Good for the body & soul

A couple of weeks ago, I was really ill with a nasty stomach flu that was going around. I happened to get it from my preschooler and then so did the rest of the family. When I was finally up to eating, the only thing I wanted was chicken soup. And boy did it make me feel nice! It was like a warm bowl of healthy goodness.

This got me to thinking about the other times I had been under the weather. Most of them started the road to recovery with a bowl of chicken soup in one form or another. I usually make myself a yummy bowl of soup that I’ve spiked with cooked rice & cilantro. It is so delicious. 

Another chicken soup I love & infuses me with well-being is a Thai version called Tom Yum soup. The very best I’ve had is from a Thai restaurant near me called Lemongrass. Their Chicken Tom Yum soup is spicy, rich & makes my mouth water just thinking about it.

Soup is generally something I don’t follow a recipe for since I’ve made it so many times. I normally look at the ingredients & wing it from there without looking at amounts. Making soup is a simple and wonderful thing. It is versatile and forgiving. And one of the best things about soup is that everyone loves it and it makes you feel wonderful eating a great soup too!

So I did take the time to write these favorite soups down and here they are. The Tom Yum soup might have a few unusual ingredients not found in the average American’s pantry or spice cupboard. It may take a trip to the local oriental market to get things like galangal, kaffir lime leaves or bitter melon; trust me, it is well worth it.

I hope you find these recipes as edifying to you as they were for me.

 

Chicken & Rice soup with Cilantro

Prep Time: 20 Minutes

Cook Time: 40 Minutes
Ready in: about 1 Hour
Servings: 6

Ingredients
1 tsp butter
2 medium onions, small dice
2 carrots, small dice
2 ribs celery, small dice
2 tsp garlic, minced
½ cup sherry wine
1 tsp poultry seasoning
½ tsp granulated garlic
½ tsp granulated onion
4 cups chicken stock*
1 ½ cup chicken, chopped
1 cup cooked rice
1 bunch cilantro, minced

Directions

In a large pot, melt butter on low heat.
Sweat onions, carrots & celery until tender.
Add garlic & cook for about 1 more minute. * If using chicken base instead of stock, add base with garlic.
Deglaze with sherry. Add spices. Cook for 5 minutes until alcohol is burned off.
Add chicken stock. Bring to boil, then reduce to simmer.
Add chicken & simmer for 10 minutes.
Add rice, then simmer for 2-3 minutes or until rice is hot.
Remove from heat & add cilantro

Tom Yum Koong Soup  

Prep Time: 20 Minutes

Cook Time: 40 Minutes
Ready in: about 1 Hour
Servings: 6

"This Thai soup with straw mushrooms starts with a stock made from chicken combined with slices of galangal, kaffir lime leaves, lemon grass and fish sauce. Garnish with cilantro."

INGREDIENTS:

1 tsp sesame oil
4 white onions, julienne
2 bitter melon, seeded & julienne
1/2 cup oyster sauce
4 cups chicken broth
2 lemon grass
4 kaffir lime leaves
4 slices galangal, minced
4 bird's eye chiles (*optional)
12 green onion, diced
1 1/2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 1/2 limes, juiced
1 teaspoon white sugar
1 teaspoon thai chile paste (like sriracha)
8 straw mushrooms, halved
15-20 cilantro leaves

DIRECTIONS:

Trim lemongrass and cut into small matchstick size pieces. Or leave in larger pieces to remove later.
In a large pot, sauté white onions in sesame oil until translucent, add bitter melon. Sauté for about 2-3 minutes
Add oyster sauce, stock, lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, galangal, bird eye chilies*, green onions, fish sauce, lime juice, sugar and chili paste to a pot then bring to a boil, simmer 25 minutes.
Bring to boil, after boiling for 5 minutes, add mushrooms. Cook for further 10 minutes or until mushrooms are tender and heated through.
Remove lemongrass (if not soften and tender enough to eat) and lime leaves.
Garnish with cilantro.

“Me want cookie!” - Cookie Monster

Lately, I have noticing there are a lot, I mean, A LOT of peanut butter cookie recipes being posted on Pinterest lately. Sometimes I feel like I can’t get by 4 posts without seeing another one. And most of them have unsubstantiated claims like “Only 4 ingredidents1” or “gluten free!” but when you get to the actual recipe, you find it had 12 ingredients and at least one is flour.

I have decided to throw my hat into the arena for this. Because if there is one thing I love better than donuts, it’s peanut butter! My mom can attest to this addiction came from a very young age. She has a picture of me & my brother when we have the infamous Peanut Butter & Cheese fight – this was when you could get both in a squeeze-able container. If you substitute peanut butter for green eggs & ham, then I’m right with you Sam I Am!

This recipe has been tweeted and twisted and turned a bit. As usual, when I was working on it, I grabbed as many Peanut Butter cookie recipes as I could find, then compared them all to one another to see what the major & minor differences were. Most were the same. Except one. It called itself “The Impossible Peanut Butter Cookie” and I agreed with the title. This cookie had no flour and only 3 ingredients – Peanut Butter, sugar & eggs. I thought, no way this can work! There just no way, there’s no flour to give texture or build off the gluten, no leavening – this thing is just going to melt into a giant puddle on the pan. So I set that recipe aside and worked on the rest to make, what sounded like on paper, a really great cookie.

