It’s Beginning To Smell A Lot Like Christmas: Banana Drop Cookies & More Apple Butter

This week was all about Christmas decorations and finishing my holiday shopping. I attempted to extend my creative courageousness outside of the kitchen and put together a window box display with evergreen branches, pine cones and berries. I’m pretty pleased with the outcome.

A sudden deep freeze has descended upon Minnesota (it was 12 degrees when I got up this morning) so it was a good weekend to stay inside. My first goal was to find extra storage for all the new kitchen equipment I’ve acquired as a result of this project. My kitchen is a small step up from a galley kitchen. It’s tiny. I have 8.75 square feet of useable counter space. There is an additional 5 square feet, but it’s currently taken up by a microwave because the one above my oven decided it no longer wanted to work. I also have a small table that usually becomes the staging area for ingredients before I begin to cook.
 
This weekend, I dragged out a set of old bookshelves, moved around some furniture in my office/library room and set up a Found Recipe Box area. Hopefully it helps relieve my tiny kitchen from some of the extra burden it has been carrying the past few weeks. One of my favorite additions to the shelves is a card I got from some friends who moved out to the East Coast last fall. They are big fans of the blog and encouraged me to “keep up the shenanigans in the kitchen” because they love to read about my adventures. I keep trying to convince them to move back so they can share in my adventures, but so far I have been unsuccessful. 

When it’s cold out, warm cookies always sound good so I decided to try the Banana Drop Cookies. While I was mixing up the dough I got a phone call from Justin, one of the friends who moved away. He was in town and wanted to swing by to say hello. I told him it was perfect timing because by the time he got here, the first batch of cookies would be coming out of the oven. When he arrived at our house, Murphy was literally shaking with excitement. Our friend Justin is one of Murphy’s best friends – I think it’s because he always seems to be dressed up when he comes to our house and Murphy just can’t resist adding a layer of gold hair to everything Justin is wearing. Lucky for Murphy, Justin likes dogs.

While we were catching up, the timer rang and I pulled the first batch of cookies from the oven. I wasn’t sure what to expect because the dough was really sticky. The recipe said to add extra flour if needed and I added an additional ¼ cup, but it didn’t reduce the stickiness. The cookies are dense and cake-like and I think Justin described them best when he said they “are like scones that don’t crumble when you bite into them.” But they are delicious banana nut scone-like cookies. Everyone gave them a thumbs up.  

Sadly Justin wasn’t able to stay long so I packed up a bag of cookies for him to take home and tried one more time to convince him to move back. I was, yet again, unsuccessful. But hopefully the cookies were a nice reminder of Minnesota and a tasty treat for the flight home.  

I also decided to make another batch of apple butter this weekend. I got a new official canner with a jar rack from Fleet Farm so I wouldn’t burn my fingers. Fleet Farm is awesome, it’s like Target except you can also buy building supplies, deer urine (I was horrified by that until I learned it’s for hunters) and horse saddles (this will come in handy when my dream of owning a horse – specifically a Friesian – comes true). Plus, all of their pet supplies are a lot cheaper than the big pet supply stores. It, like Target, also seems to have a $25 cover charge because I don’t think we’ve ever left the store with a bill cheaper than that. 

The canner worked like a dream. And the added benefit of making apple butter is that it makes the whole house smell like Christmas. Something about the combination of cinnamon and nutmeg just reminds me of Christmas. While Murphy kept vigil by the mouse house he discovered outside and my husband watched football, I lit the Christmas tree, turned on Christmas music, and took a deep breath full of the smell of Christmas while I contemplated all the baking I need to do this week. There's a cookie exchange, my husband has a pot-luck at work, and my husband’s birthday is this weekend (he got to choose his birthday cake from the box). It will be an adventurous, sweets-filled week! And since we are going to get snowed in on Tuesday (6-12 inches was the last I heard…yuck) it will be the perfect time to stay in the kitchen and bake.

Now We’re Cooking With Gas: Butterscotch Oaties

 

We had a bit of excitement at our house last night. We had a gas leak. The gas company came this morning to dig up the street and our front yard and then drill a hole through our foundation to add a new line. Murphy thought this was the best day ever – constant excitement out in the front yard and a man who kept coming inside to pet him (luckily he loved dogs). Murphy went back and forth between the front window where he sat barking on his “throne” (my ottoman that I haven’t used in 3 years since he claimed it as his own as soon as he was big enough to get on it) and the back door when the Gas Man came in to check on something in the basement and say “hi” to the dog. I have a feeling Murphy was jealous that I let strangers dig a big hole in the front yard and he always gets yelled at for doing the same thing in the back yard. 

I was a little concerned, however, when one of the men who arrived to fix the gas leak walked around to investigate the yard with a lit cigarette in his mouth. Sadly, I’m not kidding. I considered grabbing my valuables, packing up the dog and the chinchilla (yes, I have a chinchilla too, I’ll talk more about him in another post), throwing it all in the car and driving far away before he blew up my house. But I trusted that he knew what he was doing and he wouldn’t willingly blow himself up. Thankfully, I was right.

