Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies

Ok. Whatever you do, don't follow this recipe.  I was thoroughly unsatisfied with the result, however, it is what I made so post I must.

First some explanation.  When altering a baking recipe (Not advised! The margins of error in baking are very small.) to add cocoa powder, you must add more butter, baking soda and sugar to compensate for the drying and acerbic aspects of the cocoa.

I did not add enough of any of them, apparently

 Anyway, follow the instructions under the lid of the oatmeal.

Cream together (meaning, mix until creamy) softened butter and your sugars.

This might be too creamy

Beat in eggs.

Two of them.

Add your powders, replacing a quarter cup of flour with cocoa powder

Chocolaty!

Pour in oats,

Mix thoroughly.

Ball into one inch masses and place on a cookie sheet.

Yum...?

 I got bored after one sheet so I made a sheet cake out of the rest

While those are baking, you can clean up the inevitable mess.

Cocoa powder everywhere!

I made a peanut butter sauce for my bars

And by that, I mean I melted some peanut butter. 

 And poured it over the completed bars

Add some sugar over the tops of the cookies to try to make up for the fact that I added no where near enough the first time.

Seriously, don't try this

Although the bars aren't awful frozen.

Moar Hot Pockets

Here is a slightly different take on the classy hot pockets that I made the other day.

I am going to make two variations on a kind of meat pie, the easy one and the slightly more easy one.

For the easy version, you will need an onion and some beef. For the easier version, you will need pre-cooked chicken tenders and a tomato.  For both recipes you will need a container of Pillsbury crescent roll dough (or a knock-off thereof).

First thing's first, preheat your oven to whatever it says on the dough container.

America's Choice Chicken Tenders: Just heat up!

Prep your veggies and your cutting board

Chop away.

I have yet to find an anti-crying onion trick that actually works for me. 

Put the tomato into a bowl with some chicken tenders and season well with salt, pepper and garlic and some oil. Set that aside. If you are only doing the very easy ones, skip ahead a bit. If you are trying to gain XP and up your cooking skillz, put the onion in a pan with some oil, and turn that sucker up to medium heat.  

Check!

Keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't burn.  While you are doing all of that, you can cut your meat into edible chunks.

Note the separate cutting board

Once the onions are cooked:

They are cooked!

Throw in your meat.

Steak and onions!

And saute it until the meat is cooked through. There is no picture because I have faith in your ability to tell raw meat from cooked.

Once you have your two fillings ready, lay out your crecent dough and rip it into fourths. Since the dough comes pre-torn into eighths, you may need to squish it together at the seams a little bit. Place a pile of filling on one half of the dough,  and fold it over into a pocket.

As a note, this is the chicken and tomato filling.  If your beef looks like that,  it is probably not cooked and I revoke my previous statement.

 Follow the baking instructions on the dough container.

Meat biscuits!

 Et voila! you have easy and delicious meat pies!

Steak on the left and chicken on the right.

Leftover night!

(Yes I realize this didn't get posted until Friday, I promise it won't ever happen again.) Cooking every day for a week thus far has left me with, occasionally, more food than even my roommates can eat. And that is why God invented Tupperware. Due to my hellish work schedule, I didn't get home until almost eleven-thirty. And that makes Wednesday leftover night!

Slightly more specifically, I had some mustard chicken and bruchetta left over from earlier in the week

Look at those yummy leftovers!

I cut up my chicken into bite sized portions.

I may or may not have munched on a few of those portions after this picture was taken

 Next, both the chicken and the bruchetta got thrown in a pan with some salt, pepper, oil and garlic powder.

Then I stir-fried away until the onions were cooked (once they turn translucent).

Then I grabbed some lavash bread

And suddenly, a leftover wrap!

Stirfry is one thing you can do with leftovers, and, in most cases, probably the easiest.  Let me know in the comments if you have better things to try with leftovers!

Five Color Bruchetta

Today was hot. Not in the attractive or enjoyable way either.  It was sticky and gross and my air conditioner was doing little to help the situation. It was so hot, in fact, that the thought of an open flame or hot oven in my kitchen was repulsive. I cannot stress this enough. I almost never make a meal with no actual cooking (mostly because I think fire is cool). It was gross.

Fortunately, it being summer (hence the whole heat thing), everything I needed to make a five color bruchetta was in season. For this, you will need four plum tomatoes, a medium onion, a green pepper, a yellow pepper and some olives (pitted, for the love of your fingers, don't try to chop olives with pits. Aggravation will ensue). Also, a loaf of baguette sliced into half inch slices.

Isn't it amazing how I magically have everything I need?

A note about picking vegetables for this recipe: you want an approximately even amount of each of the peppers, the tomatoes and the onion (the olives should be pungent enough that you will only need a quarter part of them).  Remember a simple rule of thumb. Tomatoes are solid but not dense, so they will chop to about their apparent volume.  Onions are solid and dense, so there will be more onion than you expect. Peppers are hollow, meaning there will be less than you think. Also, a short squat pepper will give you about the same amount of usable fruit as a taller skinnier one.  Don't ask me how.

