Almond Butter & Dark Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Two cookies diverged in a burst of baking inspiration,

And sorry I could not bake both

And be the baker of two kinds, long I stood

And looked at one as hard as I could

Wondering if it would inspire cookie-baking growth;

Then took the other cookie, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was peanut buttery and warranted care;

Though as for that the flavors there

Had appealed to me really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay Almond butter, or peanut butter – what to choose – ack!

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two cookies diverged in my mind, and I--

I took the one less popular by,

And that made all the difference.

With that, I won't post again until after New Year's, so have a good one - and see you in 2008!

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

Hey, if Oprah can have her favorite things, why not me? I've decided to pick out a few, every-day favorite food-things to share with you. These are all foods that I always have around the house; foods that fit my solo-dwelling lifestyle perfectly and that I enjoy on a regular basis. Oh, I won't be giving all of you a free supply of any of these foods...I'm definitely no Oprah in that respect.

My first favorite thing is Whole Foods Buzz-Free Decaffeinated Coffee. How can one love decaf, you ask? I cut out caffeine about 5 years ago and never looked back, and with this rich, decadently delicious decaf offering, why should I? Sometimes I secretly replace my friends' regular coffee with this stuff and they can't tell the difference....well, at least until their monster headache hits a few hours later. But taste-wise, it's as good as the "real" stuff.

I love these individually-wrapped potatoes from Melissa's. They stay fresher longer, and are easy to "bake" in the microwave. I'll often have a piece of fish, some salad and one of these for a satisfying and healthy dinner. Five minutes in the microwave and I've got a perfect baked potato.

Sorry for the tiny photo - I couldn't find anything bigger. I always have Silk Soy Creamer in the fridge. I'm not allergic to dairy and I'm certainly not vegan, but I prefer to avoid dairy for every-day stuff like creamer (I reserve it for the fabulous cheese plate at my favorite restaurant). I just feel better when I eat less dairy. Silk makes a smooth and creamy creamer that doesn't break up into little bits like most soy milk does. And it lasts a lot longer than real dairy creamers, which is good for me since I use only a splash of it in my morning (decaf) coffee.

I eat an egg almost every day, so it's important to have GOOD eggs. These Organic Valley eggs are fresh and fabulous every time. The yellows of the yolks are reeeeeeeeeaaaaally yellow, and I love the packaging - I never get a cracked egg in this snuggly bunch.

Though I am not allergic to wheat or gluten, I really enjoy these gluten-free crackers from Mary's Gone. They are made of seeds and are really crunchy and hearty, but are very low in fat and calories. I often substitute tortilla chips with Mary's Gone Original crackers since they hold up to salsa wonderfully. It's also my absolute favorite cracker for another favorite-yet-unmentioned-item: Whole Foods scallion and parsley hummus.

I love chili. When I watch Food Network shows about chili or chili cookoffs, my mouth waters. I even love the canned stuff; when I was little, my dad used to make Hormel chili, add a few dashes of Tabasco, then pour it over slices of toasted bread for a hearty lunch. But canned chili, even the low-fat variety, is full of sodium and calories, so it's hard to truly enjoy it. Behold the Boca Meatless Chili. It comes in single-serving packages in the freezer section, and it's loaded with flavor and that real, chili heartiness that one who loves chili looks for. It's a good-sized serving, and only has 150 calories per package. Sometimes I pour it over a Melissa's potato for a real treat.

I always have at least one bar of dark chocolate in my fridge. Usually, it's this one: Chocolove's Orange Peel in Dark Chocolate with 55% Cocoa Content. I LOVE the flavor of orange peel with dark chocolate, and this bar doesn't disappoint.

I hope you enjoyed some of my favorite things! Happy Holidays!

Only two more days: Menu for Hope!

Menu for Hope ends tomorrow, December 21st. So please click here to find out more and donate today!

Warm and Fuzzy Soup

What do you do when you have an entire butternut squash leftover? You make soup! Thinking that one medium-sized squash would not be enough for my dinner party (see last post), I bought two. Well, after cutting up one, I realized I had enough to feed 20 people, so I decided to make soup out of the second one. It's so easy: Simply saute some onions and shallots and thyme together in a pot with a bit of olive oil, throw in cubed butternut squash and cover it all with chicken stock. Bring to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste, then blend it all together in a blender. You can add curry powder if you want a little spice, or whatever spices you prefer. In the end, you've got an incredibly healthy and hearty soup that'll warm you to your core. Top with some crusty croutons and you've got yourself a meal.

Devil's Chicken

I was so eager to start eating the Devil's Chicken Thighs I made that I completely forgot to take a photo of all the chicken in the baking dish. I also forgot to take a photo of the roasted butternut squash, the crackers-and-parsley-hummus appetizer and the special gluten-free cookies. In any case, I had a dinner party Friday night and the whole meal was a success! :)

The Devil's Chicken Thighs, courtesy of the Sunday Suppers at Lucques cookbook, was a bit tedious to make but incredibly delicious. I substituted the regular breadcrumbs with ones I made out of rice bread (one of my dinner guests is allergic to wheat), but you couldn't tell any difference and it worked really well. To accompany this mustard-flavored chicken, I roasted some sweet butternut squash and made a simple salad of greens, tomatoes and Persian cucumbers.