The ground hasn’t frozen yet, but today was one of the coldest of the season so it wasn’t pleasant sitting in a house with no heat and windows open to air out the smell of gas as they reconnected the line. So as soon as the holes were filled in, the gas was back on and my toes had thawed out, I decided it was time to watch the first Christmas movie of the season and make cookies!

Butterscotch Oaties aren’t a traditional Christmas cookie, but they’re easy to make and a nice treat on a cold, dreary winter afternoon. I recommend making the batter into balls (about one inch thick) and lightly pressing them onto the cookie sheet. They cooked better when they were a little thicker. If they’re too thin, they become kind of lacey when they bake and break apart. 

While Murphy was passed out recovering from a busy day of barking, I turned on the Christmas lights, sat on the couch with a warm cookie and watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (one of my favorites). Despite the early morning drama, it was a great start to the Christmas season.

Meat, Cheese, and More Meat: Meat Loaf (Italian Style) & Meat Balls

 

 

We were having a bit of a sweets overload in my house so we decided to balance it out with some meat, or in this case, a brick of meat. 

I always thought of meatloaf as a solid hunk of meat covered in a ketchup sauce. This Italian version breaks the meat in half with a layer of cottage cheese and mushrooms and doesn’t have sauce on top. It’s an interesting flavor, but sadly, this is the first recipe in the box that we haven’t been crazy about. Maybe it was just the post-long-holiday-weekend blues, but it was a mediocre meal compared to everything else we’ve tasted. Murphy, on the other hand, was a huge fan. If you could measure an approval rating by the length of drool hanging from a dog’s mouth, this one would be off the charts. And Murphy doesn’t drool for just anything. His two favorites are tacos and brats. And now Italian-style meatloaf can be added to that list. 

I debated whether or not to post the pictures of this one because, honestly, it looks really gross. I tried to think of a way to decorate the plate to make it more appealing, but there’s just no way to dress up meatloaf. Trust me, it tastes better than it looks.

There was also a meatballs recipe on the bottom of the card, but we consumed enough beef for a while so I didn’t make that one. Now, I think it’s time for more sweets!

Thanksgiving Doorbusters: Cranberry Sauce & Pumpkin Chiffon Pie

 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you had a fun holiday full of family, good food and safe travels. I didn’t host Thanksgiving dinner, but I did bring some Found Recipe Box creations to my husband’s family’s dinner table: cranberry sauce and pumpkin chiffon pie. 

Cranberry sauce is incredibly easy to make and is done in less than 20 minutes start to finish. I always looked at that red, gelatinous mass on the dinner table and thought it had to be really hard to concoct. If you can boil water, you can make cranberry sauce. It’s that easy. And it’s so much better than the canned stuff!

I am a huge fan of pumpkin pie and I think that this pumpkin chiffon pie just might be my new favorite. It’s almost as easy to make as regular pumpkin pie. The only additional step is to make a meringue that gets folded into the pumpkin mixture. It makes the pie light and airy, which is really nice after stuffing yourself at Thanksgiving dinner. You get the taste of pumpkin pie without getting weighed down by a heavy dessert. Because let’s be honest, no matter how full of turkey, potatoes, stuffing and bread we are, there’s always room for dessert! 

I also had a special request from my husband to make apple crisp. It was a tough choice between that and the apple kuchen, but we decided on the crisp. It was a hit. But an even bigger hit was the homemade whipped cream. We had a hard time keeping it away from my niece. She didn’t want any pie or apple crisp, just the whipped cream…6 plates covered in whipped cream. Can you say “sugar rush?” I should have tried that when I woke up at 5am this morning to go shopping. It was the first time I’ve ever shopped on Black Friday, let alone at 5 o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t bad though, I was on the road just after 5am and back in bed by 6am.

And now that Thanksgiving is over, it’s officially time for Christmas (although, if you’re one of my neighbors, Christmas apparently started about 2 weeks ago when they began lighting the herd of glowing animals in their yard). So tune into the 24-hour Christmas music station and get ready for cookie season! I’ll be posting lots of cookie recipes soon so if you’re looking for ideas for a cookie exchange, be sure to check the Found Recipe Box!

It’s In The Can: Apple Butter

While apples are still in season, I wanted to make a few more recipes that use them. And this recipe uses a lot of them! The card calls for 4 bowls of apples and 3 bowls of sugar. A little internet research told me that the translation to that is: 4 pounds of apples and 3 cups of sugar.

Be prepared when you make this recipe that it takes quite an investment of time (especially if you are going to can jars of it afterward) but it is completely worth it. It took me about 45 minutes just to core, peel and cut up the apples. Once everything is in the pot, it basically just cooks and makes the whole house smell delicious for about an hour.

