Survival cookies

When I put up the recent post on making strawberry preserves, a reader asked why I canned it up in quart jars instead of pints.

Short answer: Just about the only thing we use strawberry preserves for is as a filling for so-called "survival cookies."

Back in our old home, these incredibly delicious filled oatmeal sandwich cookies made the rounds among our group of homeschooling moms. They became dubbed "survival cookies" because they require no fresh ingredients and can be made completely with dried or preserved ingredients.

Because I tend to make survival cookies in large (quadruple) batches at a time, using a quart of strawberry preserves is not unusual.

I thought I'd walk you through my latest batch of survival cookies. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients
• 1 1/2 cup shortening, lard, or butter (I prefer shortening)
• 1 1/2 cup brown sugar (or half brown, half white sugar)
• 1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda mixed with 6 tablespoons hot water
• 3 cups oatmeal (thick or thin cut)
• 3 cups flour (may use white or whole wheat – I use half-and-half)
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 1/2 teaspoon salt

• Filling (we use strawberry preserves, but use whatever your family enjoys)

Directions
Preheat oven to 350F. Blend shortening, sugar, and vanilla. Add baking soda (in water), nutmeg, and salt. Mix in the flour. Using a stout spoon, stir in the oatmeal by hand (do NOT try to use a mixer for this step, as the dough is too stiff). Stir the dough until it’s thoroughly mixed.

Flour a large breadboard or other surface. Roll the dough thin. Cut with a round cookie or biscuit cutter (I use a clean tuna can). Stack the round cutouts aside until the dough is used up.

Lay the rounds on a cookie sheet and place one teaspoon of the desired filling in the center (dollop it, don’t spread it). Lay another cutout over the top to make a “sandwich.” It is not necessary to seal the edges.

Bake at 350F for 10 to 15 minutes (depending on your oven) until lightly brown. Do not overbake.

Tips
• The cookies do not expand while baking, so they can be (reasonably) crowded on the baking sheet.

• The dough is sticky during the rolling and cutting process. Be very liberal with the use of flour on the breadboard, rolling pin, and dough surface.

• Use a spatula to lift the raw dough cutouts so they won’t tear.

• Because rolling and cutting the cookie dough can be labor intensive, I usually quadruple the recipe and make an enormous batch at once. The recipe multiplies well and surplus cookies freeze beautifully.

• If you’re feeling extra fancy, drizzle a little frosting (powdered sugar + milk) over the baked cookies.

Steps:

Rolling and cutting the dough:

Stacking the cut rounds aside:

Darcy parked under the table, hoping something drops:

All the rounds from a quadruple batch, cut and stacked:

By the time I finished cutting the rounds, it was too late in the day to bake, so I slid two-gallon Ziploc bags over the baking sheets for the night (to keep the dough from drying out);

Dollops of strawberry preserves on the lower layer of the cookies:

Cookies sandwiched and ready to bake:

Enjoy!

My new favorite broccoli recipe

As many readers know, I love broccoli. I mean, I seriously love broccoli.

I've had this veggie prepared in endless ways, but Older Daughter introduced me to a method of roasting it which has become my new favorite recipe.

It starts with cutting up the heads...

...until you have enough for the meal's requirement.

To this, add olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, Panko bread crumbs, and Parmesan cheese (shredded, not grated).

Add these ingredients in whatever proportions you prefer, and mix thoroughly.

Then spread the veggies on a baking sheet. Some of the mixture will have sifted to the bottom of the bowl, so spoon this over the top of the broccoli.

This particular baking sheet belongs to our toaster oven, which I use for roasting.

Set the temperature to 400F for 20 minutes.

And voilà: The best roasted broccoli I've ever had.

Bon appétit!

Spaghetti squash bonanza

We have a bonanza of spaghetti squash in the garden. The plants had a second wind in late summer, which means many of the younger squash aren't ripe (I'll pick them and try ripening them off the vine, but I'm not overly hopeful). However the ripe squash are abundant and ready to pick.

Older Daughter has a delicious recipe she uses with spaghetti squash, which includes pesto and pork sausage, but I wanted to try making a sort of veggie fettuccine alfredo. (I adore fettuccine alfredo.)

So I started by picking a nice ripe squash.

I cut this in half and scraped out the seeds (as it turns out, I missed a few).

I sprinkled a bit of salt over the face of the squash, then put them face-down on a pan.

These I baked in the oven (actually, our toaster oven) at 400F for about an hour.

While it baked, I made an alfredo sauce (butter, cream, Parmesan cheese), to which I also added some basil. It's worth noting the only ingredients of this dish that didn't come from our own efforts were the salt and the Parmesan cheese.

The squash came out of the oven tender, though I had missed a few seeds I had to scrape off afterward.

