Prep Work

When I was in elementary school, I never had to study for anything.  In middle school, I had my first experience where I actually had to think ahead and prepare for a test the night before.  It took me until my third year of college to learn to start my homework more than one day in advance, and until graduate school to start it once it was assigned.

Now, it wouldn't have made sense for me to memorize all the countries in Europe a week in advance in sixth grade, but as my assignments (and chores, and sewing projects, and kitchen experiments...) have become more complicated, I have realized that prep work is crucial in order to ride the wave of chaos.

Today's prep work has been for a self-caused problem - I am going to visit my parents for Thanksgiving, and they're not at all equipped to deal with my mostly-vegan habits.  Thus I have been getting things together for snacks/lunch on the road tomorrow, and have started collecting simple recipes that hopefully won't scare my family off of the interesting foods I eat.

I confess that I am making something strange for my own consumption, but that is in the hopes that it will be able to fill in if I feel like a meal needs some meat texture.  I think I'll talk about that more in another post, though.

For now, I am working on catching up on my slight posting backlog.  Thus, here are the past two week's cookies:

123. Chocolate Waffles (marked as a best cookie)

Oh. My. Goodness.  It has been quite some time since a recipe from my cookbook has left me so impressed.  But this one has, and I had a hard time not eating them all up myself (which would have been a bad idea).

These cookies/waffles are super full of chocolate - they have unsweetened chocolate melted into copious amounts of butter, as well as a hefty serving of Dutch-process cocoa.  Aside from the regular other ingredients, these have half a tablespoon of cinnamon, giving them a nice Mexican Chocolate flavor.

The batter for these is cooked in a waffle maker, which means each batch (of 4) only took about 2 minutes to be done, and looked very pretty too.  Finally, the cooled cookies are dipped in a chocolate icing so that only the ridges are covered, and sprinkled with confectioners' sugar.  The result was a delicious cakey cookie, with a rich chocolate flavor.  I'm not sure if the icing added any extra flavor, but it made them look so very pretty.

These were very easy to make, but still very impressive.  They'll definitely be making a reappearance.

124. Chocolate-Almond-Marsala Cookies

I'm not exactly sure why I chose these cookies this weekend, except perhaps that they needed to be done.  These cookies are made with Marsala wine as their main liquid, and are further flavored with chocolate chips, toasted almonds, candied orange peel, and cinnamon. The mix of flavors is interesting, and was pretty good a day after I baked the cookies.  However, when I was making these I was very concerned that there wasn't enough liquid in them... adding honey as instructed provided enough liquid to make the dough stick together.  Still, I think these cookies are too dry for my preferences.  In the meanwhile, I will be making more Tofu Marsala, and trying to figure out why blogger wouldn't upload the brighter version of my cookie picture.

Aright, that's all for me, I'll maybe have adventure stories later.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!!