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Granola by Orangette

Granola
Granola

Granola

I am a big fan of homemade granola. I used to not like granola very much. The stuff you buy in the paper bags at the store was just too hard and crunchy for me, and I didn’t like not knowing what all the seeds and dried fruits in it were. This all changed when I had a roommate for a summer who made her own granola. The stuff used to make our entire house smell like heaven for days. It was amazing. So then I started using her secret recipe (secret being the operative word here, otherwise it would be on the blog, trust me) to make my own as well. I added some flax seeds here and some raisins there, and before I knew it, I became a lover of granola.

Remember those salted chocolate cookies I made last week? Well on the same blog, the post before those cookies is a recipe for Olive Oil and Maple Granola. That sounds…um…heavenly. Right? Am I right? You will, especially after I tell you the ingredients. Anyway, so I decided to make it. I love having granola around, it’s another quick alternative to cereal (try this granola with some Greek yogurt and slices of banana).

Olive Oil & Maple Granola

Ingredients

3 cups rolled oats
1 cup raw hulled pumpkin seeds
1 cup raw hulled sunflower seeds
1 cup unsweetened coconut chips
1 1/4 cups raw pecans, whole or chopped
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
1 tsp kosher salt
3/4 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup olive oil (plus some for coating the pan)

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Prepare a baking sheet by spraying it with baking oil or just pouring on a little olive oil and spreading it around.

In a bowl, combine the oats, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, coconut chips, pecans, light brown sugar, and salt, and mix it all up.  Add the olive oil and maple syrup, and stir until the dry ingredients are evenly and well-coated.

Spread the oat mixture onto your baking pan in one even layer. Put it in the oven and bake for 45 minutes, stirring around every 15 minutes. When it’s done, the granola will be golden brown and toasted. Take it out of the oven (add more salt if you want to, but do a taste check first), and set the pan on a wire rack to cool. If you want to stir in any dried fruit – think cherries, raisins, or cranberries – now’s the time.

The granola will store well in an airtight container. It’s delicious, perfectly sweet, and nutty – try not to eat it too quickly. One great thing about this recipe is that it makes about 7 cups, so plenty of granola to last you at least a couple weeks. Enjoy with some rich greek yogurt!

Asparagus Salad with Prosciutto and Poached Eggs

Asparagus salad with croutons, prosciutto, and poached eggs

Asparagus salad with croutons, prosciutto, and poached eggs
Asparagus salad with croutons, prosciutto, and poached eggs

In the Ad Hoc cookbook (by Thomas Keller), there’s this delicious looking asparagus salad with croutons, prosciutto, and poached eggs. Sounds good, right? I don’t know about you, but I love all of those things. Jonah and I were in the mood for a light dinner, so we decided to make it the other night. The only problem? Neither of us had ever poached an egg before. It’s one of those things, like baking with yeast, that scared me even though it’s probably not actually that hard.

But I did it! And you can do it! I did! My first attempt was much more successful than my second attempt. After having some little egg bits in the pot from the first egg and then swishing it all around to create my whirlpool, the visibility was not so good, so I had trouble telling where my egg was in it’s cooking process. And then it broke when I removed it. Don’t worry, I made Jonah eat that one. Hahaha.

Fall Salad with Poached Eggs, Asparagus, and Proscuitto

Ingredients

2 eggs
1 bunch asparagus
olive oil
salt
8 slices of prosciutto
Croutons (fresh! our grocery store has some really delicious ones made in house. please don’t buy those gross ones in the resealable bags. blech.)
balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper for finishing

Instructions

Poached eggs

Put a few inches of water in it plus a dash of vinegar (white distilled, because that was the only kind I had that seemed reasonable), and started heating it. The important thing (it would seem, from my research) is to have the water hot enough but not so hot that it’s boiling or even simmering. Got that? No bubbles breaking the surface. While your water is heating, break your egg into a small bowl or ramekin. It’s good to not break the egg directly into the water because it gives you a little more control.