Using a fork, I scraped the "pasta" fibers from the squash into a bowl.

Then it was a simple matter of pouring the aldredo sauce over the squash fibers.

Easy-peasy and very yummy!

As I ease back into cheesemaking, Parmesan is something I've always wanted to try. That way – excepting salt – this meal could become an entirely home-grown affair.

UPDATE: I asked Older Daughter for her Pesto Spaghetti Squash recipe, and here's what she said:

• 2 spaghetti squash, split and deseeded. Coat with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and bake face-down on an oiled cookie sheet at 400F for one hour. After baking, scrape out the squash "pasta" with a fork. To this, add:
• 1/4 cup of pesto (or to taste)
• Parmesan cheese mixed in (to taste)
• Onions, sautéed until soft (this is for me)
• OR, cherry tomatoes, sautéed until soft (this is for Older Daughter)
• 1/2 lb. spicy Italian sausage, cooked until brown

Mix everything together, and voilà.

Croutons to die for

Up until this point, we (the Lewis household) have been fairly lazy when it came to croutons. Normally I buy them bulk from Winco on my once- or twice-a-year excursions into the city to stock up on bulk items from the big box stores. Well, stocking up on bulk items is pricey, and since February's job loss, we just don't want to spend the money.

But we were out of croutons, so Don took it upon himself to make some. They're easy-peasey to make, so I don't know why it never occurred to us to do this earlier. Go figure.

Anyway, when he's ready to make a batch, Don asks me to make a loaf of French bread (which I do with the bread machine).

He lets the loaf sit for a couple of days to "harden up," then cuts it into roughly one-inch cubes.

These are his ingredients: Olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, and Parmesan cheese.

He mixes everything together...

...and adds it to the bread cubes.

Adding the oil mixture to the bread cubes is a patient process. He drizzles a little over the top, then tosses the cubes to bring up the bottom cubes. Drizzle, toss. Drizzle, toss. Rotate the bowl. Drizzle, toss. He goes through this process about six times until the mixture is used up.

Then he spreads the bread cubes on cookie sheets...

...and bakes them at 375F for 13 to 15 minutes (or until slightly browned).

He lets the croutons cool completely, then bags and freezes them.

One loaf makes about 1.75 lbs. of croutons.

In theory – in theory, mind you – croutons are for salads and other savory dishes. In reality, however, these have become our New Favorite Snack. Seriously, we'll decant a small bowlful from the freezer bag and crunch on them by themselves. They are ridiculously delicious.

Speaking of crunching, Don crunched the numbers and compared homemade croutons with store-bought ones, keeping in mind we buy all ingredients in bulk. The homemade ones are about half the cost of bulk store-bought croutons – and twice as good.

Here's the recipe he uses. Since one loaf of our homemade bread makes about 12 cups of cubes, he quadruples the recipe. (He also doubles the amount of garlic, 'cuz we love garlic.)

I don't know why it took us so long to make our own, but there you go. Seriously, we're never going back to store-bought croutons ever again.

Yule log cake

Older Daughter decided she wanted to try making a yule log cake. She got the recipe here.

She mixed the dry ingredients...

...separate from the wet ingredients.

This is for the cake part.

Whipping egg whites.

Folding the egg whites into the mixture.

This is the part she wasn't sure about. She lined a tray with parchment paper, and poured the cake mixture to make a thin cake.

It baked beautifully.

The next tricky part was rolling the hot cake and then letting it cool.

While the cake cooled, she made the icing (ganache) that would go over it, starting with breaking up a bar of baking chocolate.

She added the chocolate to hot cream.

Then she whisked it until it was smooth.

Next was the filling, which consisted of whipped cream, mascarpone cheese, and a bit of powdered sugar for sweetener. (The filling was out-of-this-world delicious.)

When the cake was cool, she very carefully unrolled it...

...and spread it with the filling.

After this, the cake is re-rolled.

Not bad!

But wait, it gets better. The next step is to cut off a chunk of the end, at an angle.

The rough end is then "glued" with the ganache against the main part of the cake to make a "branch." (This is a yule log, after all.)

The ganache was thick and dry, almost crumbly, to resemble bark. It took some work to get it onto the cake roll.

After this, the ganache is kind of "scored," again to resemble tree bark.

She added a snippet of cedar, just to make it festive.

She said the one thing she did wrong was not to relocate the cake onto a platter before frosting it, since once it's frosted, it's almost impossible to move.

But other than that, it was a splendid first attempt. I'm not a huge chocolate fan, but even I thought this project was just delicious.

An excellent Christmas baking project. Next time, she said she might try making an "alder tree" by making a vanilla (instead of chocolate) cake. Yum!