While I wait for my next book to be edited....

Crumbled Mess Tahini Cookies

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STUFF

1 cup tahini (firm, natural variety, such as Artisana)

¾-1 cup melted 片糖 AKA Chinese brown slab candy (estimate it)

¼ cup water

1 cup whole grain pastry flour 

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon egg replacer or 1 tablespoons flax meal

¼ teaspoon sea salt 

ACTIONS

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

Smoosh the tahini into a large-ish bowl. Melt the sugar in the microwave with the water for about one minute. Stir and mash until soft. Add to the tahini. Add the dry items. Stir to combine and finish with your hands by kneading. 

Now you can attempt to roll the dough into balls, whatever size you like. I like about 1-2 tablespoons per ball. If you are unable to roll into balls due to everything being too dry, don’t worry about it. Plop dough in crumbled chucks on your prepared sheet. Bake 10-13 minutes until “done.”

Cool on the sheet. Eat with a tiny ice cream spoon. Really.

Gonna Write Something Different

 Dear Massive Fan Base,

I'm going to write a different kind of book soon. Cookbooks are fun but I have something else percolating. Stay tuned. Or don't.

Some Kind of Garden to Table Bullshit

 Last year, moving to a small town in Skagit County, I had the requisite naïve fantasies about local food garden-to-table grubbings. Well, after some months of angry weeping, I can report that I've had a few "successes." I'll briefly share one with my ever-expanding fan base (Srsly, leave me alone already).

When you harvest the squash too soon because, uh, you cut the vines by mistake

1. Cut the squash off the vines and set aside.

2. Pinch or snip all small (smaller than the palm of your hand) tender unblemished leaves, tiny squash, cute tendrils, flowers, and flower buds off the vine.

2.5 Wash these things carefully, peeps.

3. Cut up a few cloves of garlic.

4. Heat up a sauce pan on medium. Throw in the garlic. Stir and get it to look a bit translucent.

5. Toss in the squash vine bits and bobs.

6. Stir.

.7. Add some vegetable broth, salt, and MSG. 

8. Observe. It is done when the bits and bobs look pleasantly edible to you.

9. Sprinkle on red pepper flakes to taste.

10. Consume with aplomb.

Oopsie

Yummie

Maybe I Should Post Something About Ice Cream

I'll vacuum a few cobwebs from this site and spruce it up for a moment with a new post.

Recently I made some strawberry ice cream. Here's how things went down:

INGREDIENTS

1.5 cups fresh strawberries

1 cup heavy cream

1 cup whole milk

1/2 teaspoon Stevia (or 1/2 cup white sugar for the stevia-phobes)

1/4 teaspoon sea salt

2 Tablespoons vodka

DIRECTIONS

Put it all in a blender and blend until relatively smooth. Pour into your ice cream churn and churn until it looks like a texture you can live with. Spoon into a shallow freezable container and freeze.

I was lazy about the level of blending but it turned out pretty tasty. Obviously I didn't bother to take any good photos but a video of some churning excitement is HERE on my Instagram account. I suppose if you wanted to go vegan with this you could likely use a combination of coconut milk and cashew butter instead of the milk and heavy cream, but I am unsure what the texture would be like. Why don't you try it out and let me know how it goes? 

Slumming It in Hawaii

I recently had an opportunity to work remotely in Hilo, Hawaii. Being the never-ending cheapskate, I opted for a housing situation that was literally a bedroom built on top of a patio between a house and a garage. It did not include a kitchen, but did include a lot of cute geckos as well as a microwave and a toaster oven. It was an amazing opportunity to improvise all kinds of cheap and fun dishes out of local weeds. Here is one of my favorites.

Bitter Gourd (Momordica charantia) Vine Ramen

Ingredients

A generous handful of small Momordica charantia vines, the tenderest ones

1 egg

1 packet spicy ramen such as MaMa

Directions

Wash and chop the vines, set aside.

Microwave the ramen with hot water in a microwave safe bowl. When it's boiling hot, stir in the egg well. Microwave 30-60 seconds longer. Toss in the vines. Stir. 

Consume.

You should eat it

A Random Cookie Recipe for the Blessedly Rainy Day Lazies

 Peanut Insanity Chocolate Chip Cookies

Just came up with this when I wanted cookies last night and wanted to work with what I had on hand. It’s similar to other cookie recipes but the peanut powder (available at health food stores or in bulk online) packs extra peanut protein and flavor. This is not a “less sweet” cookie like some of my other abominations-- it contains plenty of sugar.

INGREDIENTS

Moisty Bits

¼ cup butter, at room temperature

1 cup brown sugar

¼ cup+2 tablespoons peanut butter

1 large egg

¼ cup water

¼ teaspoon liquid stevia

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Dry-y Bits

½ cup peanut powder

1 cup white whole wheat flour

1 tablespoon flax meal

½ teaspoon kosher salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup dark chocolate chips

1 cup ground roasted peanuts (I use Asian style skin-on peanuts but use whatever you want)

DIRECTIONS

Stir together your moisty bits in a big bowl in the order presented. I recommend a hand mixer to ensure even mixture. It will be pretty wet. You need it wet because the peanut powder will absorb a lot of water.

Get your dry-y bits and dump into the moisty bits. Stir to combine nicely but you don’t need to hyper-wild.

Drop in the chocolate chips and peanuts. Stir to combine. It should be a little crumbly but hold together fine when you shape into balls, similar to peanut butter cookies. If it isn't, add a tablespoon of water at a time until you feel pleased with the texture.

When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 375°F. Put balls of dough on a parchment lined cookie sheet in tablespoonfuls, about 1 inch apart. They don’t spread. Flatten so they’re about ½ inch thick or so (if you leave them rounded, the bottoms may burn before the tops are done). Bake about 12-15 minutes or whatever length of time looks right to you in approximately that range when you look at them in the oven. 

Let them cool on the parchment for about ten minutes. Eat several to make sure they’re good. Then move to a cooling rack. Eat more to make sure they're cool.

Dang I forgot to tell you about this ADDITIONAL (FREE) cookbook!

 Do you want to read an awesome cookbook and discover that it has been defiled with one of my own recipes? Check out the 2020 Husky Cookbook!

This is a cookbook written by various members of the UW community to celebrate cultural cuisine/food diversity and healthy eating. If you have a UW NetID you can download it via the above link.

Or you can just look at my own copy here.

Oh, so which recipe is actually in the Husky Cookbook? My Norwegian lefse recipe (also found in Leave Me Alone I Just Wanna Bake This). It can be located on page 30 of the book (page 34 of the PDF).

God appetitt!

Lefse of Doom