Sister's Choice Quilts

Help! I Need a Good Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

Well, this was an epic fail. Eva and I bake on Tuesdays, as one of her extracurricular activities. Yesterday we made chocolate chip cookies and they were a disaster. I used the recipe on the back of the Nestles chocolate chip bag and it sure didn't work for me. These cookies spread out all over the pan, making one gigantic, thin, nasty cookie. Horrible. They didn't look right, didn't taste right, and were not the chewy, cakey, delicious cookies I remember.

The second tray turned out better because I doctored up the batter by adding another half cup of flour.

This was more like it, but still not right. I don't know what the problem was, but here are some thoughts:

1) Too much butter (2 sticks)
2) Not enough flour (only 2 1/4 Cups)
3) Too many chocolate chips (2 cups)
4) I did not add nuts (Eva's preference), which would have thickened up the batter
5) Did not chill the dough- but the recipe didn't say to do that

So what do you think? 

I'd love it if you could steer me in the direction of a perfect cakey chewy chocolate chip cookie. I have every cookbook known to man, so if you just reference "Ina Garten's recipe from her (Fill in the Blank) cookbook", I can find it. Or send me a website link, or send me your Grandma's recipe. I just know I need to get a decent chocolate chip recipe pronto. And Eva tells me if I MUST add nuts, she will cope.

Holding my breath here, praying you all will come through for me.

Cooking Up a Storm

Hope your holiday celebrations have been as magnificent as mine have been! Since our son arrived home from Ireland, we have been cooking up a storm. All the dishes he has been craving, and some new experiments as well. On one of his first nights home, we made homemade pasta for linguine and clams. It was so delicious.

We made a rum cake, which was sensational. Wish I could show you a photo of that, but it is long gone. Here is a link to a similar recipe.  

For Christmas, of course there was prime rib roast and mashed potatoes and a fancy salad. Ahren and I did make a really yummy bread wreath that came out great. We had to jerry-rig a tube pan out of a cheesecake pan and a tin can in the center.

Here it is before rising and baking.

And here is the finished result. It was pretty amazing. The recipe is called Pull Apart Garlic Butter Wreath by Half Baked Harvest. It wasn't hard to make and in fact, we had a good laugh while we were cutting out the dough into all those squares. It makes tons, and I mean you could feed 12 people this thing!

It's been so wonderful to have our son home. I do not want to see him go home on Friday. We really have hardly left the house. Of course our weather is really acting up, so it is cozy to just stay in. His sister Sara has come over several times to visit and it's been great to see the two siblings together. And of course, Eva is having a blast with Uncle BroBo.

Happy holidays from our house to yours!

Countdown to Thanksgiving and a Question

More fall color. These trees are in my father's backyard. Three large Japanese maples. He lives in a modern-style house with plate glass floor-to-ceiling windows along the backside of his home. He sits in his chair in the living room and enjoys watching the nature show in his garden.

Well, this is going to be a busy week for most of us, I'll bet. It may be Monday, but a short week that involves a lot of pie and ends with shopping can't be all bad. I know what I'm cooking, who will be at the table, and what I will wear, but there is a lot to do to make it happen.

I need your help. My husband asked me to make a sweet potato casserole I used to make. You roast sweet potatoes, mash them with butter and brown sugar and top them with a pecan streusel. You can assemble it the day before (except for the topping) and bake it on Thanksgiving. It was bright orange and tasted delicious. Better than the version using canned ones with marshmallows on top 

So, here's the thing. I went to the store, and bought "sweet potatoes". They look like the third potato in the photo above. The palest one. Now, I recall my casserole being quite orange. Was I using yams? It has been years and my memory is fuzzy. Did I maybe use yams in the past? This casserole is going to be pretty insipid looking if it is beige. Should I go back and pick up the Garnet Yams I saw piles of at the store? Is that what people use?

Your advice will be much appreciated!

Donuts

Sorry for the radio silence this week. Lots going on/not much going on. That is, I've been busy, but not with anything interesting! No sewing going on, that is for sure.

But what I do have for you today is donuts. Eva and I made Ina Garten's recipe for Baked Cinnamon Donuts and I'm telling you, they are worth the price of the special donut pans. The beauty of this donut recipe is that they are baked not fried. So, healthy donuts, right?

