How to use up raw pecans & chocolate candies...

Pecan cookies with chocolate caramel center.

I am now an expert at shucking pecans.
       At Thanksgiving, Wes went over to his grandparents' house and he and his grandpa picked pecans. I wasn't there but I imagine they picked pecans for appropriately seven hours and eighteen minutes while discussing the complete works of Krisnamurti. Wes returned with a large paper grocery sack FILLED with raw pecans (still shelled). I like pecans. I was excited. Raw nuts are expensive and we just got about 5-6 pounds for free! But I've never shucked nuts before in my life. I wasn't aware how difficult those little suckers would be to open. The excitement ended when I picked up a nutcracker for the first time. LOL
       Over the course of the next three months, Wes & I took shifts shucking them. We'd do a few handfuls at a time. Shuck nuts, hurt fingers, enjoy healthy snack, repeat. When we whittled down the amount in the paper grocery sack and had few enough left, we placed what was left in a Pyrex for storage. The time came for me to need to transport cupcakes to my Arbonne + RagsReborn party. The rest of the pecans had to go. Commence mass nutcracker pecan shucking party!

Text courtesy of Lacey.

After a night of labor, I was left with a rather large bowl of pecans. What to do with them? ... 

                                           

The literal fruits of our labor.

Wes' brother gave me a really nice (and large) box of chocolates for Christmas. I brought them to Christmas dinner at my mom's but we didn't get a chance to open them because there were already plenty of desserts. So, Wes & I took the chocolates back home and put them away.
       Fast forward almost two months ... today I remembered that I have a really nice box of unopened chocolate covered sea salt caramels just sitting in my kitchen waiting to be eaten. I had some for breakfast (they were delicious) and decided I wanted to use the rest for baking. I could have had more for breakfast but I didn't for the sake of my teeth and waistline.

There was only supposed to be 24 chocolates in the box but I got 25 when I opened it! Yay, bonus chocolate!

       I really like those peanut butter cookies with the Hershey's kiss in the middle--well, more like on top. I think they're called "Chocolate Thumbprints". I also really like Turtle (aka caramel and nut... not the animal) flavored desserts. A former coworker of mine would always bring "Trailer Trash Turtles" to our company potlucks. They're pretzels with Rolo candies and pecans on top. I've never made either thumbprints or turtles before but I imagine they're both pretty easy. And the two could probably be combined into one master cookie. Using that as my inspiration, I decided to bake some cookies with the Christmas chocolate candies in the center & crushed pecans in the dough. This is my first time baking these* & the recipe is mostly made up, except I used a sugar cookie recipe from a baking cookbook to get the correct proportions (because baking without correct proportions is disastrous). Wish me luck!
       *I will add adjustments to the recipe once I'm done baking...and if it's terrible, I'll just scrap this blog and post pictures of Sadie & Athena instead. LOL

Caramel stuffed cookie recipe:

       Ingredients- 

• 1/3 cup of granulated sugar*, 
• 1/3 cup of brown sugar*,
       *sugar cookies call for 1/2 cup each of brown & granulated sugars but I went with only 1/3 cup because I didn't want them to be too sweet with the candy in the center. The lesser amount of sugar did not affect the cookie texture or baking.
• 1 stick of butter (at room temperature & softened), 
• 1 egg, 
• 1 1/4 cup of flour, 
• 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, 
• chocolate caramel candies (make sure you have one per cookie; not all chocolates are shown in this picture), 
• 1/4 cup of pecan pieces, 
• a dash of nutmeg & a splash of vanilla (both are optional)
        I was able to make 12 cookies from this recipe. The chocolates were pretty large (about 1 x 1 inch squares). The recipe should be able to make one and a half dozen cookies if the chocolate pieces were smaller. 

1. Get a large mixing bowl and cream both sugars & butter. This is easiest to do with an electric mixer.

2. Once creamed, add egg, vanilla & nutmeg and mix together until everything is well blended.

3. In a separate smaller bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda & pecans.

4. Slowly add the flour mixture into the butter mixture. I always use one hand to pour while the other hand is mixing.

5. Wrap completed dough in Saran Wrap and refrigerate for an hour (more or less... I never time these things.) You can preheat the oven while waiting on the dough to chill. Preheat to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. 

6. After chilling...time to make cookies!! Take a chocolate candy and wrap dough around it. The cookies will be little dough balls with candy in the center. 

