Ingredients

Most of these are just guidelines, do whatever you like. Add raisons, dried cranberries, different kinds of seeds…

• 1cup Unsweetened, unsalted, smooth peanut butter
• 1cup Shredded coconut
• 3/4cup Raw honey
• 2tbsp Cocoa powder
• 1/4cup Hemp heart seeds
• 1/2cup Roasted unsalted pumpkin seeds
• 1/2cup Sesame seeds

Yield: About 16 balls
Calories per ball: Approximately 226

Steps

1. Mix together honey, cocoa powder, and peanut butter
2. Add other ingredients one by one, mixing in. (Not the sesame seeds though! Leave ‘em out)
3. Roll mixture into balls with your hands, & then coat with the sesame seeds
4. Put in tupperware and pop in fridge (or freezer if you’re in a hurry) to harden
5. Enjoy!

Here’s a crappy iphone photo…

Ingredients needed

• 3/4 cup margerine (1.5 squares)
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 2 cups white all-purpose flour

(of these three additions, you can do a little more of one if you want. Like maybe 1 cup chocolate chips, 1/2 butterscotch, 1/2 walnuts. Or 1 cup walnuts 1/2 chocolate, 1/2 butterscotch. Whatever.)

• 1/2 cup chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup butterscotch chips
• 1/2 cup walnuts

Instructions

Preheat oven to 325°

Melt margarine in microwave. Mix in the sugars, vanilla, and eggs.

Add baking powder and salt.

Add flour, one cup at a time, fully mixing in between cups.

Add the walnuts, chocolate and butterscotch chips.

Roll into balls, placing on baking sheet.

Bake for about 14 mins.

I will try to do something different in the near future, before I drive everyone away with my obsessing.

But for now, here’s another one.

I don’t know if they should be called cookies or if they should be called biscuits – they have a thick texture and are spongy like cake. They aren’t too sweet or heavy.

They are a very ‘adult’ tasting cookie.

Nutritional Information per Cookie

• Makes about 34 cookies

Honey is much higher in calories than processed sugar (1 cup of honey = 1031; 1 cup sugar = 774). So even though I feel like using honey is ‘healthier’ and more natural, it is higher in calories!

• Calories: 151.3
• Sugars: 13.8 g
• Carbs: 24.2 g

I ate so freaking many of these while I was making them. Baking is dangerous.

Wet Ingredients

• 1 cup butter
• 1.5 cups honey
• 2 eggs
• 1.5tsp vanilla extract

Dry Ingredients

• 4 cups of flour
• .25 cup of granulated sugar
• 1tsp baking soda
• 1tsp ground ginger
• 1stp ground cinnamon
• .5tsp ground nutmeg
• Feel free to fudge around with the spices. I don’t think you could go wrong by adding quite a bit more of something if you have a flavour preference!

Step One: Mix honey, sugar, and butter on stovetop

The most annoying part of the whole recipe – in a saucepan over a low heat stove, melt butter into honey and sugar. Stir with wooden spoon while it melts.

Once it’s done melting, put the saucepan aside to cool and move on to step two.

Step Two: Add everything but the flour

In a large bowl add the eggs, baking soda, ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Whisk together and then pour your honey mixture over it.

Step Three: Add Flour

Add flour one cup at a time, mixing in fully between cups.

Step Four: Bake

I rolled my cookies into balls before placing on the pan. As you can see from the finished product, there are two looks – the round ones and the jagged ones. The jagged ones were not rolled into balls because at first I was scared that the dough would be super sticky from all the honey and didn’t want it all over my hands. Hint: It wasn’t.

Bake at 350° for about ten minutes. Keep an eye on them – they’re easy to mess up if you put them in for too long or too short.

Step Five: Eat

Best served with a hot pot of tea.

Warning: I am calling these cookies, but they are only mildly sweet. They are not a dessert cookie, and they are definitely not meant to be eaten alone. Eat with tea or don’t eat at all.

The roast I ended up using was freaking HUGE.

It cost $14.00 and it was so distastefully enormous that we didn’t even really want to waste money on it, but it was the only roast available and we’d already somehow gotten into this mindset that we were doing a roast, goddamnit, if it was the last thing we ever did, so we bought it.

(I wish I could take fabulous recipe photos like some people do. I don’t understand! It’s nighttime and we just have our crappy kitchen lighting. How do people do it?!)

