili powder as stated above. I also cut back a bit on the sugar. Bake and cool completely.

Mix one to two cups of peanut or other nut butter with a few tablespoons of butter. I found the butter to be unnecessary later, but it does make it easier to spread. It also firms it up a bit when it's cold. The amount of peanut butter is also a matter of preference.

Melt 1/2 cup of chocolate chips with 2 T butter and 1/8 cup sugar. Again, note above the changes I would make next time if you like it even less sweet. Spread on top of peanut butter and refrigerate the whole mess until it's firm and easy to cut.

Eat what you will and take the rest out to make some new friends. I sure did.

Sweet Potato, Black Bean, and Goat Cheese Pasties

If you are anything like me, you eat breakfast one-handed while you drive, dress, or otherwise frantically make your way out the door in the morning. Breakfast should be finished, neat, and ready to go - all things I am not in the morning. I like more savory items first thing and most breakfast pastries are too sweet, so I created something that fit the bill. These are a nice mix of sweet and savory, while providing a good mix of carbs and protein for the morning. Feel free to adjust the sweetness to your liking. Or hey, add some peppers in with the cayenne and start your morning off with a trip to the hospital. Whatever floats your gravy boat.

Sweet Potato, Black Bean, and Goat Cheese Pasties
makes about 30 pasties if your pastry rounds are about 3" in diameter before filling and folding.

Ingredients:
2 medium sweet potatoes
6-8 ounces goat cheese (strength it up to you - I like mine bold and tangy)
1 can black beans (I only used about 3/4 of the can, but I think all would have great too)
1-2 tsp garam masala (I like mine a bit sweeter and stronger. Taste as you go)
1/4 to 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (I used more because mine is OLD)
1 tsp salt (or more if you want a more savory filling)
1/8 to 1/4 tsp cumin
4 refrigerated pie crusts (the pre-rolled kind or make your own if you're just that good)
1 egg, beaten

Bake your sweet potatoes with your preferred method until soft or cheat and use canned. Remove skins, then mash with all other ingredients except the last two.

Roll out your dough on a lightly floured surface. Cut out rounds of dough, roughly 3" in diameter.

Fill rounds with 1-2 tablespoons of filling, but don't fill them enough to overflow or break when sealing. Fold over, use your beaten egg to seal the crust. Crimp and place on parchment paper or foil covered baking sheet. You can do all many of fancy eggwashes, sugar glazes, or butter basting at this point.

Bake at 425F for 25-ish minutes. They're done when pastry is baked and lightly golden brown. Cool on rack and pack for the next day. These were good both hot and cold and reheated well in the microwave.

Vegetarian Shepards Pie

I never thought something as simple as shepards pie would be so damn time consuming. I guess because I never made one before. Make broth, then stew, then mashed potatoes, then bake together. Not to mention all the chopping, shredding, timing, and cooking. To be honest, I never actually made it to the pie part. I just plopped stew and potatoes in a bowl and called it a day. Pie be damned!

I don't like parsnips. Don't. I've tried them roasted, stewed, and turned into french fries. Don't. Funky. No. However, the broth... the BROTH. So worth it. So.Worth. It. Worth it enough to spend extra time typing in caps with periods after every word. That takes time, yo. Also, celery root! Man, I don't like celery but this root business might have something to it. It did taste nutty and delicious like promised.The problem, however, was the one I got was obviously old because it wasn't crisp and shreddable, it was spongy and tough. Sigh. Still, I know now that it tastes great, so I just have to find better ones.

This recipe is pretty flexible with substitutions and that's probably a good thing since some items might be hard to find in your area. Just do the best you can. Who cares, right? For example, I couldn't find pearl onions or anything close, so I used frozen pearl onions in a cream sauce. No biggie. I think I'll try this again with winter squash and sweet potatoes for a winterized version. Doesn't that sound lovely? 

Vegetarian Shepards Pie

from Epicurious

Cherry Pepper Cobbler with Spiced Oatmeal Topping

Kay, so remember cherry season? It's a while back now. Well, there's this place, you see, where you can pick your own cherries. And I picked them and made them into a cobbler, you see? Then it got eaten and I was too full to blog about it, see? Yeah.

It's called Cherry Hill Orchards. I've actually been twice now and, yes, I will totally get around to telling you about the other one. Some day. Anywho, it was me, two co-workers, two kids, and a truckload of Amish people. It was a warm, breezy morning, spent petting farm cats and getting things stuck to my sticky fingers. I would just like to let the world know that I am a trooper. I was so far up in there picking cherries that I wore the tree as a hat. Seriously, I was picking cherry stems and bugs out of my hair hours later. Very cool experience and picking them yourself is CHEAP. Plus, compared to all my other "farming" experiences, this was a piece of cake because I wasn't dying in the South Georgia sun for hours. Check it out if you're in the area.

