Cook your hobby: Scrabble cookies!

Recently there was  a cooking challenge over at the Chickenless Kitchen: Cook your hobby!  By that, she she meant that everyone should in some way cook something that represented in some way one of their other non-cooking hobbies.  I thought it was a great idea, and immediately thought of several options: cooking (wait, no, that didn't count)... reading!  Yes, that works!  Ah, but what then?  Make a bunch of book cupcakes?  Nope.  I needed something more interesting... How about mice racing?  Hmm... would be great if I actually did something like that, but since I just made it up I'm pretty sure I'd get called out pretty quickly.  Yeah, I could say photography, painting, travel and all the other hobbies easily found on survey checklists... but that's no fun, right... ? 

You know what IS fun?  Scrabble!  I decided to do Scrabble Cookies because I really do love Scrabble and Jason and I often talk friends into playing horrible mutant versions of the game for our amusement.  It's always good times.  Also, the idea of making rectangular cookies with letters on them seemed simple enough...

So I went to consult my trusty Joy of Cooking and found a nice recipe for a fourteen-in-one master cut out cookie recipe and adapted it to make: Wood Grain Orange Chocolate Cookies!  The wood grain was important to me as real scrabble tiles are wood and I've always loved that about them.  After finding a good way to achieve that, it's simply a matter of either piping on chocolate ganache for letters or using an edible marker (I tried the latter version on my "actual size" cookies since they were a bit small to manuever a piping bag around).  On a side note: I had tried another method for the letters involving mini alphabet cookie cutters that I sent away for specially, but it was a total, hilarious disaster.  I wish I'd taken a picture of the sad, slumpy & disfigured letters it produced.  Ah well, in the end it turned out good!

If you enjoy these cookies half as much as I enjoy Scrabble, my work here is done...


Recipe: Scrabble Cookies

For the Wood Grain Chocolate Orange Cookies (adapted from Joy of Cooking's Marble Cookies)...
2 1/2 cups AP flour
1/2 pound unsalted butter cut into 14 pieces, at room temperature (that's 2 sticks)
1 cup superfine sugar (you can also pulse granulated sugar in a food processor for 1 minute)
1/2 teaspoon table salt
1 large egg yolk
1 large egg
2 teaspoons vanilla
4 ounces melted semisweet baking chocolate
The zest of 1 orange

For the Letters...
For larger (2 inch high) cookies: 1 cup chocolate ganache, cooled slightly and added to a piping bag with a number 3 round pastry tip (you'll need a bar of semisweet baking chocolate and a pint of heavy cream for this - see "ganache" link for method)
OR
For "actual size" (2.5 cm high) cookies: Edible black marker

What to do with it all...

1. On medium speed, mix butter, sugar and salt unti fluffy
2. Add egg yolk, whole egg, zest and vanilla and mix until well blended
3. Reduce speed to low and add flour slowly until well combined
4. Divide dough half, wrap and refigerate unti firm - at least 1 hour and up to 2 days
5. Preheat oven to 375 degree F and prepare 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper or Silpat
6. On a well-floured surface, roll out your first round to a 14 inch thick then drizzle over half your melted chocolate
7. Knead the dough loosely to incorporate the chocolate just so you see streaks in the dough
8. Re-flour your surface and roll dough out to 1/8 inch thick
9. Cut cookies to desired size using a ruler and a sharp knife: 2 inches by 1 1/4 inches for large cookies, 2.5 cm by 2 cm for "actual size" cookies"
10. Repeat process with second dough half
11. Place cookies on baking sheets, and place sheets into oven (one on lower rack, one on upper)
12. Bake for 5 - 7 minutes, rotating sheets half way thru baking (watch closely for browning)
13. Cook and decorate either with melted ganache, or edible marker (recommended for smaller cookies)

Makes approx 2 dozen large Scrabble cookies, or a whole boards' worth of the "actual size"!

On another note, I'd like to thank Nancy of wonderful Spicie Foodie and Kathy of the brilliant Colors of Indian Cooking for the Honest Scrap Award!  In accepting this award, I am supposed to list 10 honest things about myself, so here goes!

