The best gooey cookies Evah!!!

•        1 cup coconut oil or butter/margarine

•        1/2 cup molasses

•        1 cup Peanut Butter

•        1 cup sugar

•        1 tsp. salt

•        2 tsp. vanilla

•        2 eggs

•        2 1/2 cups flour

•        1/2 tsp. baking soda

•        2 cups chocolate chips

1.       Preheat oven to 350°.

2.       In a mixing bowl, combine the butter with sugar and molasses; cream together until light and fluffy.

3.       Add peanut butter and mix well.

4.       Add the salt, vanilla, and eggs and beat until well mixed.  

5.       Add flour and baking soda; mix until just combined.

6.       Stir in the chocolate chips.

7.       Drop heaping tablespoon-size balls of dough about 2 inches apart on greased baking sheets

8.       Bake until cookies are golden around the edges, but still soft in the center, 10 – 12 minutes.

9.       Transfer onto plate or wire rack and let cool, or eat them hot (careful melted chocolate can burn)

If you want plain chocolate chip cookies, just leave out the peanut butter. This recipe works great without it as well. To make ginger molasses cookies, leave out peanut butter but add 1 tbsp fresh grated ginger and 2 tbsps powdered ginger! 

The Infamous Turducken

My wife is American, and we live in Canada. As such, we have the option of two thanksgivings to celebrate. To make things more interesting, his birthday falls around the American thanksgiving. Since we are in Canada, we have to celebrate the Canadian thanksgiving. That being said, we decided to have a little fun for his birthday and make Turducken.

For those of you who don't know, a turducken is a chicken stuffed in a duck and stuffed in a turkey. My wife often follows up with the joke that the ultimate challenge is the dish that starts with a hummingbird and ends with a cow.

Still turducken is enough of a challenge to start.

All three birds need to be completely deboned, although the turkey legs and wings can have their bones.

I am lucky and I have a great place to get birds. Saslov's meat market in the Byward market.They were nice enough to do the deboning for me, so that when I had half the work to do.

I decided to brine all three birds. This ended up being a great idea. One of the biggest risks with turducken is making sure that all three birds are safely cooked all the way through.  This could lead to the birds being dry. That being said, I also decided not to put stuffing in between the layers. Instead I filled it with seasonings.

Then came problem number 2. I needed to close each bird, but the end result has to be able to be sliced. If I sowed them closed then I wouldn't be able to slice.  I used some metal skewers and then used some string to tie the skewers and provide a means of pulling them out.Once everything was ready and set, I started baking.

That is when the success of the brining really showed. There was soo much gravy that about half way through the cooking process, I had to pour off the gravy. Why? There was so much gravy that the whole thing was covered! I wasn't going to have roasted turducken, I was going to have boiled poultry!

I poured out the liquid and made a lot of gravy. By the end of the roasting, I had half of a pan again of gravy. It was incredible!

The turducken was a hit. It was a fun recipe to make  and one I would make again.

Not an easy thing to slice for the first time.

Noodles Continued

So I realize I am posting this on the same day, but I felt that this needed to be two separate posts. I cam down with a cold this weekend and decided to make some chicken soup. About 2 hours in, I realized I was out of any soup noodles.

You guessed it! I decided to make some on my own. I found a nice recipe for some egg noodles.

Mixing together flour, salt, eggs, and milk (lactose free). The mix worked out beautifully, although the noodles grew much more than expected and became quite large. As soup noodles, they failed since they would have to be cut extremely thin in order to work. However, I finally found what seems to work as a great Udon noodle recipe. I have tried cutting them a little thicker and will let you know tonight how it works.

UPDATE:

So while waiting for my boyfriend to come home, I got to work preparing the noodles for dinner. I took one batch and cut them very thin. I used the knife to bunch up a small amount of dough and then pressed down. After letting the noodles dry a little, I made myself a bowl of soup. The thin noodles worked out perfectly.

I also prepared the Udon noodles for the evening. Before we got down to dinner, Alex and I had to run a few errands. We packed up the drying noodles in a ziplock bag to keep from the dog and left. When we got back, we found that the cat had chewed through the bag and devoured the entire batch! I whole roll of raw dough devoured!

I guess it will have to wait till I next make noodles, before I can figure out if these work as Udon. *sigh* Silly Kitty! 

Wish me luck!