For an appetizer, I found some gluten-free crackers from a company called Glutino. Unlike the rice crackers that many wheat/gluten-allergic folk eat, these are just like regular, buttery crackers but without the gluten. I also found chocolate covered, and lemon wafer cookies from the same company, and I have to say they were the most "realistic" gluten-free cookies I've ever had. They were light, crispy and delicious. I highly recommend Glutino products to those of you who are gluten or wheat-free (I got mine at the new Whole Foods in Pasadena).

Next time I have a dinner party, I promise to take more photos!

Menu for Hope: Gourmet Salt Box (UW31)

Today is the kick-off of Menu for Hope, the annual food-blogger fundraiser started by Chez Pim a few years ago. It's fun, it's easy, you can win fantastic prizes (see more on that below) and you'll be helping out a worthy cause: world hunger.

You can read all the details here at Rasa Mayalsia (she is hosting the West Coast prizes on her site), and view a whole array of prizes. In a nutshell, for every $10 you donate, you get a virtual raffle ticket to bid on the prize of your choice. At the end of the two-week fundraiser, Chez Pim will announce the winners. Pretty instant gratification, if you ask me! The fundraising is being handled by a bonafide charity called Firstgiving, so none of the bloggers are handling any monies. Click here to check out information about Menu for Hope through Firstgiving.

The prize sponsored by Rainy Days and Sundays is this beautiful boxed set of salts from NapaStyle. The prize code for this is UW31.

The box, which is made from non-endangered acacia wood, contains 4.5-oz of each of the five salts: Sundried Tomato, Citrus Rosemary, Roasted Garlic, Hawaiian Red, and Gray Salt. It is a $58.00 value and, from my own personal experience using Michael Chiarello's salts, this will inspire many great recipes! Shipping in the U.S. and Canada only.

Donation instructions:

1. Choose a prize or prizes of their choice from Rasa's list or the complete prize list on Chez Pim.

2. Go to the donation site at http://www.firstgiving.com/menuforhope4 to make a donation

3. Specify the prize you would like to bid for in the 'Personal Message' section in the donation form. Each $10 donate will get one raffle ticket toward a prize. For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for UW01 and 3 tickets for UW33. Please write 2xUW01, 3xUW33.

The results will be published on Chez Pim on Wednesday January 9th.

So please donate today, even if it's only $10.00. Just think, you can walk away with this gorgeous salt set for a mere $10.00! Last year, Menu for Hope raised a whopping $62,925.12. Let's go for $100,000 this year!

Christmas Cookie Baking Fest

Every year, I bake a zillion Christmas cookies for the staff at the Chateau Marmont restaurant. I go there often for work and everyone from the waiters to the reservations manager has become like family to me. So, I bake, I package and I deliver little treats once a year to these fine people as a small token of my appreciation for all the hard work they do.

This year, I made Ina Garten's Jam Thumbprint cookies and her White Chocolate Chunk cookies (with a twist). I also made little mini pecan pies(she calls them Pecan Toffee Tassies) , from a Paula Deen recipe. For the jam thumbprints (above), I used a sour cherry jam instead of the raspberry that Ina uses in her recipe. I think the cherry adds a great contrast to the sweet coconut, and it just seems more holiday-ish. The cookies were easy to make, and came out really buttery and lovely.

For Paula's mini pecan pies, I substituted the almond brickle chips with Heath toffee chips. I don't really know what almond brickle chips are, and could not find them anywhere at the grocery store, so I went with the toffee chips. Another change: instead of rolling out the store-bought pie dough before cutting it with a cookie cutter, I cut the circles out first, then used my fingers to make each round a little bigger to fit inside my mini-muffin tin. I really hate rolling dough out, especially when I have a bazillion cookies to bake, so this was much easier.

I love how the "pies" came out - they are the perfect two-bite snack. I have a feeling that this will be everyone's favorite. I will definitely be making these again.

Last but not least are Ina's white chocolate chunk cookies. I also made a couple of small changes here. Instead of using 1.5 lbs of white chocolate chunks, I bought a 12-oz. bag of white chocolate chips, and added another 8 oz. of cocoa nibs. The white chocolate is very sweet, so the nibs give the cookies some flavor balance, and it adds a great nibby crunch to the cookie. These cookies are incredibly easy as well, and I will be making another batch for some friends this season.

So what does one do after baking 150 cookies? Gift herself with a tall, ice-cold beer! Actually I drank this beer because a) I really wanted a drink; b) I had a ton of liquor but no mixers or even one lemon or lime or any kind of fruit in my house; c) I had no wine in the house. I looked through my fridge and found one Amstel Light, and it was at least two years old. I hardly ever drink beer, and what beer I do have in the fridge is leftover from a dinner party where someone brought beer. Still, it hit the spot. I also found two Asahi's back there, so I'll save those for another desperate day.

