Banana-oat-white and dark chocolate- pumpkin seed-pecan-cookies

The last few weeks have been tough at our house. Things have been a little out of whack, and then yesterday Jacky had to have his snaggle tooth pulled. In short, we need cookies.

Since I haven't posted a recipe in a long time, I thought if I was gonna do it, why not make it a crazy, out of control, every-ingrediant-ever type recipe?

Here is how I came up with this one. I had some rapidly browning bananas laying around that needed to be used up. I also had dark and white chocolate from easter in my pantry, as well as pecans, pumpkin seeds and the usual baking paraphenalia. I always like to use what I already have laying around the house when baking. However, after tasting the results, I must recommend that you go out and buy whatever part of this recipe you might not have- these cookies are worth a trip to the store to pick up white chocolate!

I also want to mention that I tried baking with brown rice syrup for the first time ever in this recipe. Rice syrup is an alternative to sugar that is less sweet and makes you feel a little less bonkers after eating it. I only swapped it with the white sugar- I still used brown sugar too- and the cookies were wonderfully balanced. I think the oat flour helps knock down the sweetness a bit too. The dough is chewy but tastes like banana bread, and then you bite into a big, bitter chocolate chunk and a toasted pecan... wow. The white chocolate chunks are the real sweet spots. Anyway, I think its worth trying the syrup or cutting back the white sugar just to make the contrast within the cookie extra special.

I found a recipe from Auntie Martha (it feels like we are related, anyway) for banana chocolate chip cookies, and then changed it all around. Here's what I came up with:


Banana, Oat, White and Dark Chocolate, Pumpkin Seed, Pecan Cookies

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup oat flour (just grind up some oats in the food processor)
• 1 teaspoon coarse salt (plus more for sprinkling on top of these bad boys)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2 cup brown rice syrup* (or 1/2 cup white granulated sugar)
• 1/2 cup packed light-brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup mashed ripe banana (about 1 large)
• 1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
• 4 ounces semisweet chocolate and 4 ounces good quality white chocolate, coarsely chopped into 1/4-inch chunks (I used disks and didn't chop them up- delightful)
• 1/2 cup coarsely chopped pecans (about 2 ounces), toasted
• 1/4 cup pumpkin seeds, toasted

Mix butter and sugars together in standing mixer until fluffy. At a lower speed, add vanilla and the egg. In a separate bowl, combine AP flour, oat flour, baking soda and salt. Gently combine flour mix with butter mix. Then, also gently add oats, nuts and seeds. I wanted giant, extravagant cookies, so I made my dough balls about the size of clementines. I kept the dough high and tight so that the cookies wouldn't spread out too flat in the baking process. Bake for 12 minutes, turning the pan in the oven half way through in order to evenly bake the cookies. Sprinkle with coarse, flakey salt when they are hot out of the oven.

I just ate two. God help me.

Easter: Not for Sissys

 This year, since I had to work on Easter Sunday, I asked my family if they would be willing to come over to our house and celebrate on Saturday instead. In the end this was a fantastic turn of events because Saturday was sunny, warm (hot at times!) and beautiful from morning until  night. Sunday was a cold and rainy day! We win! Everyone who came brought the most amazing dishes: spring salads (even a rabbit cobb salad prepared with one of Nic's own rabbits), scalloped potatoes with anchovies, asparagus bread pudding, brown bread and tomato gratin (Brown Tom), yogurt cornmeal cake with rhubarb, nutella cups, lemon bars and banana whoopie pies!
Kevin and I prepared all day on Friday (which was also our 4 year anniversary! Yowzas!). I braised a 3 pound lamb shoulder in my tagine for 6 hours with onions, prunes, garlic and meat stock. It was the most tender, succulent meat I have ever tasted. 6 hours in a tagine will do that I guess. We roasted an 18 pound ham with a maple syrup, bourbon, mustard glaze that I don't think we will ever be able to finish. I sauteed tiny new carrots with a similar glaze, adding curry for flair.  For a healthy option I made a bulgar salad with spring peas, plum tomatoes, shallots, and a shiitake mushroom vinaigrette. On Saturday I took the lamb I had braised off and layered it between to two layers of scalloped potato slices, creating a lamb pie called Champvallon. I also tried Smitten Kitchen's recipe for her "Lighter than Air Chocolate Cake" which is a flourless bittersweet take that requires a dozen eggs all separated and whipped forever. Instead of making a plain whipped cream frosting, I followed her directions for a white chocolate mint whipped cream instead. Deeeelightful. It really had a light texture with a deeply dark and barely sweet flavor. The mint was an excellent addition.
Lynne made Smitten's lemon bars- we love Deb so. They are sooo good. I highly recommend trying that recipe if you are in the mood for a lemon bar that is dynamic and lemony, not so sweet it burns the back of your throat.

I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend. Thanks for all the sweet messages about Hiro. Ouch we miss him so much!

Easter Chocolates

I don't know what my grandma is trying to do to me, but I like it. From here on out, I want any gift I am lucky enough to receive to have a note in it that says it is made with heavy cream and needs to be eaten within two weeks. No problem.

