James' Kick "A" Math Lemonade

We'll call this a "guest post" from my husband. I'll just write exactly what he has on his little white index card ...

James' Kick "A" Math Lemonade

(cause you can't find a lemon conversion factor or a gallon recipe)

13 cups of water

2 2/3 cups lemon juice or 8 lemons

1 1/2 - 2 cups sugar

Put cold tap water in empty Gatorade container, add sugar & swoosh around, put in lemon juice, add ice & call it good enough.

Random notes on the back ...

~17.41 cups

74% water

15% lemon juice

10% sugar

1% unknown (cat hair)

for 8 cups: 5.92 cups water, 1.2 cups lemon, .8 cups sugar

3 water, 2/3 lemon, 1/2 sugar

Tar Heel Pie

Sometime during my time in North Carolina I picked up this post card ...

I originally grabbed it because I really like Southern Kitsch, but part of me also thought that that pie actually looked darn good.

It must not be a very popular recipe because I never actually had it in the 21 months I was there, but I did make it some time after I got home, and Oh. My. Goodness. It is incredible. AND ridiculously easy (which convinces me it must be a TRUE Southern recipe.)

I stumbled on an accidental variation while making it, too. If you pour the butter over the chocolate chips while it's really warm (like the recipe says to) the chocolate melts and makes this rich fudgey, gooey sort of filling. 

OR ...

If you melt the butter and add all the other ingredients first, it cools the concoction down so when you add the chocolate chips they don't lose their shape. The finished pie ends up being much more like a giant chocolate chip cookie.

I'm not sure I have a favorite way of making it. They're both totally different and totally scrumptious.

Tar Heel Pie

1 cup chocolate chips

1 stick of butter (melted)

1 cup chopped pecans

1 tsp. vanilla

1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

2 eggs (beaten)

Pour warm butter over chocolate chips and stir. Blend all remaining ingredients and stir into chocolate chip mixture. Pour into an unbaked pie shell. 

***or a graham cracker or oreo crust - if you buy those ones that come with the disposable pan it's REALLY easy - No Clean Up!*** 

Bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes. 

(From the kitchen of Mary Baker.)

Hello Dolly Cookies

 

If I had to pick one recipe as our biggest family tradition, I would have to say Hello Dolly Cookies would be it. The first time I remember having them I was 4. It was Christmas Eve night and my Grandparents had just driven down from their new home in Lake Tahoe. It was definitely past my bedtime but my parents let me stay up to wait for Gramma and Grampa to get there. Somehow even after a 2 1/2 hour drive in the middle of winter, my Gramma managed to keep them warm and gooey. I got to open a present and eat a Hello Dolly Cookie square before bed.

*For the rest of my life, THAT would be what Christmas would taste like.*

I arrived in North Carolina as a missionary in November, 2002. It didn't take long before the standard missionary question I seemed to get from folks was,

"What holiday traditions does your family have???"

"Uhhhh ..."  I kinda drew a blank. Traditions? I don't know, we just did the same thing as everybody else, right?

My companion had this great story about a Dutch tradition her family does where they have rice pudding for dessert and someone has an almond hidden in their pudding. Whoever finds the almond gets a prize.

She was making me look bad.

So then I started telling people about Hello Dolly Cookies and that seemed to satisfy them. Whenever we were invited to someone's house for the holidays I always managed to squeeze in the little bit of time it takes to make these.

Once, on my mission another missionary called us to ask if we had any easy cookie recipes that they could handle making. They had an investigator that was sick and they wanted to do something nice for her. They were greeted by my trainer's standard answer of  "Sisters DON'T bake."

While I agreed with her philosophy, and taught it to my future trainees, I also taught them when to bend that rule, and this was one of those times. The elders managed to pull it off, and I heard they ended up making many more batches.

They called them "Sister Bebo's Bomb-Diggety Cookies."

Hello Dolly Cookies

1 cube butter

1 cup graham cracker crumbs

1 cup chopped walnuts

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

1 cup flaked coconut

1 15oz can sweetened condensed milk

Melt butter in 10x12 pan. (It really doesn't matter what size - smaller makes them thicker, bigger makes them thinner, I wouldn't go bigger than 9x13 without doubling the recipe, though) 

Make sure butter covers entire bottom of pan.

Sprinkle with graham cracker crumbs evenly.

Top with layer of walnuts, then chocolate chips, then coconut.

Pour sweetened condensed milk evenly over the top.

Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

Cilantro Pesto ... or Love in a Jar

Did I mention I have a husband that loves cilantro? A jar of this bright green goo was my gift to him for our first Married-Person-Valentine's Day. We lived in a cute little old blue house. Maybe "cottage" would be a more accurate word? It had one bedroom, old wooden floors, and was heated with a wood stove - that's pretty much the definition of a cottage, right? It was heaven to us at the time. We were both working and going to school, busy with church callings, and didn't have much money to speak of. I lucked out and stumbled on this recipe, which was probably about the best gift I could have given him. He treated it the way I would have a jar of fudge hiding in the fridge. He couldn't walk by it without grabbing a spoonful (or finger-full.) I tied the jar with a little lavender ribbon leftover from one of our wedding presents, and it always migrated to that spot in the fridge that you see as soon as you open the door.