1.  My kitchen is a whopping 100 square feet (about 7 x 14), galley style, with practically no workable surface areas.  I sometimes pretend I am MacGuyver to invent ways to cook (I know lots of people have much smaller kitchens and I should not complain!)
2.  I've never met a piece of chocolate I didn't like
3.  I will choose a pickle over a cupcake on any day of the week
4.  I didn't not learn to swim until I was 20 due to a fear of water
5.  I secretly believe myself to be a queen of the thrift stores (with pride) for my ability to find amazing things in them
6.  As a child I was so sensitive to sugar that I once ran off and dislocated my own shoulder in a hyperactive flurry after inhaling a pudding cup that a friend of my parents' unwittingly gave me
7.  I have a dream to someday own goats
8.  My big toes point upwards a bit and give off the appearance of being snobbish
9.  Everyone in Chicago seems to love living by the lake, which I did once, and hated it passionately come Winter
10.  Though I am a born and bred Chicago girl, I prefer New York style pizza to Chicago deep dish... which is, of course, sacrilege...

Thanks again everyone!

Midweek Meals: Healthy, Quick Mediterranean Vegetable Saute

Vegetables are amazing.  In looking up nutritional content for the ingredients for a midweek meal, I learned some very nifty things about what I was eating...

Eggplant - Is a fabulous "diet" veggie.  It's low in fat and calories, high in thyroid-supporting manganese and a good source of fiber.  Another interesting thing about eggplant?  It has more nicotine than any other edible plant!  Though you'd have to eat a bushel of eggplant before you reached the concentration of nicotine found in just one cigarette, so it's probably not the best idea to light one up, sorry.

Cauliflower - Considered a "nutritionally dense" food, cauliflower is a happy place to find vitamin C and a host of phytochemicals to fight cancer.  There are also studies that show it may work as a estrogen regulator (due to indole-3-carbinol) and glucosinolates that could help your liver detoxify.  Happy news for pub crawlers!

Chickpeas (garbanzos) - A nice low-fat source of protien and fiber.  Tossing a can of these precooked babies into your veggies gives your 29% of your protien in every serving.


Green (or French) beans - Great for your bones as they contain 25% of your vitamin K in each serving (helps fight osteoperosis), and a good amount of calcium.  Many sources believe that green food sources of calcium are betterfor the body then dairy sources, too, by the way!  I know my favorite clinical professor way back when I was in school as a bodywork therapist always paraded that theory.

In 2010 I'm making efforts to revive an old way of eating that worked really well for me, but I just got away from.  On the weekdays, I would focus on vegetarian and seafood meals only and enjoy meat only on the weekends.  I always felt like I had great energy when I followed this with care.  The problem came in when I was too busy to make proper meals and ended up eating potato chip dinners.  Bad, bad!  That's where having some nice pre-planned recipes that I love come in handy.  For me, it's motivational to know why the foods I'm preparing are good for me, too, so I've been doing my research!

Essentially, these recipes are going into a sort of food journal for me to improve my eating habits.  In doing so, I figured why not share them with all of you, too?  I'm planning to add some recipes that are based on fun healthy foods lists (if such a thing can be called fun?) such as the recent New York Times article on The 11 Best Foods You Aren't Eating (thanks to Cheryl for printing that out for me!).

So what do you think?  Would you like to see more recipes like this one?  What are some of your favorite healthy foods to include in weekday meals? 

Recipe: Healthy Quick Medditerrean Vegetable Sautè

What you need...

1 can chickpeas
3 cups chopped eggplant
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1/2 pound whole fresh green beans
3 cups chopped cauliflower florets
2/3 cup chopped yellow onion
2 tablespoons tomato paste
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon dry dill (or small bunch of chopped fresh)
1 tablespoon dry oregano (or small bunch chopped fresh)
1 tablespoon dry mint (or small bunch chopped fresh)
1 1/2 teaspoons allspice
1 teaspoon tumeric
1 lemon, juiced and zested
1 cup vegetable stock or water
Olive oil for sauteing
Salt and pepper to taste

What to do with it all...

• Heat (on medium) enough olive oil in a large heavy bottom sautè pan to coat it
• Add your onions and cauliflower florets and allow to sautè for 3 mins or until they get a fragrant
  
• Add eggplant, red pepper and green beans and cook for another 5 - 8 minutes on medium, stirring occassionally
• Add all the rest of your ingredients, toss/stir to combine and cook on medium-low until cauliflower is just fork tender (about 10 mins)
• Serve over rice!

How to make all-natural rainbow cupcakes: guest post at CarolEgbert.com!

The other day the talented artist and all-around-terrific food person Carol Egbert invited me to write a guest post for her.  I couldn't be more thrilled - her illustrations and recipes are such that my post blushes to rub shoulders with them.  You really must take a moment to check out her beautiful site, and while you're there, you can visit my un-recipe post on making the famous rainbow cupcake with a twist: all-natural fruit and spice colors!