Chocolate Drop Cookies, or, Homemade Oreos

I'm starting to hear Eleanor in my head when I cook her recipes. But Eleanor, although awesome, was not a kindly, mild-mannered grandmother. She was brash and opinionated (but fiercely loyal), and so far that's exactly how I'm hearing her in my head. While baking these cookies I could hear her gravelly smoker's voice almost like she was in the room with me, snapping at me in a thick New York accent while she lit a cigarette: “put the cookies farther apart, what are you, stupid!?”

But... I live in Scotland, I have a tiny oven (so tiny the cookware we brought from America when we moved here doesn't even fit in the oven), even tinier cookie sheets, and I didn't want to be stuck in the kitchen all afternoon cooking them only 3 at a time, so I disobeyed Eleanor's orders and crammed the batter in medium-sized balls as close as I could on each of my two cookie sheets.

Bad idea. The moral of this story is that your grandmother DOES know best, even if she's a figment of your imagination and lives only in your head. Little did I know how much these dumb cookies would expand.

After the first tray came out of the oven and the cookies had expanded so much that the tray looked like a pan of brownies, I came to my senses and started scooping smaller balls. The next batch came out fine, so it was no big deal in the end, especially once I tasted the cookies. These are exactly what I imagine a homemade Oreo would taste like (aka delicious). The chopped nuts give them a delicate crisp texture without being overly crumbly or dry, and because they are made with melted chocolate instead of cocoa powder, they have an actual chocolatey-ness to them that I always think is missing in chocolate cookies. The texture is the perfect balance of chewy and crispy, and because they're fairly thin, you can eat as many as you want without feeling guilty!... or maybe that last part is just me. I'm already fantasising about making them this summer to use as the base of homemade ice cream sandwiches-- yum!

The Verdict:

3 Spoons out of five. They're delicious, but they spread so much while they cook that in my (admittedly tiny European) oven, I had to cook them three or four at a time. Even using two sheets, that meant 4 batches for the 30-ish cookies I got, which is kind of a pain. Also, have I mentioned how much I hate melting chocolate? I'd still make them again, though-- especially once ice cream season rolls around.

The recipe:

Chocolate Drop Cookies

The Ingredients:

3 oz baking chocolate (if you have American-style baking chocolate, this is 3 squares)
1 cup sugar
½ cup butter, melted
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 ½ cups sifted flour
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
½ cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
½ cup finely chopped nuts of your choice (I used a mix of blanched almonds and brazil nuts)
12 sliced brazil nuts

THE DIRECTIONS:

Grease two cookie sheets and preheat oven to 350F/176C.
Melt chocolate by putting in a small bowl and microwaving for 10-sec intervals until smooth, stirring well after each interval.
Set aside to let cool.
Mix together sugar, melted butter, and egg in a medium-sized mixing bowl.
Add flour, baking soda, and salt, alternately adding milk after each ingredient.
Stir in melted chocolate, vanilla, and chopped nuts, stirring well to ensure uniform texture and consistency.
Using the smallest spoon you have, drop 1-inch balls of batter onto prepared cookie sheets, at least 2-3 inches apart.*
Press a slice of brazil nut into the top of each cookie and bake for 12 minutes or until edges are slightly darker than middles of each cookie.
Let stand on cookie sheet for 1-2 minutes before moving to cooling rack.

*Per my experience, you seriously do not want these bigger than 1 inch. I used a slightly rounded teaspoon to scoop the batter with after the first batch expanded to cover the entire cookie sheet and my cookies were “normal” cookie sized-- about 3 inches across.

Makes 24-30  

Spinach Salad with Bacon Vinaigrette

When I started this project, I separated the recipes into categories in hopes that I wouldn't get to the end of the project and somehow have ended up with nothing but 35 recipes for salad left.

There should have been no worries there. Of the dozen or so recipes behind the “salad” divider I created in the recipe box, only about three are lettuce-based. The rest? Mayonnaise, jello, or water chestnut based.* After my first week of cooking recipes from the box and accidentally choosing a lot of meat-centric dishes, I decided it was time for a salad. I chose one of the few veggie-based salads in the box, but it still has bacon in it, so healthy is relative.

Did you hear me? I said it has bacon in it, so here're your dinner plans for the evening. You can thank me later. Not only was this the easiest recipe I've made yet, but it was also the first one I've had help in cooking, which made it even better.

*sidenote here: water chestnuts? Really? My grandmother was a woman who had to put a note next to “garbanzo beans” on one recipe to remind herself to “look in the bean aisle for something that looks like hazelnuts” but she cooked regularly with water chestnuts??

The Verdict:

4 Spoons out of five. This is delicious, (relatively) healthy, and if you garnish it the way we did, it has the perfect mix of sweet, salty, bitter, and crunchy that I think every salad needs to be really interesting. However, the bacon vinaigrette only makes enough for a couple spoonfuls per salad, and we had to add a little oil and vinegar to keep the whole thing from being too dry. It's still being added to our rotation, though!