7. Place the balls onto a cookie sheet (you can grease the cookie sheet or use parchment paper but I have a Silpat and I LOVE it) and press down onto the balls until the tops are flat. Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until golden brown.

8. Cool and enjoy!! (but don't cool for too long...these are best eaten warm so you can truly experience the gooey caramel center!)

These cookies turned out so well!! So so yummy!! Especially for being the first time I ever made them. I have impressed myself. LOL If I had to tweak the recipe, I'd use smaller pieces of chocolate candy and maybe only one type of sugar. And that's only because they turned out a little sweet for my taste.

Wes is cooking again...

...and he's making chili. Last week's blog was a bit long so we'll keep this one short. I am also photographing and blogging and sorta helping in the kitchen as Wes cooks & dictates instructions to me (I'm a multitasking extraordinaire over here!) so I don't have much time for storytelling anyway. Wes is quick in the kitchen so this is just a little difficult. Hopefully, I won't leave out any steps. He's my proof reader anyway, so if I leave something out, I'm sure he'll add it back in. Enjoy!

--By the way... my husband's best dish is his slow cooker chili. So.effing.YUMMY. We haven't entered any competitions but if we did, I'm almost certain we'd place. We use the same basics each time: meat, tomatoes, chili powder but we also like to mix it up and do something a little different each time. This combination of meats and vegetables made for an amazing recipe. Its the middle of summer but, what the hey, let's go ahead and make some chili anyway! (Remind me to not get into children's poem or book writing.)--

Wes' Chili recipe-
       Ingredients needed:

• 3 stalks of celery
• 6 small peppers (You can use any combination of any type of pepper you want--all hot or all mild or a mix of the two. We are using banana peppers from our garden. They are a medium mild pepper.)
• 1 pound of ground beef (I was going to type 'tube' because that's what it comes in but Wes made me change it to pound.)
• 9 ounces of beef chorizo (which also comes in a tube)
• 1 16 ounce can of diced potatoes (We used the canned potatoes with jalapenos because we're using milder banana peppers.)
• 2 10 ounce cans of diced tomatoes with lime juice and cilantro (You must get the cilantro lime tomaotes...the other ones aren't as good!)
• 1 tablespoon green onions (because neither of us like traditional onions)
• A tiny "little bit" of garlic (Wes' measurement)
• Wes says he never measures the amount of chili powder he puts in there... let's just say a 4 tablespoons of dark chili powder & 2 tablespoons of regular chili powder

1. Remove the seeds from the peppers and dice them. Then dice the celery.

The man moves too quickly so I only got a picture of the peppers. The celery wasn't diced too small. I would say about pieces a quarter inch thick.

2. Put the diced vegetables in the crock pot along with the garlic and green onions. Also, add the potatoes. It doesn't matter what order you add them in since we'll be stirring them together at the end anyway.

3. Put both meats in a pan and brown them together. Make sure they are mixed up really well. (Check out my action shots!!)

4. Put both cooked meats atop the veggies in the crock pot.

5. Add tomatoes and chili powder. 

Cilantro lime tomatoes only!! I am obsessed with cilantro!!

6. Stir thoroughly to make sure everything is combined.

7. Cook on high for 3 hours. 

       I have no nutritional or serving size/amount for this recipe. I can tell you its pretty spicy, not gluten free and not vegan. We usually have a bowl each for dinner and then there's enough left over for us to do leftovers for lunch the next day. It keeps in the fridge for a few days and you can reheat it in the microwave or on the stove top. 

       Since taking a picture of a slow cooker sitting there for three hours is boring, here is a picture of Wes & Sadie resting after our hard work.

Wes is making deliciously amazing pot roast.

Ahhh date night <3 Dinner on the patio. With lanterns!! Welcome spring : )

One of the first things that Wes cooked for me was pot roast. (Actually, the first thing he cooked for me was a pork tenderloin but that's not a regular in our recipe rotation so we'll just skip straight to the pot roast.) Not long after we started dating, one of his co-workers gave him some left over pot roast. Seeing as he was a bachelor, she gave him enough to last a week. LOL Since he had so much, Wes was nice enough to share. I've never had homemade pot roast; it was so yummy! Why have I never made this before?!?! After that, we (mostly Wes) felt inspired to make our own pot roast. Wes doesn't cook often, but there are two things he does well. One is chili and the other is pot roast. I'll blog about the chili another time.

