A Favorite Cookie Recipe

 Truly one of the most delicious and easy cookies, ever! I have also heard them called Butternut Balls and Mexican Wedding Cakes.


MELTAWAYS

Butter Nut Cookies

1 Cup of butter(please don't use margarine--ick!)
1/4 Cup of sugar
2 Cups of flour
1 Tablespoon (yes, that's a Tablespoon) vanilla
1 1/2 Cups of chopped nuts--I like walnuts, but pecans would do if you can swing them
Powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. (Yes, that's 300, not 350.) Cream the butter. Add everything else except the powdered sugar. Roll into balls about the size of a walnut. Put on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 35 minutes.
Let them cool until you can handle them (they'll still be a little warm) and then roll them in the powdered sugar.

Enjoy!

PS--if you ever read my old blog, "Sorta Frugal," this is a copy and paste from that. But yummy is worth repeating!

4 p.m. slump

I hit the late afternoon slump a while ago. Glad I got a lot done earlier, LOL! That includes 20 minutes on the Wii and about an hour schlepping around doing housework. Oh, and I made cookie bars. Here is a link to the recipe:

No Bake 5-ingredient Granola Bar



 On the creative front, I sewed appliques on an apron I'm making (that's a future post) and crocheted quite a few rounds on some socks (another future post). I changed my machine thread to light blue for the apron, but only after doing the giraffe's body. Here he is, headless and stuffed, LOL! I'm hoping to hit the crafts store tonight and maybe find some big, goofy eyes for him.

Innovation

Okay, I'm sure millions of people already know this. But I just thought of it for myself this morning, so for me it is innovative.

I used 4 bottles of barbecue sauce to make ribs on Sunday. There's always some left, you know? That stuff that sticks to the sides. So I wanted to incorporate them together. A balancing act was out of the question.

So I took some foil, folded it up and wrapped it around the necks of two bottles. Now they are in the sink and gravity is doing the rest.

BTW, you want to make killer ribs? First, grill them for a bit on the barbecue. You aren't cooking them, just getting some nice grill marks and a little char on them. Oh...make sure you've emptied out that thing that catches grease or you will have a BIG fire and a lot of heat to deal with. That's another story.

Now, put your ribs into a big lasagna pan. You might need two pans. Dump your favorite sauce over them. Cover with foil.

Cook in a 250 degree oven for 3-4 hours or more. Yes, that's 250 degrees.

You will end up with the most delicious, fall-off-the-bone ribs ever!

Pantry-to-Fridge Pickles

(NOTE: This is an earlier post. I'm just redoing it so I don't have to keep looking for it.)
(I use a jar from store-bought pickles, but changed the name!)


I call these "Pantry-to-Fridge Pickles" because you probably have most of the ingredients in your pantry already. My own version is somewhat mild, slightly salty and slightly sweet. These are dill pickles, not sweet pickles, though. Most recipes I found for fridge pickles call for too much sugar, and I hate sweet pickles, to be honest. (Obviously, though, these are not "Kosher" dills.)

You need:

2 cups water
2 cups white vinegar
1/8 cup sugar
1/4 cup Kosher salt (you can use canning salt but I wouldn't know the proportion so play with it)
1 Tablespoon pickling spice

The above list is pretty much 'right,' at least to my taste. But the following is up to you:

Onion powder
Dill weed
Garlic powder

Cucumbers--four to eight to ten depending on how big they are. Figure out what will sit in 4 cups of liquid.

When you buy them, make sure they are very hard, as the pickling will soften them a bit. Unwaxed cukes or Kirbys are best.

Okay, so cut the cucumbers the way you like them and throw them into a bowl. Sprinkle with your herbs and spices. I just eyeball it. You like garlic, add more garlic. This isn't carved in stone, but you should probably go easy the first time around.

Put the water and vinegar in a microwave safe bowl or a pot. I use my 8-cup measuring cup. Nuke or simmer until nice and hot. Then mix in the sugar and salt a pickling spice.

Pour it over the cucumbers. Cover. When it's cooled down a bit, put it in the fridge overnight.

Next day, put the pickles in jars and pour the 'juice' over them. Enjoy!

PS--you can use fresh ingredients, but then this wouldn't be a pantry recipe!

Mama Mia!

Last night, I made homemade mozzarella for the first time. My daughter's friend and her mom were nice enough to teach me!

It is sooo easy! In fact, the hardest part is getting the curds. And all you have to do there is go to an Italian store that makes fresh mozzarella and buy them.

I want to do this a few times until I'm totally sure of myself, but I promise I will post the how-to. You'll be amazed.

Basically, you bring a big pot of water up to temperature (about 180 degrees but wait on that until I post about this again), then you dump in the curds for about 3 minutes (again, I'll have the exact timing later).

Then you strain the curds out into a bowl. They will be somewhat stringy. Wearing gloves (because the curds are HOT) you pick up the blob and fold it up, then you just let it stretch down. You keep turning and folding until the stretchiness slows down and the cheese is shiny. You wrap it up into a ball and put plastic wrap around it. Then you put it in the fridge.

Or you eat it right away because fresh mozzarella is AWESOME.

Or...and we had this as a snack last night: instead of smushing it into a ball, you take the stretched out piece and lay some prosciutto on it, then you roll it up and cut pinwheels. I don't even like prosciutto and I had two of these.

I promise I'll post a how-to ASAP. But next post, I will share my own Pantry-to-Fridge pickle recipe!