When the water is hot enough, take a wooden spoon or spatula (I would advise a spatula… I liked it better for helping the egg along later) and stir it so that it creates a nice little whirlpool. Pour your egg gently into the middle of the whirlpool. It will look, for a moment, like you’ve done something horribly wrong and this will never work and you’ll be asking yourself why you even tried in the first place. But just wait! After the egg has been in the water for about 30 seconds or so, you can start to help it along by nudging it with your spatula, pushing the bits together. After a minute or so, you may notice that your egg has stuck to the bottom of your pan. Gently slide your spatula underneath it to get it unstuck. I also liked to roll my egg over because the bottom of the pot is hotter (duh) and it helped it to cook a little more evenly. Now, after about 3-5 minutes, you should be done! Remove the egg with a slotted spoon and put it in one of 3 places: 1) an ice bath, and then reheat it in the pot of water when you’re ready to serve (Thomas Keller). 2) on a paper towel to dry a little bit (Smitten Kitchen). 3) If you are out of paper towels and don’t feel like preparing an ice bath and then reheating your eggs, a lint-free dishtowel (me).

Fall Salad

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Trim your asparagus, put on a baking sheet, and toss with olive oil and salt. Put it in the oven for about 20 minutes, or until the asparagus is cooked to your liking (some people like it crunchy, some people like it soft). Note: Thomas Keller wanted us to grill our asparagus, but we don’t have a grill. Roasting it is a wonderful and winter-friendly alternative.

On a plate, arrange your asparagus, eggs, prosciutto, and croutons. Season to taste with salt and pepper and drizzle with oil and vinegar.

This meal was delicious and light. I can see it being lovely for a summer dinner party. It’s fairly easy too, once you get the whole egg poaching thing down (I’m still working on that part). Enjoy!

Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

Chocolate Crinkle Cookies
Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

You’ll notice that this is my second chocolate cookie recipe within a week. I know, I know, why Annie? Why do you tempt yourself with these delicious chocolatey cookies? First, I can’t help it. Sometimes I just want something fudgy and gooey and crisp around the edges. Second, I don’t eat all of them myself. The first cookies (the salted chocolate cookies) were mostly consumed by a bunch of friends we had over, and the second cookies (the ones I’m about to tell you about) I brought to Jonah’s boss. We’ve started a little tradition that whenever I make cookies, Jonah takes some into work so that we don’t eat them all, and his coworkers are loving it. Jonah works at a great start-up company in Portland that does internet radio, and we may be hitting the airwaves ourselves soon with a food/cooking show. We’ll see what happens, but we’re talking about it. Thoughts?

Anyway, now onto some chocolate crinkle cookies. I wanted to make something that did not require me to buy anything since we have so much baking stuff in our apartment. So after some searching, I found this recipe on 17 and baking for these. Easy, delicious, and pretty. I halved the recipe because, well it supposedly yields 7 DOZEN COOKIES and let’s face it, we really didn’t need that many. So I’ll give you my miniature version.

Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

Makes 3 dozen cookies

Ingredients

1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cups granulated sugar
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4-1/3 cup confectioners’ sugar

Instructions

In a bowl (or in the bowl of your electric mixer, if you’re using one) combine the cocoa powder, sugar, and oil. Scrape down the sides, and add the eggs one at a time, mixing well between each addition. Add the vanilla. Now throw in the flour, baking powder, and salt and mix to combine. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for at least 4 hours. I let mine sit in the fridge overnight because I didn’t feel like starting the baking process at 11 p.m.

When you’re ready to bake the suckers, preheat your oven to 350 degrees, line a baking sheet with parchment paper, and pull out the cookie dough. Put the powdered sugar into a shallow bowl, and roll the dough into balls about 1 inch in diameter or about a rounded teaspoon. You’ll want to lightly oil your hands so the dough doesn’t stick to your palms when you’r rolling it. After making the balls of dough, roll them in powdered sugar to coat evenly, dusting off any extra, and put them on the cookie sheet at least an inch apart.

