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Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

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The best of both worlds.

I love chocolate chip cookies. I also love oatmeal cookies. So what could be better than two cookies in one?

  • 1 cup (2 sticks) margarine or butter. (I admit I usually use margarine, but sometimes I use one stick of each.)
  • 1-1/4 cups firmly packed brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 tablespoons milk
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla
  • 1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt (optional; I include it)
  • 2-1/2 cups uncooked oatmeal. You can use either quick or old fashioned, but I think it tastes better with old fashioned.
  • 1 12-oz package semi-sweet chocolate morsels
  • 1 cup coarsely chopped nuts (optional; I don’t include them)

Heat oven to 375°F. Beat together margarine and sugars until creamy. Add eggs, milk, and vanilla; beat well. Add combined flour, baking soda, and salt; mix well. Stir in oats, chocolate morsels, and nuts; mix well.

Baking instructions when you have time to spare:
Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 9 to 10 minutes for a chewy cookie or 12 to 13 minutes for a crisp cookie. Cool 1 minute on cookie sheet; remove to wire rack.

Baking instructions when you’re busy with other things:
Lay a sheet of wax paper or aluminum foil on the bottom of a standard-sized sheet pan. Spread the batter evenly over the paper, making sure you bring the batter right to the lip of the pan. Bake about 15 minutes or until batter starts to brown. Cool 5 minutes on pan, then lift paper out to flat surface such as a large cutting board. Using downward strokes with a large knife, cut into squares.

Baking instructions when you want to bake it another day:
Using floured hands on a floured surface, roll the batter into one or more log-shaped rolls about 1-1/2 to 2 inches in diameter. Wrap rolls tightly in aluminum foil. Refrigerate up to 2 days. (I’m not sure about freezing this; you might want to give it a try with a small quantity of batter.) When ready to bake, unwrap and slice rolls into 1/2-inch thick slices. Bake on ungreased baking sheet for 10 to 12 minutes.

Cool completely. Store in tightly covered container.

Yields: about 5 dozen cookies (or equivalent bars).

How to Destroy a Perfectly Good Margarita

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It’s the salt.

Last night, Mike and I went out for dinner in Wickenburg. It’s summer here and our choices are limited. More limited than we thought. We’d been planning to eat at House Berlin, the German restaurant. House Berlin makes an excellent walleye and is the only restaurant in town where you can get veal. But a hand-printed sign on the window said “Closed August for Vacation.”

We left the car parked where it was and walked to my second choice that evening. I won’t say which of Wickenburg’s amazing dining choices it was because I need to be critical (again) and I know how sensitive my fellow Wickenburgers can be.

A Short History of the Best Margarita in Wickenburg

The restaurant we went to used to make the second best margarita in town. The first best was at the Santa Fe Cantina, which was also one of the town’s top five restaurants. Santa Fe made the best ribs, too. And the best artichoke dip, which I was fortunate enough to get the recipe for.

But the Santa Fe sold to new owners — who, to their credit, still made those excellent margaritas.

But then they handed it off to their foster son — or at least that’s what I heard — and he decided to change the menu. (Hey, that’s an idea! Take a formula that works in a restaurant that has great following and change it!) He soon drove the place out of business.

So now we had to settle for second best, which, without a real best, becomes the best.

In My Mind: A Nice Cadillac Margarita

I like Cadillac margaritas. That’s a margarita with a shot of Grand Mariner in it. A good Cadillac margarita is the best margarita. Okay, so that’s my opinion, but next time you’re in a place that makes good margaritas, try one and see for yourself.

So when the waitress came, we ordered two Cadillac margaritas. Then we opened the menu to start browsing selections. That’s when I discovered that we were going to pay $8.25 for each drink.

Now I’m accustomed to spending that kind of money for alcohol at resorts and fancy Scottsdale restaurants. In fact, it’s even common for us to blow $10 to $16 a piece on top shelf martinis. But I’ve never spent that kind of money in Wickenburg for any drink — even at the town’s nicest restaurant at its best guest ranch. And the price didn’t include Wickenburg’s exorbitant sales/BB&B tax, which is somewhere around 14% these days — second highest in the state (and proud of it)! The high tax is why quite a few people in WIckenburg are dining out in town a lot less often these days.