They were super easy to make and we got almost two dozen out of the recipe. They were so good right out of the oven that it is a miracle we had any left to put on the tray.

Hope you are all having a great week.

We had the storm of the century last weekend. The atmospheric river typhoon bomb or whatever the weathercasters were calling it. I can tell you there was a lot of wind and rain involved. My husband measured over 5 inches in our backyard and my son-in-law got over 6 inches on his rain gauge. Which is pretty unprecedented in our area of the state. When I got home from the Bay Area Sunday afternoon, our neighborhood looked like a war zone with broken tree branches and debris blown all over. Not sure if the drought is over, but we certainly got drenched. Supposedly the storm is headed East, so watch out!

 

I Did It!

I set a goal to finish the last row of the Serendipity Sew Along Quilt this week and I did it! I still have to sew the rows together and attach the borders, but that is a goal for another week. I really love the colors in this quilt and know I will enjoy putting it out next summer and early fall.

Look what Eva made this week. She wanted to make mummy cupcakes and I love what she did. She made seven mummies and decided that was enough. After mixing some yellow and red food coloring into our white frosting, she achieved a nice pale orange, and she frosted the rest of them that way.

I am so enjoying our fall weather right now. The days have been just lovely and in the early evenings, we have been sitting on the front porch and watching the deer wander through. Don't you think fall is way too short? It is still blistering hot here through mid-September, and then by November the leaves have fallen and it is getting into our rainy season. The six weeks between Sept. 15 and Oct. 31 are glorious.

Don't get me started on how the retail stores rush the seasons. I went to the Trader Joe's by my dad's house last weekend because everyone knows Trader Joe's has great food for fall. And they were out of everything fall-related. The employees were putting out the Christmas food already. NOOOOOOOOOOO. Please let me have my butternut squash ravioli for a few more weeks.

Hope you have a terrific weekend!

Cookies!

Eva and I do a cooking project every Tuesday and this week we made Sugar Cookies.
Melt-in-your-mouth-delicious sugar cookies!

My Great Grandma Tillie made sugar cookies all the time and they were such a favorite of mine when I was growing up in Michigan. Hers were kind of puffy and each one had a big fat raisin on top. Just one. Grandma Tillie also wore crimson nail polish and lived with a man named Mac, whose relationship was never completely clear to me. I'll have to ask my dad about that. Grandma Tillie was my mother's step-father's mother, so Dad may not know or remember. Now that I think about it, Tillie wasn't a blood relation to me at all.  She and the neighbor ladies used to sit and play cards in her kitchen on hot summer days. They always took off their blouses and played in their bras or slips. Good grief, the things I recall in my old age.

I recently bought a new cookbook that has 100 cookie recipes. And every one of them looks delicious. I wish Eva liked nuts, because the fact that she doesn't eliminates many of the recipes. There are bar cookies and drop cookies and roll in a ball cookies. I would like to start at Chapter One and just work my way through the book. One recipe that sounded good was a S'Mores Cookie. It had a graham cracker base, then a chocolate layer, then a marshmallow topping.

Do you have any memories from your childhood of special cookies?

Another Simple Summer Meal

This is another super simple summer dinner that we had recently. It took no time at all and was delicious.

The dish is called Caprese Chicken and I found it on the Delish website. 

Here's what you need to make it:
Two boneless chicken breasts, cherry tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil, balsamic vinegar, and some garlic.

Making it could not be more simple. You don't really need a recipe, but feel free to check the link for details. First you cook seasoned chicken breasts for about 6 minutes on a side and then remove from the pan. Next, add balsamic vinegar and minced garlic to the pan and saute for about a minute. Toss in the cherry tomatoes and season with salt. Saute for around 6 minutes. Add basil. Tuck the chicken pieces back in the pan. Cover the chicken and tomatoes with slices of mozzarella. I covered the pan and let it simmer for a couple of minutes to melt the cheese. Sprinkle with more basil when you are ready to serve. I put thick slices of French bread in a basket to use to soak up every drop of that delicious sauce.

In the heat of our summer, I am all about making as little a fuss in the kitchen as possible. If you try this recipe, let me know how you liked it. I've got it on repeat!