Now put them in the oven and bake for 10-12 minutes (mine were perfect at 11). Let them cool on the cookie sheet for a minute before moving them to a rack to cool completely. These cookies look like cookies you see in the magazine. They cracked beautifully and looked so pretty with the contrast of the white powdered sugar and the dark chocolate insides. Enjoy these treats with a glass of milk!

Mexican Bowls

Mexican Bowls

Mexican Bowls
Mexican Bowls

Mexican Bowls

The other night, dinner rolled around, and I was feeling incredibly lazy. Nothing that I could think of eating actually sounded good to me, so I put Jonah in charge. There’s a restaurant here in Portland called Por Que Non that has really good Mexican food. They have this dish called a Bryan’s Bowl that is just a bowl of delicious rice and beans and meat and cheese and guacamole and salsa and everything you could ever want in a little bowl. It’s incredibly good. So Jonah suggested making something like the Bryan’s Bowl, and I was not particularly optimistic, because usually when restaurants have something like that they have some secret delicious sauce they pour over it to make it so freaking good. And we didn’t. But…oh well. So he searched something or other on the internet and found this recipe for Cilantro Lime Rice to use as the base for our Mexican bowls. And man oh man, it made all the difference.

Mexican Rice Bowls

Ingredients

Cilantro Lime Rice

1 cup uncooked white rice
1 teaspoon butter
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp plus 1 Tbl lime juice, freshly squeezed is highly preferred
1 15-oz can vegetable or chicken broth
1 cup water
2 tsp granulated sugar
4 Tbl fresh chopped cilantro

Mexican Rice Bowl

Cilantro Lime Rice
Black Beans
Chopped Red Onion
Chopped tomato (or salsa)
Chopped avocado (or guacamole)
Sour Cream
Hot sauce
Lime wedges
Chopped cilantro
Tortilla chips

Instructions

Cilantro Lime Rice

Let’s start with the rice. Put the rice, butter, garlic, 2 tsp of lime juice, broth, and water in a pan. Bring the contents to a boil, reduce the heat to low, and cover and cook the rice until it’s tender (about 15-20 minutes). While the rice is cooking, mix the leftover Tbl of lime juice with the sugar and cilantro. When the rice is done, remove it from the heat and stir in the cilantro/lime mixture.

Mexican Rice Bowl

While the rice is cooking you can also prep the rest of your ingredients for your bowl. We drained the beans and just heated them in the microwave, chopped the onions, and got out the salsa, guacamole, sour cream, cholula, and some tortilla chips.

Now it’s time to assemble your bowl. I did mine kind of like you would if it were the filling of a burrito, making even layers of all the ingredients I wanted. I also used my bowl as kind of a layered dip and ate it with tortilla chips for an added bit of crunch. Oh man. I may not have been in the mood for this meal at the beginning of the evening, but it really hit the spot! Enjoy!

Cheese Straws with a Bite

Cheese Straws with a Bite

Cheese Straws with a Bite
Cheese Straws with a Bite

For some reason I’ve been in the mood to make some kind of cheesy snacking food lately, like crackers or something. So this weekend when I was up in Seattle, I took the opportunity to make these cheese straws from Smitten Kitchen. They are ridiculously easy and have quite a bite to them due to the red pepper flakes. If you don’t want to risk them being too spicy for you (or whoever else may be eating them), you can easily reduce the amount of red pepper flakes, but I thought it was quite delicious.

Cheese Straws

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups grated extra-sharp Cheddar cheese
4 tablespoons (1/2 a stick) unsalted butter, room temperature and cut into 4 pieces
3/4 cup flour, plus some for rolling out the dough
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon milk or half-and-half

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. In a food processor, pulse the cheese, butter, flour, salt, and pepper flakes. Pulse it until the mixture is in coarse crumbs.

Now add the milk until the dough comes together and forms a ball. Lightly flour a cutting board or your kitchen counter, dump the dough out, and roll it into as rectangular of a shape as possible and about 1/8 of an inch thick. With a sharp knife slice the dough into 1/4 inch – 1/3 inch strips. I left some edges ragged and trimmed others, I don’t think it really matters.