We're having it for dinner tonight so I'm here in the kitchen taking pictures and typing as he cooks...
Slow-Cooker Pot Roast Recipe:
INGREDIENTS -                   3 cups vegetable broth      
    2lb of roast                         2 bay leaves (1 leaf for each pound of meat)




1 large potato                     1 pinch of minced garlic
1 cup lentils                        1 dash of parsley, salt and pepper (or however much you'd prefer)
1 cup carrots                      1 packet of soup mix



Disclaimer: Wes prefers mushrooms but he knows my favorite is lentils so he's doing lentils for me. You have to really like lentils to add them in your pot roast. If you aren't a huge lentil fan, I'd say go with mushrooms instead. Since the lentils are in the crock pot all day, they get super mushy and soak up all the broth. And its a crazy gravy-like consistency mess if you try to heat up the left overs. When I studied in Spain, my host mom made this really thick lentil soup and I LOVED it. It was one of the tastiest things that she cooked. So, I'm okay with mushy stewed lentils but they aren't for the faint of heart.

1. Thaw the meat. If you forget to thaw it, defrost the meat by running it under cold water (not hot water). Wes saw Alton Brown do some experiment with defrosting duck shaped ice sculptures    using either running cold water or in the oven and cold water worked better. Poor melted ducks!!
2. Cut up the meat, potatoes and carrots into chunks.

3. Put into the slow cooker in this order - meat, bay leaf, lentils, carrots, parsley, salt, pepper, soup mix, garlic, broth and, then potato. Save the potatoes for last. When they cook, they'll get soft but not mushy because they're left on top. (Some of this I'm quoting directly from Wes.)

4. Cook for 8 hours on low heat. If you only have 6 hours, you should have it on low for a majority of the time and then switch it to high for the last hour.

5. If you aren't going to be at home, no need to check on it. But if you are home, stir the stuff in the crock pot around every 2 hours. After your 8 hours are done, it should look awesome and like this.

So there you have it...my man can cook! : ) I'll ask him to make chili so we can have a blog on that, too. Using other people's recipes makes blogging easier. Maybe, I can bug my mom into getting some of her Chinese food recipes. Mmmmm!

Erica is entering the world of recipe writing...

The next few months will be filled with sewing and pillow making so I won't have regular weekly crafts. Instead, I will share a few of my favorite recipes. But...here's the deal... I don't follow recipes (in my defense, nothing ever really turns out nasty). Since I don't follow recipes, I don't know how good I'll be at writing them. I don't measure ingredients and I add random things as I go (my favorites are flax seed and cilantro). When I find a recipe online, I follow it halfway and then I cook the rest according to whatever sounds good in my head.

Other times, I'll only find a picture of something and try to cook it. That's how this recipe came about. I saw this on barre3's Facebook page.

It looked amazing and I wanted to eat it. But the link didn't work. I replicated it using the picture as a guide and it turned out great. (I served it to Lacey & Wes and they both liked it so its not just me saying it was delicious). Here's what I did...

Stuffed butternut squash-

     Ingredients: 1 butternut squash (makes 4 servings)
                        3 tablespoons of butter
                        1 tube of ground turkey
                        a spattering of fresh herbs (I'm using marjoram and cilantro)
                        a handful of mushrooms diced
                        2 stalks of celery diced
                        tiny bit of minced garlic
                        dash of  salt & pepper
                        1 cup of Italian white cheese (I'm using mozzarella and fontina)

1. Cut your butternut squash as shown and then hollow it out. (This could cause you to lose some fingers so be careful!)

I used a spoon and butter knife to scrape about three quarters of the meat out. (Its good to leave some of the meat in the squash) The squash pieces should look like 4 little bowls.

Then cut the meat into small cubes.

2. Sautee the garlic, herbs, celery and mushrooms together. Set aside. Then, sautee the squash and turkey; cook until about almost done. Mix the vegetable mixture in with the turkey and season with as much salt and pepper as desired.

3. Melt your butter & spread on the hollowed out squash and place on a cookie/baking sheet.

4. Spoon the turkey mixture back into the squash. Bake at 350F for 45 minutes.

5. Sprinkle a generous amount of cheese on top and bake another 5 minutes-just long enough to let the cheese melt.

6.Remove from oven and cool for about 5 minutes before serving.

Delicious!! And healthy : )