Also, can we take a break and talk about pitting cherries? I could buy a cherry-pitter, but they were soft enough that I just squeezed and they popped out. Took forever. My point here is that it took about an hour. This was an hour in which my mind went freaking WILD and tried to come up with every inappropriate comment possible (thinking about it for the rest of the week was just me). I popped about 200 cherries. By hand. I sang some tunes by Cherry Poppin' Daddies for good measure. I sang "Strange Fruit". I thought about forbidden fruit. Juicy flesh. Cleft. Cleft. Cleft, okay I'm done.

So, I bought this jam once. Hang on, totally related story coming your way. It was a cherry pepper conserve and tasted like sweet heaven. Once I got a boatload of cherries in my grubby mitts, I decided this needed to be replicated on a larger scale. With crumble topping.

I compared quite a few cherry cobbler recipes, looking for common threads that could be applied to an all-purpose recipe that is tweakable. My note taking skills are very low in this department, but I made a concerted effort to measure and do all that fancy, fiddly stuff. The end result was fantastico. It was sweet, but not overly so, with a little bite from the peppers and crunch from the topping. I think next time, I would try to thicken the cherry filling a bit more, since it was a tad runny for me. I'm also discovering that I'm not a huge fan of cardamom. Maybe it's situational, but more and more I don't like the taste it brings to foods. Look, you're reading MY foodblog. That means you can change recipes all you like to suit your tastes. I sure do. So go have fun with it!

Cherry Pepper Cobbler:

5 generous cups pitted cherries
1 T cornstarch
1-2 T flour
scant 1/2 cup sugar (or more if you like a traditional sweet cobbler)
1-2 diced hot peppers of your choice (Optional, but come on. You wouldn't make this recipe unless you wanted to add peppers)
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (optional)

Spiced Oatmeal Topping:
3/4 cup oats
3/4 cup flour
scant 1/2 c brown sugar
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp cardamom
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper (optional)
6 T melted butter

Preheat oven to 375 F.

1. Clean and pit all your cherries. Mix with the flour and corn starch. Set aside.

2. Dice and seed all your peppers. Or leave the seeds in if you're one of those crazy hot-heads. Wash your hands! I fear the day I forget this step.

3. In a small sauce pan, cook the sugar until it melts, then lower the heat to simmer. Add the diced peppers, cayenne, and vanilla. Stir until the peppers are slightly cooked and warm. This infuses the sugar with spicy flavor and dulls the peppers a bit. I think.

4. Mix into cherries and plop into baking dish. I would use a 9x9, but anything you've got that's big enough. Let it cool a bit then test the flavor and consistency. Add tasty or thickening stuff as you see if.

5. Note: most crumbly topping call for cold butter. If you can get that to work, then go for it. For me, it's just an exercise in futility adding cold butter to oats. Whatevs. If you're like me, melt your butter in the microwave.

6. In a small bowl, fumble all the topping ingredients together with the butter until you've got a pastey crumble.

7. Smooth crumble on top of cherry pepper mix and pop in the oven for about half an hour. Check after 20-25 minutes and bake until it's bubbly, thickened, and the topping has lightly browned.

Attention: Chocolate Makers

Adding pop rocks to your crappy chocolate does not make it "champagne" flavored. It just makes it noisy. Please address this. K thnx.

Lightened-Up Buckeyes

My best friend's mom always makes these for christmas. They sound like a great idea, but even I (Ms. I melt candy bars on cookies) can't choke down the sweetness. It's too much sugar, too little actual taste, and no texture. Plus, after a hard search for saltine truffles left me feeling unsatisfied, I felt this might be the perfect way to sneak them into candy.

I think saltines are the bee's knees. They provide texture, a salty kick (I used unsalted here though), and they add bulk that doesn't come from sugar. Plus, add crushed peanuts for a party in your mouth. This solves some of the problems I have with normal buckeyes. Still, the peanut butter filling is very sweet to me. That's where the chocolate comes in.

Maybe it's just me, but I've noticed a lot more as I get older that I'm using dark, heady chocolate to "unsweeten" desserts. I know, my life sucks right? How awesome is it that adding chocolate can temper the sweetness of a dessert. It's a topsy turvy world. I was worried that the chocolate wouldn't taste good if that's the only part you took a bite of, so I added a little milk chocolate. When I say a little, I mean 1/4 cup to the 4 oz of unsweetened. Barely sweet and perfect.

Together, they make a buckeye that still have flavor, but isn't too sweet, has some texture, and is practically a health food compared to a normal recipe. You're welcome, pancreas.

I made two batches. The one for the office looked like typical buckeyes. For these, shove a toothpick in the top and use it as a handle to dip them in the chocolate. I thought they looked funny with their one-armed toothpick salutes. Then of course they look like crazy cyclops eyes after the toothpicks are removed. Creeeepy. For my batch, I just plopped then fully in the chocolate for a richer truffle. I'm worth it.


Lightened Up Buckeyes

Truffles:
1 1/2 c peanut butter
1 c butter, room temperature

4 to 4 1/2 c confectioners sugar
1 cup crushed saltines

1/2 to 1 cup crushed peanuts
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Chocolate Coating
8 oz unsweetened bakers chocolate
1/2 cup semi-sweet chips
(really, any chocolate you want works here)

Mix peanut butter and butter together thoroughly. Then add the rest of the ingredients except for half of the powdered sugar. Keep mixing well until you get the taste you like with a thick texture, adding more sugar until you're happy with the result.