Now you can gently put the strips onto a cookie sheet (no need to grease it because of the butter). You want to leave a little space between them, but they don’t need much (1/4-1/2 an inch is plenty). The dough is fragile, so they might break, but don’t worry about it. The cheese straws can be any length really.

Bake them in the oven for 12 – 15 minutes (I think I baked mine closer to 15, I like the ends nice and brown). Remove them from the oven, allow to cool for a minute or two on the baking sheet, and then transfer to a cooling rack.

Good luck keeping these around for long. They were gone pretty quickly. They’re perfectly crispy and cheesy with a bit of spice… Mm! I love them. Enjoy!

Bread, again, but different

Bread

Bread
Bread

Bread

Bread

Jonah and I keep a little white board in our apartment next to our refrigerator where we write all kinds of things: items to get at the grocery store, tasks to do (such as getting a watch so we can time our couch-to-5k runs which we’ve just started), occasionally notes to each other, and there are also little magnets so we can put checks to be deposited and notes from our bosses, etc. It’s really a handy little space near the door to remind us of all the little things we need to do.

Anyway, on Monday, Jonah wrote a little grocery list on the board before he went into work. Upon seeing that bread was on the list and I hadn’t baked anything in a couple days and hadn’t made bread in quite some time, I decided to make some instead of just buying some. I had found this incredibly easy looking recipe over at Joy the Baker and had been waiting to try it. I think it’s my last “super easy” recipe before I try making my own sourdough starter. So keep an eye out. The other great thing about the recipe was that it only called for bread flour, and I’m still trying to use up that giant bag, so it was perfect. You’ll only need 4 ingredients, one of which is water, so really, only 3.

This bread is delicious with just some butter, toasted with butter and jam. Jonah said it also made a delicious PB+J. And I’m about to go try using it for a grilled cheese. This bread was so supremely simple to make, I think everyone should try it. It’s great for a beginner recipe that still has some of that crispy crust. Enjoy!

Simple Bread

Makes 2 loaves

Ingredients

4 cups bread flour
2 tsp salt
2 tsp active dry yeast
1 1/2 cups warm water

Instructions

Put 3 3/4 cups of the flour into a mixing bowl (electric mixer would be nice). Reserve the other 1/4 cup of the flour for kneading/incorporating later. On one side of the pile of flour in your mixing bowl, put the salt, and on the other side, put the yeast. Not sure why this is so important as everything is about to get mixed together, but whatever. Now pour the water over the flour and mix it until it just comes together (I started with the paddle attachment and then switched to the dough hook once the dough had come together).

Once the dough comes together and you switch to a dough hook, put your mixer on a medium speed and let it knead the dough for 2 minutes. The dough should easily clear the sides of the bowl but stick to the bottom a little bit. If you feel the need, you can add a little flour or water depending on the status of your dough, but mine was pretty spot on, so I didn’t want to mess with it. After mixing it for 2 minutes, let it rest for 5 minutes. After the 5 minute rest, mix it again for 3 minutes. At this point you can flour your counter (with that 1/4 cup of bread flour you reserved) and dump the dough out.

Now you can hand-knead the dough, incorporating the 1/4 cup of the flour reserved. You may not need to incorporate the whole 1/4 cup. I’d say I got about 1/8 cup into the dough, and then stopped. This was the first time in my bread-making experience that I felt like I could tell by the feel of the dough when it was ready. Right when I dumped it onto the counter, it was not as dense as my other doughs have been; instead it was light and easy to work with. I didn’t want to push it, so when it stopped taking the extra flour in, I stopped adding. When the dough seems smooth enough, form it into a ball, lightly oil a bowl (I just used the same mixing bowl) and put the dough in, turning to coat the dough with oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a dish towel, and let rest for 1 1/2 hours.