But this was a night out after a long week sitting in front of a computer, working on a book. It would be worth the money for a good margarita, no matter where I bought it. At least that’s what I thought.

Reality Strikes — Again

Margarita GlassThen she brought the margaritas. They were in small cocktail glasses, the kind you’d get a scotch on the rocks in. (Most restaurants in Arizona have special margarita glasses. Some of them even have saguaro-shaped stems.) The color was right for the drink, but not for the salt. It was green.

Let me back up a bit. Margaritas are normally served two ways: frozen (as in blended with ice) and on the rocks. Either way, you can have salt around the rim of the glass. They usually use Kosher salt or something similar to it. You can even buy special salt around here in a glass dipping container (shaped like a sombrero — how cute!) to make it easy to salt the rim of your margarita glasses at home. The point is, it’s salt. Plain salt. It isn’t flavored and it certainly isn’t colored.

The salt on our $8.25 margaritas was green.

It was the kind of green you might use on St. Patrick’s day: a bright Kelly green. Not lime colored like you might think reasonable for a margarita.

But I try to have an open mind. (I swear I do.) So I brought the glass up to my lips and sipped my margarita.

At first the taste of something moldy and salty hit my tongue. Then the taste of cheap margarita mix. The tequila may have been in there somewhere, but it couldn’t overpower the moldy salt. And the Grand Mariner was hiding under the ice cubes or somewhere where my tongue couldn’t get it.

I immediately began wiping the salt off my glass. My napkin and fingertips turned bright green. Some of the salt fell into the glass, leaving green streaks as it sank to the bottom. I stopped wiping.

Later, I tried to use the cocktail straw to sip some margarita that hadn’t been tainted by the salt. All I got was a mouth full of warm margarita mix. I guess the bartender didn’t have a shaker. Or maybe he/she was too busy dying salt to mix the drink properly in the first place.

I think — but I’m not sure — that the salt was leftover from St. Patrick’s Day five months before. I also think that the moisture of five months of dipped wet bar glasses got a little mold growing in the container. (Can mold grow on salt?) And I think this mold — or its essence — has become an integral part of the margarita making process at this particular restaurant.

I have to stop writing about this because I’m grossing myself out.

The Rest of the Meal

Mike’s ceviche was spoiled. We sent that back. It should have tipped us off that it wasn’t a particularly popular item when we saw it spelled “saveche” on the menu.

My mole was good. But then again, it tasted just like the mole I can make with a jar of the concentrate from the supermarket. (Because of our Mexican population, the local supermarkets have an excellent selection of Mexican foods.) That means that either the jarred mole is very much like this restaurant’s recipe or they use the same stuff. It didn’t matter much to me. It tasted good.

Mike’s quesadilla looked okay to me, but disappointed him. I think he was expecting a lot of stuff on top, like one of the other local restaurants — the one he wanted to go to last night, I should mention — makes it.

The chips were good, but Mike said the salsa tasted bad. It tasted okay to me and it was nice and chunky, the way I like it. But he got me worried that I was missing something bad, so I didn’t eat much of it.

The Search for the Best Margarita in Wickenburg Begins Again

Anyway, at this point it’s safe to say that if this is now the best margarita in Wickenburg, we’re in a sad state. It’s time to start looking for a new best. I hope I find it — at any price.

And I think Mike will remind me of this meal the next time I suggest dining in that particular restaurant again.

Oat Muesli

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A recipe from the Westin Bay Shore, Vancouver, BC.

I like cereal for breakfast. But I don’t like heavily processed cereals with a lot of mystery ingredients and sugar.

So when I was staying at the Westin in Vancouver last week, I decided to give the muesli item on their breakfast menu a try. One taste and I was hooked. I had it every morning of my stay. And on the last morning, the waitress offered the recipe.

