RECIPE: Perfect Peppermint Cookies

So, a weird thing happened this week. My husband's company is having a holiday party today, and one of his coworkers asked, "Will your wife be baking?" -- like, in a hopeful manner. I have a reputation as a good baker somewhere! I'm awesome!

Out of sheer gratitude, I made two batches of my peppermint sugar cookies. These cookies have become my calling card at Christmas time -- they're like sweet little buttons of deliciousness. I can't take too much credit -- the key is my Nanny's sugar cookie recipe, which isn't sickeningly sweet or overly buttery or too doughy. Then I add Andes peppermint chips, which are seriously one of the best inventions of the century.

You'll need:

• 1/2 cup butter (one stick)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 cups flour
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 2 tsp baking powder
• Andes peppermint chips (these are melty like chocolate...do NOT use candy canes!)

1. Soften (but don't melt) the butter in the microwave. Times vary depending on your microwave, but in my nuclear-meltdown microwave, the magic number is 20% cook power for 2 minutes.

2. Using a hand mixer, cream the butter, sugar, and egg. Add in baking powder and vanilla.

3. Mix in the flour. You can slowly sift it in, or you can just dump the whole cup in and deal with the consequences. I usually choose the later method and end up antiquing myself and most of the kitchen, but I'm impatient. At this point, your "batter" should like granules of sand and you'll think, "I screwed up. This will never become a cookie." That means you did it right. (You can skip the next step if you just want sugar cookies.)

4. Add in the peppermint chips. I use about 1/4 bag for each batch.

5. Wash your hands. Then roll the cookies into 1-1/2 inch balls. Because of the sandy batter, you'll have to really smush them together like you're kneading Play-Doh.

6. Cook at 400 degrees for 8 minutes. When you take them out, the bottoms should be just barely golden, and they should fall apart when you pick them up:

7. Move them to a cooling rack and hang in there, because once they cool, they'll stay together like a normal, well-behaved cookie. Cookies always keep baking for a minute or two while they're on the cooling rack. Keep the faith. If you cook them "to perfection" in the oven, you'll wind up with crispy cookies. 

These are relatively easy and so, so good. Enjoy. I just did. For breakfast.

RECIPE: Baked Broccoli. It's nothing short of magical.

I saw a recipe for oven-baked broccoli, and my first thought was, "Wow. That sounds like a way to make raw broccoli even more dry and bland." But then I kept seeing more and more recipes for it, so I finally decided there must be some truth to it. (Not that trendy foods can't be gross -- I'm talking to you, alfafa sprouts/foie gras/wheatgrass shakes.)

So this weekend, we tried it. And it...was....AMAZING! Okay, that's a strong word. Usually, the biggest compliment I can muster up for a vegetable recipe is "edible" or "tolerable." But these were straight-up delicious.



You'll need:

• raw broccoli
• 1-2 Tbsp. olive oil
• salt, pepper, and garlic to taste*
• lemon juice (or a lemon if you're feelin' fancy)
• parmesan

Chop the broccoli into bite-size florets. Toss them with a little bit of olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic. Lay them on a lightly greased cookie sheet and bake at 425 degrees until the tips of the "trees" start turning golden-brown. For us, that was 10 minutes, but our oven cooks with the power of 1,000 suns. Then take it out, squeeze some lemon juice over it, and sprinkle with parmesan cheese.

How delicious is it? Um, my hubby walked out of the room and I snuck a few florets while he wasn't looking. Yeah -- I STOLE BROCCOLI. Usually (much like a 3-year-old), I save my veggies for last, eat five bites, announce that I'm full, and scrape the leftovers onto his plate. So for me to sneak broccoli because I didn't want to share -- that's huge. I want to make this every night. And maybe for breakfast too.

Sorry, buffalo chicken -- you're only the second-tastiest thing on my plate tonight.

* Just shake it until it looks about right. As usual, I subbed Papa Joe's salt for all three.

EASY PEASY PIE: Swedish Apple Pie Recipe

Yikes, I haven't posted in a week -- my mashed potato coma was followed by Black Friday madness, Cyber Monday impulse shopping, and then a day or two of sheer laziness. But, I'm back. And I have a pie recipe as a sort of peace offering for being a bad, bad blogger.