After the 1 1/2 hours, the dough should have about doubled in size. Remove the dough from the bowl, punch it down, and reform it into a ball, replace it in the bowl and cover it, letting it rise for another half hour.

After this second shorter rest, remove the dough from the bowl onto a lightly floured surface (I just never cleaned my counter till the bread was in the oven) and cut it into two pieces. Form each lump into a smooth and round ball. The best way to do this is to just keep grabbing the edges of the dough and tucking them underneath. Eventually you’ll have a tight, smooth ball. Cover the two balls of dough with a damp cloth and let them rest on the lightly floured surface (aka counter) for 45 minutes to an hour.

Towards the end of this resting period, you can preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Make sure your rack is in the bottom half of your oven because the bread will rise. And put another rack below it. Put a baking sheet (or baking stone if that’s what you’re using) in the oven while it’s heating so it gets hot. Uncover your balls of dough, and slash the tops with 2-4 slashes to guide the expansion of the bread while it’s baking. When your oven is heated, take out the hot baking sheet and carefully put the dough on it, and put it in the oven.

Now it’s time for the steam. A couple minutes after you put the bread in the oven, you can dump 1/4 cup of water onto the oven floor (if you have an electric oven) and immediately close the door, then repeat in a couple minutes. I wasn’t all about dumping water in my oven for some reason, so I did what I’d read in a previous recipe and put half a cup (so I didn’t have to open the oven again and let the heat escape) of water on another baking sheet and put it on the rack beneath the bread. It also works just fine and creates steam. the steam is what helps make the crust nice and crispy, I think.

Anyway, you’ll want to bake the loaves for 20-25 minutes. They’ll be a beautiful golden brown. It’s smart to throw a thermometer in there too, just to make sure. They should register between 190-210 degrees. Now, transfer them to a wire rack to cool (mine were still making crackling/baking noises for a couple minutes, it was kind of cool). Make sure they are completely cool before taking a slice, spreading on some butter, and enjoying.

Korean Marinated Beef

Korean Marinated Beef

Korean Marinated Beef
Korean Marinated Beef

This Korean marinated beef was the second part of our asian dinner the other night. I found this recipe in our Gourmet Today cookbook, which is wonderful. This recipe was crazy good and super quick. The meat was nice and tender and perfectly cooked and the marinade caramelized nicely in the pan. You’re supposed to serve the beef in a lettuce cup with kimchi and rice, but we just served it over rice alongside the Japanese cucumber salad seen in the previous post. Here’s what you’ll need:

Korean Marinated Beef

Ingredients

1/4 cup soy sauce
1 Tbl sugar
2 tsp Asian sesame oil
1 bunch of scallions, minced, with the white and green parts separated
1 Tbl minced garlic
1 Tbl minced peel fresh ginger
3 Tbl sesame seeds, toasted
1 lb flank steak (we did about 3/4 of a pound, just because the cut of meat is a little expensive and the recipe serves 4 people), cut across the grain into very thin slices (the recipe says no more than 1/8 inch thick, but I was like, hell no, so I just sliced it as thin as I could)
1 Tbl vegetable oil for cooking

Instructions

In a medium sized mixing bowl, stir together the soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, the whites of the scallions, the garlic, ginger, and 2 Tbl of the sesame seeds. Whisk this up until the sugar is dissolved. Now add the steak, toss it around to make sure it’s evenly coated, and let it marinate for 15 minutes.

After that 15 minute wait, heat the oil in a pan over high heat. You definitely want the oil to be shimmering, if not smoking. Now add the steak in one layer and cook (ours took 2 batches), turning halfway through. If your heat is high enough, it’ll only take about 4-5 minutes for your meat to be cooked through and even get a nice sear/caramelization from the marinade. When the meat is just cooked through – don’t cook it too long or it will lose some of it’s tenderness – transfer to a plate, sprinkle with the rest of the sesame seeds and the scallion greens. Serve with rice and Japanese cucumber salad (see previous post). Enjoy!