Cilantro Pesto ... or Love in a Jar

3 cups firmly packed cilantro leaves (no stems)

1 1/2 cups slivered almonds, toasted

1 1/2 cups shredded parmesan cheese

2 Tbsp. lime juice

3/4 tsp. salt (or to taste)

3 green onions

4 small cloves of garlic

2 small jalapeno peppers, stemmed

1 1/2 cups extra virgin olive oil

Combine all ingredients except oil in a food processor and blend until finely chopped. With the motor running, slowly add oil in a thin stream. Spoon into decorative jars and keep refrigerated.

Makes 3 1/2 cups

Nutrition per 2 tsp serving: 160 calories, 3 g. protein, 16 g. total fat (3 g. sat., 0 g. trans), 2 g. carbohydrate, 1 g. fiber, 

0 g. sugar, 5 mg cholesterol, 160 mg sodium, 4 points

Macaroons



Can you tell I'm kinda lazy in the kitchen? Recipes get 5 stars from me if they're #1 Easy, and #2 Taste Good (in that order.) The whole reason I love this macaroon recipe is that it is SO stinkin' easy. Have you looked at macaroon recipes lately? When a recipe is complicated enough to require me to separate an egg white, I usually just stop reading because I know it's gonna go downhill from there.

I found this recipe in a book we got from the library called The Kids' Multicultural Cook Book. This macaroon recipe is supposed to be from India. (???) We'll go with that.

Macaroons

1/2 cup Flour

4 cups Shredded Coconut

1 can Sweetened Condensed Milk

1 tsp Vanilla Extract

Grease a cookie sheet (who am I kidding? I don't bake anything on a cookie sheet without putting down a layer of foil first.) and preheat oven to 325. 
Mix ingredients in order listed. Drop by teaspoonful 2 in. apart. 
Bake at 325 for 15 minutes. (Makes about 2 dozen.)

Ridiculously easy, no? James loves these because they're like my Hello Dolly Cookies except without those pesky chocolate chips.

Peach Sugar Jam

The Summer Jonas was born Annelie gave me the best gift ever and stayed with us until Fall. We saw a sign that the orchard down the street was selling their end-of-the-season peaches for $10 a lug. I had no idea how much a lug was, but it sounded like a good deal, and since the new impossibility of being a mother of TWO children was weighing heavily on my mind, I figured I'd better take my opportunity to make some jam while I had an extra pair of hands.



Since then, I've discovered the magic of Pomona's Pectin and I always make my jam without sugar. But this peach jam turned out fabulous, so if I ever find myself without Pomona's on hand, this will be my go-to recipe.

Here's Sam enjoying licking the pan of fudge my new-mommy-lactating-queen-hormones required me to make at the same time.

Good thing I don't put sugar in my jam anymore, huh?



Peach Sugar Jam

Combine 6 cups Chopped and Peeled Peach Chunks with 3 cups Sugar. Cook over Med/High heat stirring constantly. When fruit starts bubbling, add 1 Tbsp. Butter. When it gets to a rolling boil that can't be stirred down, add Low/No Sugar Pectin. Stir for 1 full minute. Turn off heat, fill those jars, and process in a water bath. My batch made 3 3/4 pints.

This recipe is those 3 golden-colored pint jars on the left.

Those tiny little dark-colored ones were plum-cranberry jam.

The other orangey-colored pint jars were a different recipe using yellow peaches 
(all the peach chunks floated to the top.)

Those big quart jars are white peaches in light syrup,

and the rest of the peachy-colored jars are white peach cranberry jam. 

My Special Cookies

When I got to be about 12 (and then throughout my teenage years) I really got into cooking. Well, not so much cooking, mostly baking. I come from a long line of sweet-toothed gals.

My poor Mom. I wasted A LOT of ingredients. I seriously had no idea that Baking Chocolate was different than Nestle Quick. And I remember being SO intrigued when I found a recipe for Mrs. Field's Cookies that called for "Soda."
"So THAT'S her secret ingredient!"
I remember deliberating on whether to use Pepsi or Sprite.

But I'm pretty sure my mom forgave me for all my flops and messes and wasted ingredients because sometimes I struck gold. She's got just as big a sweet tooth as me, and she certainly didn't have any time for baking those days so all her hopes rested with me.

I've never been one to follow a recipe very strictly. I can always think of a way to make it better. Even then, my search for the perfect cookie recipe led me to mash up my own Frankenstein version that my Mom is convinced are the best cookies on earth. Could there BE a better compliment than that?

My Special Cookies

1 1/4 cups Butter (2 1/2 Sticks room temp)

3/4 cups Packed Brown Sugar

1/2 cup Sugar

1 Egg

1 tsp. Vanilla

1 1/2 cups Unsifted Flour

1 tsp. BAKING Soda (Not Pepsi)

1/2 tsp. Salt

2 cups Uncooked Oatmeal

1 12oz. Bag Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips

1 Cup Peanut Butter

1 Cup Coconut

1/2 - 1 cup Chopped Nuts (I always used Walnuts)

Bake at 375 10-15 minutes

They make a GREAT breakfast!