I put 8 of each cookie in a cellophane bag, and tied it with red and green ribbons. They all went into a big basket, with a note on what each cookie was (you never know about nut allergies or the like, so you always want to write a good description if you are giving away any type of food).

A big thanks to my new KitchenAid mixer - without you, this would have been a major task (as it has been in the years past). I feel like a new me with you by my side - anything is possible!

The Kitchen Sink Pasta Sauce

Earlier in the week, when it was about 58 degrees outside during the day (that's f**king freezing here in Los Angeles), I decided to make myself a hearty fish stew for the week. But the day after I bought all the ingredients, it was back up to 81 degrees (in December - ARGH!), and fish stew was the last thing I felt like eating.

I had some salmon, scallops, cremini mushrooms and a whole slew of other fish stew ingredients just calling out for some attention. So I put the scallops in the freezer, cut up the salmon into cubes, sliced the creminis and looked at what else I had in the fridge. I had some cherry tomatoes that were getting too soft, so I sliced those in half, sprinkled them with chopped garlic, sea salt and olive oil and put them into the oven to roast. There was also some leftover bruschetta and bag of baby spinach. I could do something with all this.

I heated up some olive oil in a pan and threw in some chopped garlic, then added my salmon cubes and cooked them half-way through. I removed them from the pan, then cooked my cremini mushrooms. Once those cooked down, I added the salmon, as well as the roasted tomatoes from the oven, back into the pan with the 'shrooms. I threw in the bruschetta (it's just tomatoes and garlic and basil - how bad can that be?), some chopped basil, a few dashes of red pepper flakes and a handful of baby spinach to the sauce and sooner than you could say, "kitchen sink," it was done.

Some cooked whole wheat rigatoni and a sprinkle of grated Parmesan was all I needed to finish this impromptu supper. The sauce, thickened by the bruschetta and roasted tomatoes, clung to each nook in the rigatoni - it was, dare I say it myself, fabulous.

My Latest Obsession

I eat a lot of salads. The reason why I never tire of salads is because I always make my own dressings. My latest obsession is a simple dressing of really GOOD balsamic vinegar (I bought mine in Italy but you can get good, aged balsamic from Modena at any gourmet store), really GOOD extra virgin olive oil (I bought mine in Italy but you can get good, extra virgin olive oil at any store) and a squeeze of anchovy paste (you can get a tube of anchovy paste at any better grocery store). Whisk it all together, add a dash of salt and pepper, and you've got a rich, healthy and delicious dressing that will make your salad sing.

Friday Night in Italy

One of my favorite places to be on a Friday night is La Maschera in Pasadena. About once every month-and-a-half or so, my sister and I will meet there, hunker down at the wine bar and order a few dishes to split. Everything from the food to the people who work there is truly Italian, and I always feel like I'm right back in Italy when I'm at La Maschera.

Last night, we started off with a bottle of Barbera, which was moderately priced at $39 and very, very good. Nino, the sommelier who is behind the wine bar almost every night, is always very helpful with the wine selections and last night was no different. The nose on the Barbera was oakey and rich, and the flavor was bold and fruity.

My sister and I always split 2-3 things at La Maschera, because, along with the best bread basket in town, it's the perfect amount of food for two people. I apologize for not taking a photo of the bread basket (half crispy flat bread, half baguette slices) and the accompanying white bean puree (creamy and delicious!) and tomato/garlic/basil mixture (fresh, clean, lovely), but we were so hungry we dove into it before I remembered to take a photo. We started with the quail appetizer, which was in a rich reduction sauce with bits of crispy prosciutto and dried apricots. We'd never tried this before and it was absolutely wonderful.

We then split the tricolore salad, which we always get. It's a fresh combination of greens and radicchio, dressed with a light vinaigrette and topped with really good Parmesan shavings. They always split the single portion into two for us, which we always appreciate.

We then shared another regular order for us: the chicken sausage pizza. La Maschera's pizzas are all made on a super thin, crispy, almost cracker-like crust which is crisp all the way through to the middle of the pie. It's not too cheesy, the tomato sauce is perfect and the fresh basil added after the pizza comes out of the oven adds that perfect fresh balance. We LOVE this pizza and have a hard time trying other things because we adore it so much. I can say that I have tried their gnocchi with lamb ragu, plus a special pasta with white anchovies and both were excellent and very reminiscent of dishes I had in Italy.

The whole La Maschera experience for us is everything we want for a relaxed, Friday night dinner: friendly and helpful service, fabulous homemade food, and a warm, cozy atmosphere. It's laid back but refined, which is a difficult balance, but they manage to pull it off effortlessly. It's become our local place to catch up over great food and fantastic wine, and I hope it's around for a long time.