Japanese Cucumber Salad

Japanese Cucumber Salad
Japanese Cucumber Salad

Japanese Cucumber Salad

Last week, Jonah and I made a delicious dinner of this Japanese cucumber salad and Korean marinated beef (to be seen in an upcoming post). This salad was so incredibly simple and delicious. It would be perfect for a summer dinner. It’s very refreshing. But we had it in the winter and it was still so crazy good that I couldn’t stop eating it.

Japanese Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

2 medium cucumbers (or 1 large English cucumber)
1/4 cup rice vinegar
1 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
2 Tbl toasted sesame seeds

Instructions

We bought the sesame seeds in the bulk section at our grocery store (we needed a bunch for the beef too, so it made sense) and you can just toast them in a dry pan over medium heat. Keep an eye on them though, because they can burn quickly.

Peel the cucumbers leaving alternating green stripes of the peel. Slice them in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds. Now, using a food processor, sharp knife, or one of those mandolin things if you’re one of those people, slice your cucumbers into very thing slices. Think paper thin. Lay your cucumber slices out on a double layered paper towel or a dishtowel to absorb some moisture while you whip up the dressing.

Combine the rice vinegar, sugar, and salt in a bowl, making sure to stir it up to dissolve the sugar. When you’re ready to serve, add the sesame seeds and cucumbers, and toss to coat. Serve!

Key Lime Meltaways

Key Lime Meltaways

Key Lime Meltaways
Key Lime Meltaways

Key Lime Meltaways

So, I had gone over a week without baking. OVER A WEEK. That’s a long time for me. Seeing as we’re trying to cut down on our sweets intake, I was trying to be good and, for the most part, succeeding. But the time came when all I wanted to do was to try out a new cookie recipe and I just couldn’t help myself. I had been stalking this recipe for Key Lime Meltaways from Smitten Kitchen for quite some time, and I finally decided to make it. We had everything except the limes, so I just popped over to the store and grabbed a couple (we were going anyway to get ingredients for a delicious dinner that will be posted shortly). The recipe recommends key limes, but I didn’t want to buy an entire bag of them, so I just bought a couple of small limes (and ended up only using one actually). I used bread flour because I’m still trying to work my way through that giant bag Jonah bought me. I also halved the recipe, but I’ll give you the full recipe because…well…sometimes more is just better.

These cookies were so good, sweet at first and then sour, and the zest were these little crunchy bits from being baked… Yum! We made a half a batch which yielded 2 dozen cookies, and they were gone quickly. A little too quickly for my liking. But what can you do. Enjoy!

Key Lime Meltaways

Makes 2 dozen cookies

Ingredients

1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
Grated 2 (small) limes
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice (I added a little extra because I like sour stuff)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 3/4 cup plus 2 Tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon salt

Instructions

Put the butter and 1/3 cup of the powdered sugar into the bowl of an electric mixer and cream until it’s nice and fluffy. Then add the lime zest, juice, and vanilla and beat it until fluffy again. For me, the mixture wasn’t absorbing all the liquid (the lime juice and vanilla), so I just continued on my merry way without worrying about it.

In another bowl, mix together the flour, cornstarch, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the butter/sugar mixture and mix until combined. Now, the recipe says to roll the dough into two 1 1/4-inch-diameter logs between two pieces of parchment paper. I didn’t have any parchment paper, so I wrapped the dough in plastic wrap and rolled it out in that, which worked just fine. Now, throw the logs in the fridge for an hour to chill.

When you pull out the logs, start heating your oven to 350 degrees. Either grease your cookie sheet a little bit or line it with parchment paper. Put the rest of the powdered sugar (2/3 cup) in a ziploc or other resealable bag. Take the plastic wrap or parchment paper off the logs and slice them into 1/4 inch thick slices. Put the rounds on your baking sheet about 1 inch apart and bake them for about 15 minutes (I turned mine part way through baking because the back right corner of my oven is hotter and I wanted them to be evenly cooked).

