groups | a whisk and a spoon

Everyday Dorie: Moroccan-Spiced Chickpea and Noodle Soup

February 26, 2021 at 3:42 pm | Posted in cook the book fridays, everyday dorie, groups, savory things, soups | 6 Comments
Tags: everyday dorie, savory, soup

It’s now been almost a year that I’ve been providing daily WFH lunch (with clean-up service) to the other person in this house, and I’m always looking to cook things that will do double duty as dinner one night and lunch the next with minimal extra effort. Bonus points for things that make enough for a couple of lunches, as is the case with this Moroccan-Spiced Chickpea and Noodle Soup. This soup is Dorie’s version of harira, a traditional Moroccan soup with tomatoes, chickpeas, lentils and lots of spices. I’ve seen recipes for versions of harira with and without meat, and versions with and without noodles…this one has both, so it’s very hearty and filling.

The optional meat in this soup comes in the form of meatballs, or really balls of meat, as they’re just straight-up ground meat (I used turkey) rolled into small balls. While they do cook in the simmering soup, the balls can definitely use some s&p or they will be under-seasoned.

Overall, though, this soup is very flavorful. I did reduce the 3.5 tablespoons of ground ginger, which sounded like so much (I didn’t even have that much!), it was possibly a typo. Not sure about that, so I’m interested to see what others did. I left out the saffron entirely because my small supply was already reserved for something else, and this soup has so many other strong, fragrant spices in the mix that I thought I could get away with it. The noodles I cooked in separate pot, because I knew I’d have leftovers and didn’t want them to get bloated while sitting in the soup.

For the recipe, see Everyday Dorie by Dorie Greenspan, and head over to Cook the Book Fridays to see how the group liked this one.

Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Lucky Charm Brownies

February 16, 2021 at 10:27 am | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 4 Comments
Tags: baking, brownies, chocolate

If you are here expecting a brownie topped with pastel mini marshmallows and cereal bits, you will have to look elsewhere (they do exist, I checked the Google). These Lucky Charm Brownies have a different sweet treasure, both on top and in the batter- amaretti cookies.

The brownie batter contains many of the usual suspects…melted chocolate, cocoa, butter, sugar and eggs…but it’s gluten-free, as the flour is replaced with a mix of pulverized almonds and amaretti. The whole batter is actually whizzed up in the food processor, which makes it super quick and easy. It bakes up into a fudgy, truffle-like slab.

You could just stop there and cut them up into rich little squares. But why would you, when you could also dress them up with chocolate glaze and more crushed amaretti cookies? This makes them even richer but also even more irresistible, which is lucky for everyone who gets to try them.

For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan (it’s also here). Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Everyday Dorie: Dark Chocolate Pudding

February 12, 2021 at 9:05 am | Posted in everyday dorie, groups, puddings, custards, mousses, sweet things | 3 Comments
Tags: chocolate, everyday dorie, pudding

I do love a good homemade pudding, but I only seem to make it when a recipe rolls around for a blog group. That’s the case today, with this Dark Chocolate Pudding. This is delicious- thick, rich and luxurious. It comes together quickly in a pot and with constant whisking, you can skip the immersion blender whiz at the end (which is great, since I don’t have one). Not all pudding recipes call for eggs, but this one does, so I did push it through a strainer at the end, mostly to make sure all the little egg chalaza squiggle bits were gone.

Dorie suggests serving the pudding with a sprinkling of cocoa streusel crumbs she calls “chocolate crunch,” but I didn’t feel like firing up the oven for something that would have otherwise been a no-bake dessert. I went freezer foraging instead and came up with a handful of leftover misshapen almond macaron shells. I decided to turn them into my own crunchies by roughly crumbling them and coating them in melted chocolate. Once the chocolate set up, I had some nice rubbly bits to scatter on top of the pudding…or on top of the crème fraîche on top of the pudding.

For the recipe, see Everyday Dorie by Dorie Greenspan, and head over to Cook the Book Fridays to see all of our pudding cups this week.

Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Major Grey’s Roll-Ups

February 2, 2021 at 4:09 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, savory things, snacks, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 7 Comments
Tags: baking, cookies, savory, snacks

I know we just did a rugelach cookie last month, but I had a half-finished box of Triscuits left from holiday times, as well as an open jar of chutney in the fridge, that I wanted to get crafty with. So, here we have Major Grey’s Rollups, a savory rugelach-style cookie with a cream cheese and ground Triscuit dough and a mango chutney filling. It sounds like a bizarre thing to turn crackers into cookies, and it kind of is, but this uses the same dough as the Triscuity Bites we made a couple of years ago.