Looking at the recipe, I knew this would make way more than my husband and I could consume so I decided to learn how to can so that I could give jars of it away. I purchased Mason jars from the grocery store and found a great site with instructions on exactly how to successfully can jellies and jams. I didn’t have the proper canning utensils, but made due with large pots, which worked, but I also burned the tips of most of my fingers quite nicely in the process. Note – do not attempt to lift jars out of a vat of boiling water using a spatula, wooden spoon and an Ove Glove. The next time I do this (which will be soon because I already have a list of people I want to send this delicious treat to), I will be using the proper canning equipment. To be honest, I was pretty intimidated by the idea of canning my own food. But despite a few minor burns, it was a lot easier than I thought. And it’s a great way to keep food for a long period of time without adding a ton of preservatives. 

If you have never had apple butter before, it’s worth a try. It isn’t butter, but instead a fruit spread that can be used on toast, English muffins, etc. and tastes like gooey cinnamon apples. It’s delicious! So good in fact, that for a few minutes while I enjoyed toast with warm apple butter, I completely forgot about the fire alarm going off (from all the heat in the kitchen), the dog barking (because the fire alarm was going off) and the fact that the tips of my fingers looked like little Rudolph noses. It was a pure Calgon moment. 

In Loving Memory of Buck: Green Bean Casserole

This recipe is almost exactly the same as the one on the French’s French Fried Onion can, but I wanted to post it anyway so you could see the card and study the tight, scipty font. There are several recipes written in this same handwriting and a few might require some detective work in order to get the ingredients and directions correct.

I like green bean casserole. In fact, it is the only way I’ll eat green beans. As a kid, my mom used to make us sit at the table until we ate all of our vegetables. For my brothers and me who are all picky eaters and will never be vegetarians, this scenario occurred quite frequently at our dinner table. Until we got our dog, Buck. I remember all the clever ways we found to distract my mom so that she wouldn’t know that we were feeding the dog under the table. Something tells me we weren’t half as sly as we thought. Looking back, I’m sure that (plus the fact I let the dog sleep in my bed starting the night we brought him home) had something to do with me and Buck becoming best friends. 

Buck and I went everywhere together. He loved car rides and didn’t care where we were going as long as he could sit in the front seat and hang his head out the window. He loved to have jobs and his favorite one was getting the paper. On the weekends, he and my dad had a routine: Buck would get the paper then hold it in his mouth in the car all the way up town to get Starbucks and all the way home. One time, one of the baristas noticed him from the window and said to my dad, “Hey, look at that crazy dog out in the car with the paper in his mouth.” My dad just smiled and replied, “That’s my dog.”

Like most dogs, he had an insatiable zest for life. He was the best running partner I’ve ever had. If we weren’t out for a run around town, then we were running in the back yard and playing Frisbee. And after a hard day of playing, I’d fall asleep at night with 90 lbs of Flatcoated Retriever lying across my back or wrapped around my head. I’m sure that is part of the reason for all the back problems I have now, but I wouldn’t trade those nights for anything.

Life can be cruel sometimes and insanely unfair. When Buck was 9 years old, he began to have seizures. The dog we had before Buck also had seizures and died at only 5 years old. It was awful and we were very careful in selecting Buck so that we’d never have to go through that pain again. Only it did happen again and this time it happened to my best friend in the whole world. The vet tried medication, but it didn’t work. On Buck’s last day, he went into a grand mal seizure that he never came out of. I will never forget crying, holding his head while he shook and watching as he tried to comfort me. That was Buck. He cared more for the people in his life than anything else in the world. Some people may say that dogs don’t have emotions, blah, blah, blah. They didn’t know Buck. I know what I saw in my dog’s eyes and it was 100% pure love.

Buck died the day before his 10th birthday. It took my family a while to bring another dog into our home and I didn’t know if I’d ever be able let another dog into my heart. I was convinced there would never be another Buck. But since Buck passed, my family has had four other Flatcoats and now I have a dog of my own, my Golden Retriever Murphy. Each of these dogs has filled that void in my heart left by Buck in their own special way. Murphy has even reminded me what it feels like to have 75 lbs of dog sleep across your back at night.

Now that I’m an “adult,” I can make whatever vegetables I want for dinner and don’t have to sit at the table until my plate is clear. But I still save a little bit to share with my dog. And I’ve discovered that green beans aren’t all that bad…well, when they’re covered in cream of mushroom soup and French fried onions that is. I bet Buck would have preferred them that way too.

Kitchen Casualty: Apple Crisp

 

I had my first kitchen casualty this weekend. No, it wasn’t one of my fingers (thankfully), it was my apple corer. 

My healthy husband uses it every weekday to cut up apples to take to work for a snack. I only use it when I’m making a recipe that requires apple slices to be coated in wonderful things like cinnamon, sugar and butter. And of course, I’m the one that breaks it.

We both agreed, however, that it was totally worth the sacrifice because this recipe was one of the best (if not the best) apple crisps we’ve ever eaten. And since the recipe wasn’t very difficult, I added the challenge of making homemade whipped cream. I’ve been missing out by using the fat-free Cool Whip all these years. Homemade is the way to go. It made an incredible recipe even more mouth-watering. There isn’t a cooking time or temp listed so I guessed and cooked it at 350 degrees. It took about 35 minutes at that temp. 

If you’re looking for a dessert for Thanksgiving, try this one. You won’t be disappointed.