Monday, November 21, 2011

I Think You Should Try These

Since having my time off work, I have been cooking and baking more and loving it! I have also been trying to put some things in the freezer for when we are too busy with the lil' punkin to want to cook dinner. I have put away some spaghetti sauce, a chicken and sausage casserole and some soup. I made a double batch of these cookies last week in hopes to put some away put apparently they were too delicious and have been disappearing rather quickly.
The recipe for these Ranger Cookies came out of my Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. Yes, I use it a lot.
Ranger Cookies
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 cup quick-cooking rolled oats
1 cup coconut
1 cup raisins, dried cherries, dried cranberries or mixed dried fruit bits
{I used dried cranberries and a few white chocolate chips I had on hand as well}
1. Preheat oven to 375. Beat butter with electric mixer for 30 seconds. Add sugars, baking powder and baking soda beating until combined, scraping sides of bowl.
2. Beat in the egg and vanilla until combined. Beat in as much flour as possible with mixer and stir in any remaining. Stir in oats, coconut, dried fruit.
3. Drop by rounded teaspoons 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 8-10 minutes or until the edges are light brown. Cool on cookie sheet 1 minute and then transfer to a wire rack and let cool.
{I ended up baking mine for about 12-13 minutes. I don't know if my spoonfuls were just too big or my oven is weird or what--so just a heads up.}

Also, last week, I realized we hadn't had pork in awhile so I took some pork chops out of the freezer from our "farm raised" pigs and put them in the frying pan, roasted some butternut squash in the oven and added it to some quinoa
I cooked the quinoa in the rice cooker with 1C of quinoa to 2C of water. That took about 20 minutes.
While the quinoa was cooking, I sauteed quite a bit of garlic and green onions in a little butter.
Once the squash was done, I let it cool a bit and cut it up into chunks.
I added the quinoa to the garlic and onion, added the squash, some salt, pepper and a touch of cumin and stirred it all together.
I love quinoa but I always forget about it. I think it has great nutritional value, is a grain with protein {which is very important for me right now} and is a nice change from plain rice. We then topped it with some green peppers and yellow onions that had been in the pan with the pork chops. Ben really liked the meal and it was definitely good when you could get most of the ingredients into one bite!

I know these are kind of random recipes to stick together but they were easy, delicious and I actually remembered to take pictures of them!

What have you been cookin' and bakin' lately? Any great quinoa recipes to share?


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