I only made a quarter-recipe of these cookies, which not only means I still have Triscuits left(!), but also that I ran into the same “issue” that I did last month. My rolled out dough circle wasn’t big enough to really form them nicely…I knew that would be the case and I just went with it anyway. I sprinkled my roll-ups with some nigella seeds before popping them into the oven.

The dough is flaky, crisp and buttery, and the finished cookies have that sweet and salty combo that does go well with a cocktail.

For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and please join us anytime!

Everyday Dorie: Meatballs and Spaghetti

January 22, 2021 at 9:11 pm | Posted in cook the book fridays, everyday dorie, groups, pasta, savory things, veggies | 7 Comments
Tags: everyday dorie, pasta, savory

Meatballs and Spaghetti. Yeah, that’s right. We all know who the star of the show is here. Meatballs, browned, then simmered in a long-cooked tomato sauce, served on a nest of spaghetti…this is classic comfort food, but it’s also a really special dinner. Cooking for just two, I’m usually scaling things way down, but for these, I made the full batch. We got two night’s worth of dinners and a day’s lunch, and I even had a few meatballs left to slice and top a pizza!

I don’t eat beef or pork, so I swapped a mix ground turkey and spicy turkey sausage meat here. I’m used to making meatballs with breadcrumbs or a panade, but instead these meatballs use two surprising “filler” ingredients– walnuts and oats. TBH, I couldn’t detect the oats at all in the finished meatballs, but the little walnut bits were quite nice (although my husband didn’t notice them at all until I pointed them out). The meatballs are first browned in a skillet and then simmered in an easy tomato sauce for up to an hour and a half. I only let mine bubble away for about an hour, since turkey is leaner than read meat, and the sauce was a nice consistency at that point anyway.

The meatballs and sauce were delicious, and it’s always fun to twirl a fork through long spaghetti noodles. I’ll make this again for sure!

For the recipe, see Everyday Dorie by Dorie Greenspan, and head over to Cook the Book Fridays to see how the group liked this one.

Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Chocolate-Cranberry and Almond Cookies

January 19, 2021 at 8:50 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 4 Comments
Tags: baking, chocolate, cookies

At first glance, to me, the recipe for these Chocolate-Cranberry and Almond Cookies sounded like a bit of a throw-away….not weird, but just some random stuff squished together to make a cookie. But then I made them and tried them, and I really liked them.

These cookies use Dorie’s “Do-Almost-Anything” chocolate dough, which is a nice dough that holds it’s shape well and can be used for cut-outs, pinwheels, thumbprints, whateves. Take the base dough and mix in bits of tart dried cranberries, roll and cut the cookies and top them with a sugary, meringue-like sliced almond topping. In keeping with my on-going pandemic pantry-purge, and in the spirit of this recipe of random stuff, I used what I had when I made these cookies: dried cherries in place of the cranberries and granulated almonds in place of the sliced. I made just half of this recipe, which was a pretty small amount of dough, so I did something I usually avoid at all costs…I formed it into a slice-and-bake log. I don’t normally like messing with that style of cookie formation, but I thought I wouldn’t get a good yield as roll-outs, without re-rolling scrap a zillion times. They aren’t perfect rounds because I stink at slicing, but they tasted good (sweet, tart and chocolatey), and that’s what matters.

For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll.

Everyday Dorie: Butter-Glazed Turnips

January 8, 2021 at 5:22 pm | Posted in cook the book fridays, everyday dorie, groups, savory things, veggies | 8 Comments
Tags: everyday dorie, savory, vegetables, vegetarian

Turnip time often represents a low point on the “what’s in season” calendar. You rarely hear people talk about how excited they are to have turnips with dinner. This recipe for Butter-Glazed Turnips is an easy way to coax the best out of them. “Everything’s better with butter” is totally true, IMO, and a bit of honey and black pepper finishes a glaze that clings to the turnips and plays up their natural flavors.

I used Japanese Hakurei turnips here. They are so cute and small, and a bit sweet to begin with. Often, I buy them to eat raw in salads (and they usually have pretty green tops to sautée, too). I trimmed their tops and left them whole for this, and they were steamed through pretty quickly. I didn’t go further and caramelize them after they were cooked (although if I’d been using a larger variety that I’d cubed up, I definitely would have)…just rolled them around in the butter-honey glaze, gave them a grind of pepper, and ate them ate as a snack.

For the recipe, see Everyday Dorie by Dorie Greenspan, and head over to Cook the Book Fridays to see all that the group made this week.

Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Friendship Cookies

January 5, 2021 at 5:41 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 5 Comments
Tags: baking, cookies

Happy 2021– to celebrate another year of baking cookies with my friends, I present you with a plate of Friendship Cookies! These are really rugelach, with a flaky cream cheese dough filled with lots of things that play well together. I had a just little bloop of Philly that was exactly enough to make the dough for a quarter-recipe of these cookies. Not getting to invite friends for cookie parties and the “use what ya got” challenge are two 2020 trends that seem to be continuing into this year, so a smaller amount was just fine with me. The one downside to the downsize is that my cookies were a bit squat. The dough is rolled into a circle that’s spread with the filling and cut like a pizza into triangles, which are then individually spiraled into the rugelach shape. Since I was working with a smaller piece of dough, my rolled-out circle was a smaller diameter and as such, my triangles weren’t long enough for me to get the extra loop in. I don’t know if that makes any sense unless you’ve made the recipe, but you can see that there is something just a bit off about the way these look. You may have to look closely, because I tried to distract the eye with some rainbow sugar sprinkle.

I filled my cookies with cranberry jam (and by that I mean leftover cranberry sauce), boozy golden raisins, toasted walnuts and cinnamon sugar. I had to leave my very best friend out of these cookies…I could tell there just wasn’t going to be any room for chopped chocolate with my smaller dough round…the filling that I already had in there was basically busting out! It’s all good though. These were delicious as-is, and that chocolate will no doubt get used another time.

For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll.

TWD DC Rewind: World Peace Cookies

December 29, 2020 at 5:00 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 5 Comments
Tags: chocolate, cookies

This isn’t the first time I’ve made the famous World Peace Cookies, but I did skip making the recipe again 2017, when they were the pick for Dorie’s Cookies. That a cookie could bring about peace is a sweet sentiment for the end of a weirdly unsettling year, so I whipped up a quick batch of these to say farewell to 2020. They might not achieve world peace, but the delicious lightly salty, extra chocolatey flavor of these cookies certainly gives me a good feeling inside.

After mixing my dough (to which I added a 50/50 combo of chopped chocolate bits and cocoa nibs), I formed it into slice-and-bake logs. Then I put the sliced cookie coins into the cups of a muffin tin for baking (rather than just baking them on a sheet tray). Dorie doesn’t use the muffin tin method in her recipe for this cookie, and having tried it out, I might understand why. After the fact, it dawned on me that this dough has a bit of baking soda in it, which is not typical of a sablé, so it was probably designed to spread more than the cookies she usually bakes in a tin. I think they weren’t able to fully expand within the confines of the muffin cups, as each cookie had a raised rim and a slightly sunken interior. I didn’t let this take away my sense of inner peace, though. I considered the center divots the perfect nesting spot for a little spoonful of vanilla ice cream!

So, a very happy new year to you!! For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan (or get it here). Don’t forget to check out the rest of this week’s rewind on the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Mincemeat-Oatmeal (Raisin) Bars

December 15, 2020 at 7:59 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 5 Comments
Tags: baking, cookies, holiday

These Mincemeat-Oatmeal Bars are Dorie’s “Playing Around” take on her Raisin Bars, with a jammy raisin filling sandwiched between two layers of delicious oatmeal-almond cookie dough. Actually, maybe they are my take on the “Playing Around” take, as I made a very off-the-cuff approximation of a (meatless) mincemeat filling. I don’t even know if I’ve ever had mincemeat, but it is the holidays, so why not give it a shot? I swapped out a couple of spoonfuls of the raisins for candied orange peel, added a few grates of fresh ginger and a big shake of mixed spice and cooked it down in apple juice. Mardi mentioned that she found the Raisin Bars to be too sweet, so I kept that in mind and didn’t sweeten my mix until I’d cooked and thickened it. A little sprinkling of maple sugar was all I thought it needed.

The same cookie dough, made with oatmeal, brown sugar and almonds, forms both the crust and the topping to these bars. It’s like an oatmeal crisp really, and basically any fruit jam would work sandwiched in the middle. I used to make very similar bar cookies for family meal meal at work, using up whatever fruit was on the way out (or often pâte de fruit scrap) for the jam. The only thing I did differently here was to pre-bake the crust layer for ten-ish minutes before finishing the bars. I’m not sure it was necessary, but I knew I’d have these around for a few days, and I planned to bring a couple to the trainers still at the gym, so I wanted to be sure they had a stable base.

There was a time in life when I wouldn’t have touched a raisin, but I’ve really come around in recent years and I thought one of these bars with a scoop of vanilla ice cream was, well, *chef’s kiss*. Oh, and the dudes at the gym requested more, but they’re all gone now, so it’s on to the next…

For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!