Ingredients:
1 cup uncooked oatmeal (not instant)
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 cup raisins (they used golden raisins)
1/4 cup canned peaches, drained and cut into bite-sized pieces
1 cup (or more) half and half or milk
2 cups fresh fruit like bananas, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries

Instructions:
Mix the first five ingredients in a bowl. Cover and refrigerate overnight. In the morning, right around breakfast time, the oats should have absorbed all of the half and half or milk. In fact, if the resulting mixture is too dry, you can moisten it up a bit by adding more half and half or milk. The raisins will be plump, too. Dish out the mixture and top with the fresh fruit. Enjoy!

One note here: The recipe I got called for a mixture of cream and whole milk. That’s half and half, isn’t it? The waitress also said you can cut calories and fat by using just milk. If you do this, use whole milk — I don’t think lowfat milk would make the result as creamy and rich.

“Quiche”

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A side dish that turned into a main course.

We were going to have steak for dinner. Mike had bought two “beautiful” (I haven’t seen them) rib eyes at Albertson’s on his way home on Wednesday. I needed to make something to go with them and I didn’t feel like a trip to the store.

One thing we always have a lot of these days is eggs. With 8 hens, we normally get 5 to 7 eggs a day. Alex eats an egg every morning and sometimes Mike will have 2 or 3 (they’re generally smaller than average). And I’ll have 1 or 2 once in a while. Otherwise, we wind up giving quite a few away. Basically, if you hand us an empty egg carton, you’ll get it back a short time later with a dozen eggs in it.

I thought about that Bisquick quiche I used to make and tracked down the recipe in my stack of clippings. The recipe called for only 3 eggs; I wanted to use more. And the recipe said nothing about vegetables; I had a bunch in the freezer that I wanted to use up. So I improvised. The following is my approximate recipe; it actually turned out quite good. And when Mike got home with a headache, we had the quiche for dinner so he didn’t have to go out in the heat to grill the steaks.

Ingredients

  • 5 eggs. Remember, mine are small; if you buy large or jumbo eggs, 4 would probably be enough.
  • 1/2 cup Bisquick
  • 1/4 cup melted butter. The recipe called for 1/2 cup, but I think that’s too way much. It makes the final product greasy.
  • 1/2 cup milk. The recipe called for 1-1/2 cups, but I wanted to get rid of eggs, not milk.
  • 2-3 cups frozen (or fresh) chopped vegetables. I used asparagus, chopped spinach, and a potato/onion/pepper blend. I let them defrost for about a half hour on the countertop before I mixed them in.
  • 1/2 cup shredded cheese. The recipe calls for a full cup, but I thought that was too much. Also the recipe calls for cheddar, but I didn’t have cheddar so I used Havarti with dill.

The recipe also called for bacon, but since we were going to eat it with steak, I left that out.

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, beat eggs.
  2. Mix in the Bisquick, melted butter, and milk. Stir until blended.
  3. Add the vegetables and stir well.
  4. Pour the mixture into a lightly greased pie pan. (I used olive oil spray to spray the bottom of the pan before I poured the mixture in.)
  5. Sprinkle the cheese over the top of the mixture.
  6. Bake for 30 to 45 minutes at 350°F. Quiche is done when it begins to brown and crack along the top.
  7. Eat while hot.

The magic of this recipe is that the Bisquick automatically creates its own crust. And, between the olive oil spray and the butter in the mix, it did not stick to my glass pie pan. It made a nice meal.

Vichyssoise

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Another cold soup.

Mike and I got on the cold soup kick the other day when I made gazpacho. We decided to try a few different cold soups for dinner, leaving the big meal of the day to lunch time (when it really should be eaten).

So I got online and did a Google search for cold soup recipes. I wound up on a page at allrecipes.com with a list of cold soups. I printed off a few recipes that sounded good. But the one I decided to try first was for vichyssoise, a leek and potato soup. The recipe was submitted to the site by Derek Parker and had a rating of 5 out of 5 stars.

The soup was quick and easy to make. I followed the recipe quite closely and was rewarded with an extremely tasty soup. We had it for dinner last night and I just had a little post-lunch snack of some more.

If you try this recipe, serve it with a crusty bread, like a loaf of French bread. That’s the only thing it needed to make a perfect summer meal.