So here’s what I ended up doing:

Ingredients

• Really enormous top round roast.
• 2 potatoes
• 3 carrots
• A bunch of garlic
• An onion
• Pepper
• Thyme/Rosemary
• Olive Oil

This is not where my problems ended, by the way. I only had a thyme/rosemary/basil/oregano mixed bag of herbs, so I just sort of scrunched up my eyes and sprinkled it all on.

And we don’t own a proper baking dish because one of us (let’s pretend it was Ben, although I honestly can’t remember) dropped it at one point not too long ago and it shattered, so I used my glass dish that I usually use for baking dessert bars.

I know, off to a great start, right?

The procedure

• Preheat the oven to 475°
• Take the enormous roast out of the fridge about half an hour ahead of time. I chopped the veggies & did the dishes while it sat.
• Chop onions, carrots, potatoes and throw ‘em in your pan. You can just do big manly chunks, no fine chopping required. Very fun.
• Throw a bunch of garlic cloves in there too. I peeled mine but Jamie Oliver seems to think that you don’t have to. Peeled was good, though. Peeled was very good.
• Drizzle liberally with olive oil, toss in some rosemary & thyme.
• The roast goes on top of all this. Drizzle it also and grind some pepper on it too.
• Turn the oven down to 400° and put the pan in.

I cooked my roast for 2 hours. Obviously the length of time depends on the size. I checked on it every half hour and sprinkled on more olive oil. I also poured in about .75 of a cup of water at two different intervals when the veggies started looking dry. I don’t think you’re supposed to do TOO much water, though.

Once you’re done cooking the roast, let it sit out for about fifteen minutes before you eat it.

How was it?

Unearthly. Very very good. The veggies were especially fabulous, so well cooked that they were almost sweet but not quite. The meat was less shockingly good, but it was well-done and could have maybe even been a bit rarer. It wasn’t burned or tough. It also wasn’t fall-apart tender, though. Don’t know if this is possible with roast beef or not.

I made some Yorkshire puddings to go with it from a pre-made mix (just combined with egg and water and bake for 18 minutes. Not too exciting or hard.)

Really awesome dinner. I recommend it for sure, although it does take a lot of patience and checking up on things.

1. Plain, unsweetened & unflavoured yogurt.
2. Honey (not creamed honey, just pure honey.)

So. Good. I couldn’t believe it. It’s my new favourite thing in the world.

I do about 3 or 4 spoonfuls of yogurt in a bowl and then 3/4 spoon of honey, which I swirl around. The honey tends to stick to the spoon so I will eat the yogurt off the spoon but never chomp down on the whole thing (so that I don’t get too much honey in my mouth at once.)

It’s amazing, go do it now.

P.S. – U like my cheesy photo frame?

SO.

I tried out Pastor Ryan’s Chicken Tikka Masala (photo below credited to original recipe page).

I would like to mention first that the grocery bill came to $40, which is kind of horrendous. We could have eaten out for that price.

Here are the things I had to buy that I didn’t already have in the house:

• Garam Masala spice
• Yogurt
• Heavy Cream
• Frozen Peas
• Cilantro (we buy cilantro regularly but it’s not something I usually have extras of kicking around)
• Chili Peppers
• Tumeric
• Ginger (ditto the cilantro)
• Onion (ditto again)
• Diced tomatoes (ditto!!)
• Chicken

Spoiler: It was not as amazing as I imagined it was going to be.

First of all, I ended up making some changes as I went along because it became clear that there were a couple of issues.

1. Too much cream, not enough tomato. I ended up only using a cup of cream, instead of a cup & a half, and I also ended up adding an extra can of diced tomatoes. I don’t know, maybe some people can handle it super creamy and I know it’s supposed to be creamy..but the idea of any more cream just made me feel gross.
2. Not nearly spicy enough! I added way more chili peppers than mentioned in the recipe – 6 or 7 as opposed to 1 (and I probably could have done more), AND I ended up adding some cayenne pepper to kick it up to an acceptable spice level.
3. I also added in some cherry tomatoes because we had some extras in the fridge.

It tasted fine. We ate it, it was pretty good, we’ll probably have the leftovers for lunch tomorrow (there are tons of leftovers), so that’s all good.

BUT. We spent a lot of money! And time! And when all was said and done, the sauce tasted basically just like the canned sauce you can get in the grocery store! (Which is WAY cheaper and way less effort.)

It was not the miracle sauce I was expecting from the description.