Whoppas

Staff meal has been epic lately. This last week we had a southern meal with fried chicken, mashed potatoes, collard greens, cole slaw with fried pigs ears, jello shots, and I made whoppa cookies. Now, I am not sure if whoppa cookies are, in fact, southern because I made them up. But I think southern people are always putting candy in stuff to "make it fancy." Kevin does anyway, and he's fair-weather southern. So, the point is, I made cookies and they were southern in my mind and also very, very good. Because I didn't follow a recipe, they are not perfect. For some examples, they are a little greasy when still hot, the malted milk balls collapsed in the cookies (which ended up being a good thing- they caramelized) and they were very flat. However, I have tweaked the recipe here by adding a bit more flour and reducing the baking soda. Please let me know how it goes for you. I normally might not post this recipe until I got it right, but they are so good even if not puffy and pretty. And I promise I am not avoiding putting a photo up because they fell- I just forgot my camera and I made them at work.


Whoppa Cookies

2 1/2 cups of flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup butter, room temp
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 lb dark semisweet chocolate, melted with 1 T butter
2 cups halved whoppers or malted milk balls

Mix the flour, powedr, soda, and salt in a bowl and set aside. Meanwhile, in a double broiler melt the chocolate with a bit of butter. After it has fully melted remove from heat and set aside. In a standing mixer, beat butter and sugar until fluffy and add the vanilla. Slowly blend in the chocolate, then the flour mixture, the milk, and then the whoppers.
Chill the dough for at least an hour. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper drop healthy spoonfuls of dough 3 inches apart from each other. Bake 10-12 minutes and let cool. They are fantastic on the second day, if stored properly in an air-tight container or wrapped in plastic wrap.

Before AND After

Saturdays are often kind of weird for my eating schedule. I generally go out for brunch and eat so much that I feel sick all day- and so I usually don't eat before I work. But that is a bad idea, and I realize this about 15 minutes before we open, and that is when bar-caddy snack happens. The bar-caddy is the thing that holds the olives, cherries, picked onions and lemon slices for cocktails. Bar-caddy snack is when I get a plate and a spoon and serve myself a little of each, and slice up an orange for good measure. This snack does not make sense on the plate or in my stomach but my brain likes it a lot.

Post shift staff meal was awesome last night- almost as good as the pre. Japanese curry (full of my favorite spice, MSG) with potatoes, rutabaga, peas and asparagus on rice. It was hot and healthy, and paired with a frozen drink. Shane needed to use up some creepy moonshine and a bunch of other toxic spirits, so he blended them in the kitchen blender with ice and some pineapple juice. It was a perfect end to a perfect evening. Wait a minute...

I would like to address a certain behavior that I will not stand for. You see, David is kind enough to make us the most delicious little chocolates to hand out with the check for every table. He puts these adorable little chocolates into adorable little frilly paper cups. In each cup, if you look, there are two chocolates. Or, if you are hostile, defensive and rude, you do not bother to look and immediately attack your server for not giving you the proper number of free gifts. Here is a sample of this kind of behavior from a group of 6 (grumpy, hateful people) that I (disliked) waited on the other night.

Me: Thank you so much for dining with us, here are some salt and pepper chocolates made by our friend David for you to try tonight. It has been a real pleasure!
Customer #1: You only gave us three!
Me (pretending to be cheerful): Well if you look in the little cups you will see there are two chocolates in each cup. Do you really think I would only give you three free chocolates???
Customer #2: What- am I supposed to use a knife to cut them up?
Customer #3: There are ONLY THREE?!
Customer #4: What is the point of this? Why do we have three chocolates?
Customer #5: THIS IS THE WORST NIGHT OF MY LIFE!
Customer #6: WE SHOULD BURN YOU AT THE STAKE!
Me (head tilted, patronizing smile): Like I just said, if you just use your eyes you will notice that there are two FUCKING FREE CHOCOLATES THAT ARE PROBABLY THE BEST CHOCOLATES YOU WILL EVER TRY per cup. What kind of a server do you think I am? Ha ha!"

It's the fact that people immediately assume that I am ripping them off with a free gift that bothers me. We aren't getting our fair portion of free chocolate, damn it! Believe it or not, I am not a mean, cheap con-artist most of the time. I don't understand why I need to prove myself as otherwise.

A Wee Snack

This is a tiny chocolate molten cake made in a mason jar by my new hero. This lady is a baker, a chocolatier and a food stylist. JEALOUS! Plus her website is beautiful. But most importantly, the cake was dreamy. It was so moltenous and delightful, I almost had to cut off Kevin's hand, lest he steal one more bite of it (supposedly we were sharing. Bad idea.). This cake was a gift from my personal chocolate dealer, David. His willingness to allow me to enjoy other chocolates is, I think, very brave. Though he has nothing to worry about- I'm a sucker for bacon caramels (duh) and will never stray. Except for these little cakes. Can you see the tiny glasses of milk looming in the distance? And the tiny spoons? And the elephant tray? Dream snack.