Take them out of the oven and transfer them to a wire rack to cool. After cooling for a few minutes, but while they’re still warm, put cookies in the ziploc baggie of sugar 3 or 4 at a time. Seal up the bag, and toss the cookies around to coat them in the sugar. Remove the cookies from the bag and put them on a plate to serve!

Matcha Green Tea Cookies

Matcha Green Tea Cookies

Matcha Green Tea Cookies
Matcha Green Tea Cookies

Matcha Green Tea Cookies

A little while ago it was my dear friend Rosie’s birthday. She and I met in college and immediately became close friends. Perhaps one of our favorite things to do together was to go downtown to the Tea Zone in the pearl district and get Green Tea Lattes. They were amazing, so creamy and delicious and this beautiful green color. When Rosie studied abroad, I knew she had missed them and brought her a green tea latte when I went to pick her up at the airport.

So like I said, it was Rosie’s birthday, and a few days beforehand I happened to be surfing some food blogs and stumbled across this recipe for matcha green tea cookies. The timing could not have been better. I immediately knew that I had to make these for her. I walked down the street to Tea Chai Te (another wonderful tea shop in Portland) and picked up a couple ounces of matcha (I wanted extra to send to her along with the cookies) and started baking away.

Matcha Green Tea Cookies

A note about your matcha: the better the quality, the greener it will be! I hope yours is as vividly green as mine was. I’ve never called cookie dough beautiful before. But it was suitable for cookies for Rosie. 

Ingredients

3/4 cup confectioner’s sugar
1 1/2 tbsps matcha green tea powder
10 tbsps unsalted butter, room temperature
1 3/4 cup flour
3 egg yolks
1 cup granulated sugar (to roll the cookies in pre-baking)

Instructions

First, mix together the confectioner’s sugar and the matcha powder. Then add in the butter, and mix thoroughly to cream it.

Now, add in the flour and mix just until is it combined. The thing with shortbread-type cookies is the less you handle them, the better. Now toss in the egg yolks and mix until the dough comes together. It will look a wee bit like play dough, but instead of those obnoxious neon colors it will be a beautiful forest green.

Now you can dump the dough out onto a clean surface (aka counter) and make it into a ball, wrap it in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. When you remove the dough, start preheating your oven to 350 degrees, and dump the sugar into a shallow bowl.

Roll out your dough until it’s about 1/2 an inch thick. Using a cookie cutter that’s about two inches wide, cut out some cookies! This is totally the fun part. Feel free to mash up scraps and re-roll the dough as many times as you wish. The dough actually comes back together really nicely, unlike some other cookies. Anyway, after you’ve cut them out, you can dunk them in sugar and put them on a baking sheet. (If you don’t have awesome baking sheets that everything slides right off of, I might suggest putting parchment paper down.)

Bake them for 12-15 minutes, or until they just start to turn golden at the edges. Transfer them to a wire rack to cool, and then enjoy! (The website also warns to store them in the shade as the color will fade with exposure to the sun…)

Pizza Dough (and the pizza to go with it)

Pizza Dough

Pizza Dough

It’s been a rough week (and it’s only Thursday). So what do I do when I’m feeling down? I bake. Come on people, at this point you should know this about me. But with not a ton of time yesterday and not a ton of energy, I didn’t feel up to making some fancy bread, and Jonah and I are trying to cut down on sweets, so no cookies. What’s a baking girl to do?

Pizza dough. Not quite bread, but bread like, and can actually be put to use for dinner. So I ran with it. After finding many recipes online, I started up. The recipe calls for all-purpose flour, but I only had bread flour (Jonah bought me a giant bag, so for the time being I’m using it in the place of any all-purpose flour in recipes, which may or may not be altering things). We’ve bought pizza dough at our local grocery store (New Seasons) and it tends to be kind of halfway between thin crust and a puffier crust. The crust I made was definitely a little more on the doughy/puffy side.