You can refridgerate the "dough" until it firms up, then roll it into balls. I found the cold dough hard to work with, so just get it pliable without being too hard. Roll into as many balls as you like. Mine made about 40 medium sized truffles. Push in your toothpick handle then freeze until they're hard- at least two hours.

Once hard, start your chocolate. You can temper it the old fashioned way, or you can cut corners like I did and microwave it for 20-30 seconds at a time, stirring between. It should take about 1 to 2 minutes for the choclate to melt.

Use the toothpicks to carefully dip and swirl each truffle until they're to your liking. If you are doing the entire batch at once, I suggest melting your choclate in a small bowl or cup and making 2 to 3 batches of the chocolate. The truffles cool the chocolate quickly so this will make it easier to work with. Once all the truffles have been coated, return to the freezer for another hour or so, until you can't wait anymore.

Dig in. Or, take some in to work for strategic favor garnering. I place my work treats in this tub.

Works every time. 

Broccoli Soup

Or, where can I get a field of broccoli to make this soup so I can bring about world peace. It's that good.

 

If you wondered whether broccoli soup without the cheese is not only something that might taste good, but also something you could serve to other people at an event, let me assure you that YES OHMYGOD YES you can. Actually, I'm not sure I ever want to eat broccoli and cheese soup again now that I know this is an option. It's easy to make, cheap, and over the top good.

If you love broccoli as much as I do, you will love this recipe. The taste is so clean and honest, in your face broccoli that's also creamy and comforting. Forget the biscuits. Forget the garlic bread. Hell, forget the rest of your meal. Just whip this up and you'll be happy as Larry. However happy he is.

The only substitution I made to this one was replacing real cream with a nut creamer I had in the fridge that needed using. It turned out perfectly, so I think this would take well to any substiutions for a vegan-friendly recipe you'd like. And, you know, it might also be good with cheese.

Broccoli Soup
from the Neely's on FoodNetwork

Ingredients


4 tablespoons butter, room temperature

1 1/2 pounds fresh broccoli

1 large onion, chopped

1 carrot, chopped

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

4 cups low-sodium chicken broth

1/2 cup cream

Homemade Croutons, recipe follows

Directions

Melt 4 tablespoons butter in heavy medium pot over medium-high heat. Add broccoli, onion, carrot, salt and pepper and saute until onion is translucent, about 6 minutes. Add the flour and cook for 1 minute, until the flour reaches a blonde color. Add stock and bring to boil.
Simmer uncovered until broccoli is tender, about 15 minutes. Pour in cream. With an immersion blender, puree the soup. Add salt and pepper, to taste, and then replace the lid back on the pot.

They also have a recipe for homemade croutons if you're into that kind of thing. Enjoy!

Thai Peanut Seitan with Broccoli and Pineapple

Let's just get this out of the way. The cubed seitan I bought looks like dog food. Kay? Moving on. I'd never worked with it before, and it tastes like tofu after it's cooked. Not so scary. Plus, every time I've seen it spelled phonetically it's say-tan, which is too funny because I love saying I just ate Satan with broccoli. I'm very easy to please. (The taste of say-tan compels you!) If it's s-eye-tan, I don't want to know.

Aside from my adventures in fake meat, I almost made it without because there's broccoli! and pineapple! in thai peanut sauce! I was excited from the get-go. This recipe is great because it's just as easy and flexible as a stir fry for when you're sick of stir-frys and can't eat another one. You probably have the basics on hand and you can sub in any vegetable or meat combo you'd like to good results. It's a winner. Unfortunately, I didn't get to take any pictures because it went fast. I guess that's a good sign.

You may think the cookbook is familiar. There was another one I checked out ages ago that was the Go Vegetarian sister book. Both are excellent, though I think I'm a bit more partial to the vegetarian cookbook.

Seitan Saute with Pineapple
from Student's Go Vegan Cookbook

2 tsp oil
1/2 medium onion, chopped (about 1/2 cup)
2 minced garlic cloves
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 c chopped red bell pepper (used green with good results)
2 1/2 c bite-sized broccoli florets
4 oz finely chopped seitan (compels you!)
10 oz can crushed pineapple, unsweetened
1 T peanut butter
1/4 c light coconut milk
salt and pepper
roasted peanuts, garnish
chopped cilantro, garnish

Saute onion in the oil over medium heat for 3-5 minutes or until translucent. Add garlic and garam masala and saute another minute, stirring constantly.

Stir in bell pepper, broccoli, and seitan!, and cook for 1-2 minutes. Add pineapple, peanut butter, and coconut milk. Simmer over medium heat for 8-10 minutes, or until vegetables are tender crisp and sauce begins to thicken slightly.

Add salt and pepper to taste and garnish if you like. As a side note, the sauce is beige. Satan! is beige. The pineapple and onions look beigey. Your broccoli will be your only stand-out if you use green pepper. I'm not one to turn my nose up at ugly food, you know me, but a dash of red bell pepper is nice here. Just fyi.