 

Light Summer Meals

As I have mentioned, it has been dreadfully hot where I live. Consequently, we have been eating a lot lighter lately. This week I tried out a dish for Chicken in Lettuce Wraps, which was delicious. It is a copycat recipe of the amazing dish served at PF Changs. It is made with ground chicken and takes around 20 minutes to put together, which is also ideal in hot weather.

I used a pound of ground chicken, and my husband and I each had a serving like the one pictured above. There was tons of the chicken mixture leftover which was great for lunch the next day. You can wrap the mixture in butter lettuce leaves as we did, or try wrapping it in a flour tortilla. Not as low-calorie, but I bet it would be delicious. Serve with a side of pineapple or melon and it is a perfect meal.

So, let me tell you about the author of the recipe. She is an adorable girl named Chungah Rhee, born in Queens into a traditional Korean household. While in college studying to be an epidemiologist she started a terrific blog site called Damn Delicious. She has also written a cookbook by that name, which is excellent. Everything I have made from it has been great. She also posts a lot on Instagram. Her style is fast and easy, although she makes use of her slow cooker for some great simple recipes as well. She puts out new recipes on Instagram and her website frequently and I love following her. She also has two adorable Corgis named Butters and Cartman, and she shares pics of them often. Clearly, she has dropped the plan to be an epidemiologist with the start of her current successful business ventures.

How about you? Do you eat differently in the summer? What are your favorite things to eat in the heat?

 

One Quilt Block

This one quilt block is the only one I have managed to make this week. But here it is. The block is Butter Churn from Lori Holt's Farm Girl Vintage book. It is the 12-inch block from Week Six of Lori's Red Sampler Sew Along. I didn't have her exact fabrics but came as close as I could with what I had on hand. It's kind of a busy little thing. The idea was to mix tones of red. That fabric with the hangers on it is about as cute as it gets.

I am enjoying the sew along a lot, but have fallen far behind. I've decided not to worry about it one bit.

We had Eva over for a sleepover on Tuesday night and we made shish kebabs. You can't see it very well in the picture but she is holding up a skewer of peppers that she had just assembled. She is pretending to take a bite. She is wearing her fox nightshirt and the veggies kind of blend in. (We had just gotten home from the pool and she changed into her sleep shirt from her wet swimsuit).

And here is my husband seasoning the meat. He is doing very well after his recent health issues, thank goodness. We had a very nice family time with our granddaughter that night. The kebabs were delicious and so easy. 

When we make shish kebab, we always put all the same item on a skewer, we never mix them up. In photos, they show a slice of onion, a tomato, a mushroom, a pepper, the meat, etc all on one skewer and it looks so pretty. We have found that the different items all take different lengths of time to cook, so our skewers are all meat, all onion, all peppers, etc. How do you do it?

Hope you are having a great week!

Mushroom Leek Tart

Hope you all had a lovely weekend. Mine started last Thursday and lasted through Sunday. It was my birthday yesterday and I seemed to have started the celebration early. My daughter and her husband came over yesterday for a barbeque and I rounded out the meal with a mushroom leek tart. It was so easy and good I have to share how it's made. Here is the link to the recipe that inspired my version.

The original recipe calls for asparagus with the leeks, but I am not a fan, so I substituted mushrooms. This is the third time I have made this recipe and I am getting my technique down better. This time I cut the recipe in half and it was great. I have actually posted on making this tart before. Here is a link to my first effort if you would like to read that. I share more photos of the process in that post.

Here's what I did in a nutshell. I used one refrigerated pie crust, topped it with 1 cup of shredded fontina cheese. I topped the cheese with one leek and 5 or 6 mushrooms I had sauteed in 2 T. butter. I put a few dabs of ricotta cheese on top of the veggies (you could use soft mozzarella too I think). I sprinkled some thyme on top, just a little. Lastly I crimped the pie dough up and all around the filling as you would for a rustic tart. Brush the crust with egg wash. I baked it on a hot pizza stone at 450 for 18 minutes.

Refer to the recipe for detailed instructions for a tart that is double the size of mine. You could use any veggies you like and use a different cheese if you prefer. Make sure your filling isn't too "wet".  The first two times I made this my bottom crust was a bit soggy, but that hot pizza stone solved that issue.

Eva is off camping this week, so I plan to get in some sewing and reading. Summer seems to be in full swing all of a sudden!