This isn’t to say that I don’t love Indian food, because I do. But I still have yet to find a really good curry recipe. They all just don’t quite taste the same as they do in Indian restaurants. I don’t know why. I had high hopes for this one but it failed me.

So do I recommend this recipe? I don’t know. It’s not BAD. It’s totally decent. But I don’t think I’ll try it again.

• The recipes seem pretty foolproof. I haven’t had a bad experience yet!
• The instructions are clear and reasonably simple.
• There are lots of recipes that I am interested in & that fit my tastes.

So far I’ve tried (and loved):

• French Onion Soup
• Chicken Tacos
• Sweet Potato and Sausage Soup

But! I don’t want to be stuck with only one source for recipes, so if you guys know of any other fabulous recipe blogs, please send me links in the comments.

Links People have given me in the comments and elsewhere since this post was published:

• Jamie Oliver
• Oh She Glows
• Punch Fork
• Quarter Life Crisis Cusine
• The Pioneer Woman Cooks

Thanks for all the links! You guys really came up with some awesome ones

Photo and Recipe: Smitten Kitchen (I am in love with Smitten Kitchen these days, it seems…)

Tried this recipe last night since it was cold and wet and miserable outside. Turned out awesome! I only made a half-size, so 3 cups of onions instead of 5, and 4.5ish cups of beef broth instead of 8. I skipped the brandy and only used a quarter cup of white wine.

I didn’t bother with the bread topping – we just baked some garlic bread in the oven instead and dipped it in the soup.

Anyway, I highly recommend this recipe!

You Will Need

This may seem like a lot but it really wasn’t – I already had everything in my kitchen with the exception of the blueberries.

Wet ingredients

• 1 stick (1/2 cup) margarine/butter, melted
• 1 egg
• dash of vanilla extract
• 1 lemon
• 1cup (ish) Plain Yogurt – I added a bit more than 1 cup; it’s sort of a loose guideline.
• 3/4 cups of white sugar
• 1/4 cup of brown sugar

Dry ingredients

• A bit of raw sugar, for sprinkling on top (optional but totally worth it.)
• 3 cups minus 2 tablespoons flour (I know, this was annoying for me to measure but I stole this part from a different recipe & didn’t want to deviate…)
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• pinch of salt
• dash of nutmeg
• 2ish cups of blueberries

Prep

• Preheat oven to 385°
• Muffins take about 20 minutes to bake
• Made 17 muffins for me, so expect around that number.
• Nutritional Information per muffin:
  • 148 Calories
  • 34g carbs
  • 19g of sugar
  • 1g fat
  • 1g protein

Step One – Wet Ingredients

Melt butter in microwave and then add all wet ingredients & mix together.

For the lemon, grate the skin to get that delicious lemon zest & then cut the lemon in half. I squeezed half the lemon juice into the wet ingredients & saved the other half to use with something else.

Step Two – Dry Ingredients

Mix together dry ingredients with the exception of the blueberries.

Step Three – Merge!

Add dry to wet, stir together with as few stirs as possible. If you find the batter is tough, you can add a dash of milk to moisten it. Then add the blueberries – try to mix them in gently without breaking them open.

Step Four – Bake

Scoop spoonfuls of the mixture into a muffin pan. Sprinkle top of each muffin with raw sugar, and maybe squish in a few blueberries on top if you have extras. I baked mine for about 20 minutes, although it could take a bit longer.

You might want to try…

If you love lemony taste, I would recommend more lemon. I think if I were to make these muffins again (I probably will!) I would definitely use a touch more lemon.

Recipe

2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
a dash of cinnamon & nutmeg
1 cup shredded coconut
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
zest of three large lemons
6 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup sugar for rolling cookies

Cream sugar with butter, add egg and other wet ingredients. Mix together dry ingredients separately, then add them together.

Roll cookies in sugar before placing on pan.

Bake at 350° for about ten minutes.

Complaints

• Not enough coconut flavour. I think it maybe needs something like coconut cream.
• They’re not chewy. They’re nice and soft and fine to eat, but they don’t have that delicious chewy quality.
• Overall, I’d say that these cookies are good, and they are definitely lemony, but they lack a certain X factor. I think cocoa powder and a stronger coconut flavour would really kick them up a notch. Next time!

Edited to say – I’ve kind of come around to these cookies. Ben really likes them and they’re nice and light. Still wish they were more coconutty, though!