Pizza Dough

Makes 1 full pan pizza dough

Ingredients

3 cups flour
2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoon active dry yeast
1 cup lukewarm water (may want to add another 1 or 2 tablespoons)
2 tablespoons olive oil

Instructions

I used an electric mixer to combine the ingredients, but did the kneading by hand. Don’t ask me why, I just felt like it. So, in the bowl of the mixer, combine flour, salt, and yeast. Add the water and olive oil and stir until the dough comes together. Lightly flour a surface (kitchen counters work well) and dump the dough out onto it. Knead the dough for a couple minutes into a nice tidy ball. At this point my dough felt super lumpy, more-so than any other dough I’ve made this far, so I started to worry that this whole thing was going to be a failure. But I kept going because otherwise it would’ve been a waste of time and ingredients. What the hell.

Lightly oil the bowl from the mixer (or any bowl, really, just thought I’d save you a dish), put your ball of dough in and turn it so the whole thing is coated in oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and leave for 1-2 hours, or until it has doubled in size.

After rising, dump the dough back onto the floured surface, punch the air out of it (a great way to take out some aggression, kind of like punching a pillow or pounding chicken), fold it back into a ball, and put it back under the plastic wrap for about 20 minutes. When I hit this point, we still had a couple hours till dinner, so I stuck the dough back in the bowl, covered it, and threw it in the fridge.

When you’re ready to make your pizza, preheat your oven to 475 degrees (or higher), sprinkle a baking sheet (or pizza stone, if you’re one of those people) with cornmeal, and roll/stretch out your dough on the sheet. This was a little tricky for us, as our dough did not want to be stretched. But I let Jonah beat it up a little and eventually it stayed. We covered our pizza with tomato sauce, italian mix cheese, caramelized onions (you know, that obsession I’ve been having lately), and fresh mozzarella. We baked our pizza for about 15 minutes, though it probably could’ve used a couple more. We were getting hungry. Just look for a little puffing up and some golden brown edges. After removing it from the oven, we sprinkled a little fresh basil on top, sliced it up, and ate it. Delicious.

Flip-flopping Brown Sugar Cookies

Brown Sugar Cookies

Brown Sugar Cookies

The other night, it was late, and Jonah and I decided on a whim to make some cookies. We figured we’d just make something we’d already made before, so we got out the recipe for the nutmeg maple butter cookies because they were so good. After we started creaming the butter and sugar for half the recipe (we didn’t want that many cookies) we realized “OH NO these cookies are supposed to refrigerate for 2 hours!” At this point it was already about 10:30 and we were not up for that. So we pulled up another recipe that I’d been looking at: Brown Sugar Cookies from Joy the Baker. So what were once nutmeg maple butter cookies became brown sugar cookies, with 1/2 cup of brown sugar replaced by granulated sugar. Jonah said we should call them flip-flopping cookies (he also inserted the name of a certain GOP candidate, but I’m not about to start getting political on my blog). Oh well. You can’t win them all. The cookies were still good. Not amazing, but a good solid cookie. The little bits of ground ginger and cinnamon add a nice touch. I’m going to give you the correct recipe instead of our version.

Brown Sugar Cookies

Ingredients

1 1/2 sticks (6 ounces) unsalted butter, softened
1 1/4 cups dark brown sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 large egg

Instructions

In the bowl of your mixer, cream the butter and sugar until fluffy. While that’s happening, combine the dry ingredients – flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and ginger – in another bowl, mix thoroughly, and set aside. When the butter and sugar are nice and creamy, add the egg and vanilla and mix them in well. Now add the dry ingredients all at once to the butter/sugar mixture. Mix on a low speed until it’s well combined. Now the recipe says to cover and refrigerate for half an hour. We didn’t do that. Maybe we should have. Whatever.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees (while you’re “refrigerating your dough”… ha). Grease your cookie sheet or line with parchment paper, and drop the cookie dough by the Tablespoon onto the sheet. Bake the cookies for 10-12 minutes or until they’re just starting to brown around the edges. Take them out of the oven and allow them to cool for a few minutes on the hot cookie sheet before removing them to a cooling rack.