We went to my in-laws' house for Thanksgiving, and they asked if I'd bring a cherry pie. I don't know how to make one of those, so I offered to make an apple pie instead. But if you want to get technical, I don't know how to make that either, so I decided to make a Swedish apple pie.

I don't think it's actually Swedish, but that's not important.

It's super-easy, and that is important.

You'll need:

• 5-6 medium-sized apples (I like Rome apples)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 Tbsp. cinnamon
• 1 1/2 sticks butter (melted)
• 1 cup flour
• 1 egg

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Lightly grease the bottom of a pie plate.  Chop the apples into thin slices and fill the pie dish until it's about level with the top. (Nope, there's no crust on the bottom. Have faith!)
Mix 1/4 cup sugar and 2 Tbsp. of cinnamon in a bowl, then pour evenly over the apples. Then mix the egg, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, and the melted butter in a bowl and pour the mixture evenly over the apples. Some will fill in the cracks, the rest will sit on top. Bake for 45 minutes or until the top turns light golden and a little bit crispy to the touch.

Everyone polished it off and my brother-in-law nominated it as my new signature dish. Woohoo! Win.

Plus it's apples. So don't feel like you have to wait until the holidays. It's practically health food!

Why I'm Thankful for My Messy Life...

I have a bad habit of stressing out about the rooms I haven’t cleaned, the projects I haven’t started, and the clutter I can’t control. But I’m still thankful for all those things I stress about on a daily basis. In the spirit on Thanksgiving, here’s why I’m thankful for my messes:

I’m thankful for the heap of dirty laundry on the bathroom floor, the footie pajamas piled up on the dry sink in the living room in lieu of real decorations, the baskets of hand-me-downs that I keep meaning to organize, and the lost socks collecting dust bunnies under my bed. It’s nice to know my kids and I have clothes to keep us warm.

I’m thankful for the frozen-veggie avalanche that falls out of the freezer every time I open it. It’s annoying, and some veggies hurt worse than other at the speed of gravity (eff you, frozen spinach blocks!), but it’s a lot easier than wondering where our next meal is coming from.

I’m thankful to have friends who don’t care if my house is cluttered and dusty with occasional spiders. Or I’m thankful to have friends who pretend not to care—either way, it’s appreciated.

I’m thankful that my to-do list is so freaking long that it takes up three Stickies on my desktop and gives me a minor panic attack every time I look at it. It means people are still hiring me to do things I love doing.

I’m thankful to have a husband who won’t nominate me for What Not to Wear, no matter how many times I beg him to, because he doesn’t think my situation is dire enough. That’s a pretty sweet compliment, especially on days when I’m still wearing pajama pants at 4 p.m.

I’m thankful that our walls have been gouged by Tonka trucks, our floors are sticky with juice, and our computer screens are covered in chocolate handprints. If my biggest worry is how to get Mr. Potato Head parts out of the VCR, I’m a lucky parent. I’m thankful that my kids are healthy enough to cause mayhem.

Life is good.

And last, I’m thankful that calories don’t count on Thanksgiving! Proven fact.

Happy Turkey Day! ☺

VIDEO: Two boys dump flour all over their house...um, for real?

There's a decent chance you've already seen this video, since it's racked up a quarter-million views in the past four days. But I'm calling fraud on it. Watch it and see what you think:



Look, as the mom of two toddler boys, I've walked in on my share of messes. And it's because I've walked in on my share of messes that I can spot several red flags in this video:

1. In real-toddler-world, all five pounds of flour would be in a big pile in the middle of the kitchen. Once a toddler discovers something that can be spilled, the world stands still until every last drop has been dumped on the floor. I've watched my one-year-old sit at the kitchen table and shake juice out of a leak-proof sippy cup for upwards of ten minutes. I've found him in a mountain of wipes, but I've never found a trail of wipes throughout the house. Toddlers tend to keep their messes confined to their current location, a.k.a. the location where mom currently isn't.
2. I don't see two kids running with a bag of flour, period. A toddler with a five-pound bag of flour is like me with a 20-pound bag -- not gonna happen unless you're talking about this kid. There's flour on the couch -- that's over their heads. Could you hold a 20-pound bag of flour in one hand and casually toss flour over your head with another? On that note...
3. What's with the weird spots of flour on the picture frame? I've spilled a lot of flour, and I can safely say that flour doesn't clump when it hits glass. Unless, say, you're a fame-hungry youtube mom going for maximum shock value, so you spritz a little water on the glass first. Just sayin'.
4. The TV has a light dusting on the edge. Very thoughtful of her kids to leave the most expensive thing in the room relatively unscathed. My kids, in contrast, have a magnetic pull to the most valuable thing in the room, which is why they'll draw on my computer monitor with a Sharpie when there's a blank notebook right in front of them.
5. When I notice my kids have been unusually quiet, I don't grab the video camera just in case they've decided to antique my living room furniture. 
6. If I ever stepped out of the bathroom and saw a trail of flour in the hallway, I wouldn't mutter, "Oh...oh, boy." It'd be more like, "GET IN TIME OUT RIGHT NOW! HOW DID YOU EVEN FIND THE FLOUR?! IT'S ON THE TOP SHELF OF THE CABINET! HOW THE FREAK LONG WAS I IN THE BATHROOM? DO THEY EVEN MAKE A VACUUM THAT CAN FIX THIS?!?!?" But, I guess you can't just hand your boys a bag of flour, help them powder the room, and then yell at them -- that would confuse them. Just sayin' again.
7. She disabled comments. Go figure.

So, what do you think -- real or fake?

RECIPE: Slutty Brownies = the perfect storm of desserts!

I want to tell you about the best brownies in the whole wide world.

Brownies + Oreos + chocolate chip cookies = wheeeeee sugar WHEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

I think I have vertigo.

Disclaimer: This isn't my recipe. In fact, let me start by explaining how I create the recipes I post on here. I have no cooking skills, so I can't just "throw a few things together" in the kitchen because the outcome will usually be surprising in a really bad way. So instead, I start by Googling whatever I feel like eating ("mexican pork slow cooker") and then skim a bunch of recipes to find ingredients I recognize ("corn!"). There's usually a bit of follow-up Googling ("substitute for dill?" or "can you mix basil and cilantro?") and eventually, I come up with a list of ingredients that will, most likely, taste okay when put together. My husband gets the lucky job of lab-testing the meals ("Welcome home, honey, I put jelly in the meatloaf!") and then the ones that don't suck (in my final and overriding opinion) wind up on here.

When three or four days go by without a recipe, you should really feel bad for my husband. Send him a lasagna or something.

But when I stumbled across this recipe, I knew it was solid gold. I ran out to the store at 10:00 at night to get the ingredients. I didn't need to tweak, substitute, or simplify anything. So, I can't lay any claim to this recipe -- all I can do is bow down to The Londoner for sharing her stroke of culinary genius with the interwebs. I think she's my new girl crush, but that could just be the sugar high talking.

She calls them Slutty Brownies -- if that term makes you cringe, try to look past it, because these brownies will make you lose your moral compass.

Click here for the full recipe from The Londoner.

Short version: Line the bottom of a greased 9x13 baking pan with cookie dough batter (I used Betty Crocker bagged mix and added an extra Tbsp of water and an extra Tbsp of applesauce to the batter, like the recipe suggests). Then a layer of Oreos. Then pour brownie batter over that, and cook at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. It comes out looking like this:

Unbutton your pants because you're going to want to eat, like, five.

RECIPE: Pumpkin French Toast

I came across this recipe for pumpkin pie-inspired French toast on Babycenter and immediately made a beeline for the kitchen to try it. (So what if I'd just just finished breakfast ten minutes before that? There's always room for pumpkin!)

I had to substitute a couple of spices for the pumpkin pie spice, like the recipe suggested. And I left out the cloves, because I don't have them in stock either. I also had to substitute crappy wheat bread for the brioche, because what the heck is brioche? If you'd asked me two days ago, I would have guessed it was a cheese. Anyway, Stroehmann wheat worked fine. I prefer thin-sliced bread for French toast anyway -- less bread, more egg and sugar and yumminess.

You'll need:

• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1/4 cup pumpkin puree
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. ginger
• 1/4 tsp. nutmeg
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• 8 slices of bread (well...I cooked four and gave up)

Whisk everything but the bread together. Dip the bread in the goo, then drop it on a preheated skillet on medium (or medium-low-ish) heat and cook until golden. Then drizzle it with maple syrup and be glad it's fall, because fall really has the best foods of any season.