The Recipe:

Spinach Salad with Bacon Vinaigrette

THE INGREDIENTS:

2 heads little gem lettuce, 2 endives, or 3 handfuls of spinach, washed and well-drained
2-3 slices of bacon or 4 oz. lardons, cut into small pieces**
2 tbsp sugar
4-6 green onions, sliced
2-3 tbsp white wine vinegar, diluted with 1 tbsp water
Black pepper

A Blair Addition: Serve with sliced grapes, almonds, and radishes to bulk it up and add more sustenance. Also, I suspect it would be pretty great with a slice of goat cheese and a piece of garlic-rubbed toast.

**British bacon is nothing like American bacon and tastes way more like ham. If you live here in the UK and are making this salad, use lardons or pancetta as the grease from the pork is a necessary component of the dressing.

THE DIRECTIONS:

Dry the greens as much as possible and place them on two dinner plates.
Fry the lardons, pancetta, or bacon in a skillet until cooked through but still slightly tender.
Remove the pork from the pan with a slotted spoon and place on a paper towel to drain.
Turn heat to low and sprinkle sugar and onions on top of the bacon grease in the pan, scraping brown bits from the bottom all the while.
After onions have wilted and begun to caramelise, deglaze the pan by pouring the vinegar water into the pan and scraping up all the bits. (Watch your face during this step-- the vinegar will become steam and it doesn't feel great in your nose or eyes)
Pour the onions and the liquid from the pan directly onto each plate of greens. Greens will wilt slightly as you finish preparing the salads.
Sprinkle half the bacon onto each salad and give each plate a good grind of black pepper.
Garnish as desired (see above for the garnishes we chose) and enjoy!

Serves 2

Greek Kourabiedes, or, Brandy Butter Cookies

It's time I came clean about something. I have a raging sweet tooth. I love sweets. I know it's not cool to admit, and I'm still at the age where I should be all “green juice! Kale! Juice cleanse! Acai! Quinoa!” but let's be real: I've never been that cool and I really like desserts. In a pinch, I've been known to eat cake for breakfast if I'm really hungry (read: if it's in the house) and I'm tired of being embarrassed because I think frosting should be a main food group.

Working my way through Eleanor's box of recipes, it's clear I come by this passion legitimately. Half of her recipes are for sweets, and I'm going to try them ALL. Today's cookies are labelled “Greek” “Kourabiedes” on the recipe card (quotation marks in the original). I thought the superfluous punctuation marks were just because Patty, a friend who apparently wrote down the recipe for Eleanor, didn't understand basic grammar, but then I looked up Kourabiedes and found that their trademark is that they are always made with nut flour. As these have no nuts, I guess they really are ersatz “Kourabiedes” instead of authentic ones after all.

THE VERDICT:

5 Spoons out of five. These are delicious, easy, and fast (though a bit messy) and we highly recommend them. I sent most of the batch to work with my husband and they were gone in 20 minutes. Bake yourself some!

The Recipe:

Brandy Butter Cookies

THE INGREDIENTS:

8 oz unsalted butter
1 1/2 tbsp confectioners sugar, plus significantly more for dusting/rolling (icing sugar if you are in the UK)
1 egg yolk
2 ½ cups sifted flour, approximately
1 jigger brandy (approximately a shot)

the directions:

Clarify the butter: bring it just to a boil, then skim off the white bits that float to the top, pour the remainder through a cheesecloth-lined fine mesh sieve and let the clarified butter cool and re-solidify.
Preheat oven to 350F/177C.
Cream the clarified butter until light and fluffy.
Beat in sugar, then yolk, then brandy mixing well after each addition.
Gradually work in sifted flour to make a soft dough that pulls away from the beaters-- note that you may not need all the flour (I only used a scant two cups and my cookies had a crumbly, shortbread-like texture. Basically you want the dough moldable but not sticky.).
Shape dough into u-shapes or crescents, one spoonful at a time by rolling them into a cylinder between your palms and then wrapping the cylinder gently around your thumb. Work quickly to avoid the dough getting too soft.*
Bake 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheet for 20 minutes until just barely browned at the edges.
While cookies are baking, sift additional confectioners sugar onto wax or parchment paper.
As soon as cookies are removed from the oven, place them onto sifted powdered sugar while still hot. Sift additional powdered sugar over cookies and let cool.

*Crescents are nonsense and if you're in a hurry and you aren't taking these to a Greek wedding, you could just bake them as balls, since I'm sure they'd taste exactly the same. The powdered sugar does cling nicely to the curves of the crescents, though, so if you have the time it's worth the extra effort.

Makes approximately 30 cookies, depending on size and shape.