Now its time to dice away! Shoot for about quarter inch (half centimeter) pieces.

Hey look! There are five stripes of color!

Dump the vegetables into a waiting bowl.  This is when I fall in love with my flexible cutting board all over again because it happens to act like a funnel, minimizing spillage.

Now it's time to season your veggies. I used (from left to right) olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder (not garlic salt; if you only have garlic salt then omit the regular salt) basil and balsamic vinegar.

My pepper bottle is kind of mutilated

 Mix everything in and together until its approximately homogeneous

Fine, homogeneity is ok....

Serve over bread.  If you can look at a oven, you can toast the individual slices.

Mustard Chicken Sandwiches

Lunch again! Today we are going to make a dijon-coated chicken sandwich. (That is {[(dijon coated) chicken] sandwich} not a chicken sandwich coated in dijon mustard, which would be messy but also delicious.)

The first step will be to, as usual, assemble your ingredients. You will need chicken, dijon mustard, pickled beets, a tomato, arugula and bread.

The diet coke is optional.

Prepare your frying pan with oil, salt and pepper.

 Take some mustard and put it on a plate.  You will need a decent sized glob.

Coat each piece of chicken in the mustard individually.

Fry those buggers.

While those are cooking, take your tomato and beets (in the plastic container next to the tomato)

See? Up there above the cutting board? 

and make into sandwich portions

Once your chicken is done, assemble a sandwich.

I sprinkled more salt and pepper on top.

 Slice it in half to display the interior for photography.

You probably don't have to do that last part.

Serve with chips and salsa.

The Classiest Hot Pockets Ever

I'm not going to dissemble. This one is a bitch. It was my first experience working with filo dough and I was thoroughly unprepared for the sheer amount of work required. The end result made it worth the effort.

What I made was essentially chicken cordon bleu in a filo crust, or, as I like to call it, a European Hot Pocket.

To make this, you will need four pieces of thin sliced chicken, some swiss, some ham (both also thin sliced), salt, pepper, mustard, 16 pieces of filo, an acceptance of the inevitable and an infinite amount of patience

To start, thaw out your filo dough and preheat the oven to 350F (175C). Take some thinly sliced chicken and pound it thinner-shoot for a quarter of an inch.

To do this, place your chicken on a firm surface.

An actual cutting board works better for this than my usual thin sheet of plastic.

It is better to cover it with a piece of saran wrap when you start to take the mallet to it. Otherwise you will get chicken everywhere. I promise. It will be nasty.

Raw chicken is gross.

 Once all of your chicken is thoroughly pounded,

I had to put the head back on my mallet 

 Slice them in halves

Yup, still nasty

 Place down a slice of ham down, then a slice of swiss topped by one of your chicken halves.

The fun part was how I had to keep washing my hands between each  packet.

Roll up the pile so that the ham and swiss are wrapped around the chicken

Now clean to handle.

Repeat for the rest of the chicken slices.

The neat little piles are not necessary, but they are encouraged.

 Now if your are a sane person, you will discard the filo dough and buy some puff pastry instead. If you are like me and insist on doing this the classy way, take to heart these lessons I learned about filo dough in the twenty minutes it took me to make eight pockets.

Firstly, the sheets will rip. It doesn't matter how careful you are being, they have the durability of a bubble floating next to a five-year-old. You will try to prevent it but, at the end of the day, it would take the placidity of a Buddhist monk to not become frustrated.

Secondly you will need much more olive oil than you think you will.  You will also need a paint brush.

Now, for those unfamiliar with the process of preparing filo dough, you must first remove a roll of what appears to be rice paper from its packaging. Next you must lay a sheet down across a flat surface and paint it with melted butter.

If I am adding that much fat to something, however, it will be in the form of olive oil, thankyouverymuch.

 Once the first sheet is thoroughly doused, repeat the process until you have a pile four sheets high. Be sure to cover the top piece because you need to put oil anywhere the dough will touch itself.

Above: Five minutes of trying, fruitlessly, to keep the sheets from ripping.

Slice the sheets down the middle, so you have two wraps. In the middle of each, place one of your meat and cheese fold-overs, along with some mustard, salt and pepper.

Mmm, Dijon...

Next you will proceed to make a burrito out of your dough by folding in the sets of opposite corners. Looking at the above picture, fold in east and west, then south then roll north down so that it wraps around the entire pocket

It really does look like a tiny burrito.

 Place your wraps on a cookie sheet. Make sure that cookie sheet is lined. I forgot to do that and my clean up became much more difficult.

As you can see, I tried several wrapping methods. None of them kept the melted cheese in. 

Throw them in the oven for about 45 minutes, or until the outside looks like this:

And now they look like egg-rolls. I really do need a better camera.

Warning: These contain molten cheese. Let them cool! 

Enjoy!