It was okay. Nothing special. Yeah, it was a peanut butter cookie, so that made it delicious, but it wasn’t anything to write home about or bring to work to say, hey try this! I decided to look at the impossible cookie again. I made a small batch, because I didn’t want to waste my precious ingredients. Lo & behold – it was really good! It held its shape well enough that pressing it was necessary and it worked great making peanut butter blossoms too! But I wanted more – you’ve never heard that from me before have you? ;)

Now was the time to put on my culinary thinking cap & put all of the years of school and cooking & baking to work. What could I do to bring out the peanut butter flavor & truly delight a PB head like me?

The final product doubled the number of ingredients to six. Peanut butter (of course), eggs, brown & white sugar (the original recipe only called for white) vanilla & the curveball – curry powder. Believe it or not, the curry truly brought out the flavor of the peanut butter & it was such a minute amount that it is almost undetectable. So if you love peanut butter as much as I do, these are the cookies for you!

Peanut Butter Cookies

Total Time: 12 mins

Yield: 18 cookies

Ingredients

1 cup peanut butter (your choice, smooth or chunky)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 large egg
1/16 tsp curry powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
sugar, for rolling (optional)

Directions

Mix peanut butter, both sugars, curry, vanilla and egg together until smooth.
Drop by teaspoon onto cookie sheet two inches apart. If desired, roll in extra sugar before placing on cookie sheet.
Press with fork; press again in opposite direction.*
Bake 8-9 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Do not brown; do not over bake.

*If making Peanut Butter Blossoms, roll balls in sugar & do not flatten before baking. Pressing the kiss into the cookie after it comes out of the oven when flatten the cookie.

The way the cookie crumbles

This week was a friend’s birthday and I wanted to surprise her with a birthday treat. So I had some other people ‘casually’ ask her what kind of sweets she likes and it came down to chocolate.

While chocolate is a pretty easy choice for bringing a dessert, but the first thing that springs to mind was Chocolate Chip Cookies. Now if you know me like I know me, making the recipe off the back of the Nestle Toll House chips bag wasn’t going to cut it, by a long shot. Especially since the idea was to have a really great cookie. I am not saying those cookies are good, they aren’t, but I wanted something more. Something that really brought out the chocolate in the cookies & made them more than ordinary.

So that got me thinking about what enhances chocolate. I did some research and found there are a few things that do the trick. But I wasn’t convinced adding instant coffee, red peppercorns or chiles were the way to go necessarily. Maybe I was simply overthinking it? So I got back to the drawing board & grabbed about 7 or 8 different chocolate chips cookie recipes that had high rates and compared them, and yes I did include the Nestle Toll House one; it’s a classic and it was appropriate to be there.

A couple of things stood out on some unique recipes, one by Elizabeth Faulkner and the other boasting to be The Best NY Times Cookie. They both used bread and cake flour instead of AP flour. Now I don’t keep any other flours at home except AP cuz it is easy enough to create them from ingredients I have on hand. The other thing was resting the dough, at least overnight.

That seemed to make no sense to me – rest cookie dough? Why? Well here’s why. Like in pie dough, the flour needs to hydrate and because there is not actual water in the dough, it must get it from the eggs & butter. The water in them is more gelatinous, the one recipe explained so it takes more time to hydrate the flour. If you’ve ever made pie dough & let it rest in the fridge for ½ hour, you know what I mean as how different that time makes from before & after.

I also found that brown sugar enhances the chocolate too. Since more brown sugar lends to a chewier cookie, I replaced all of the white sugar with brown. For the substitution for the bread flour, I added 1tsp of Vital Gluten to each cup of AP Flour. I also added 1 Tablespoons of cornstarch to each cup of AP flour the recipe called for as cake flour (taking that tablespoon out of the flour measure on the AP for cake too – if that makes sense.) To mix things up a bit more, I used ½ semi-sweet chips & ½ dark chocolate chips, added butter extract with the vanilla extract & did include some instant coffee.

Now I know some of you are asking, what is vital gluten & butter extract & where do I find them. Vital Gluten is wheat protein flour; I buy mine either at the health food store or in the baking aisle with the Red Bob’s Mill product, usually by the yeast. Butter extract is a flavoring used to give a buttery taste to baked goods without having to add additional butter to the recipe. I find it either at a cake decorating store or even at my local Walmart in their cake decorating supplies area. However, the amounts are pretty small, so you could skip either one, but the cookies got rave reviews.

I made a double batch but had to bake one off immediately & couldn’t let it rest as I needed it the next day. That’s the one I brought in & everyone loved. With that in mind, each batch makes about 60 cookies.

*** Update - if you do let the dough rest, you lose about a dozen cookies. I just scooped by 72 hour rested batch and only got about 48 cookies***

Now that I’ve bored you with all of the technical details, here is the recipe I know you really wanted.

Chocolate Chip Cookies, Best

Makes about 60 cookies unrested dough; 48 cookies rested dough

 

 Ingredients:

• 3 ½ C + 1 tbsp. + 1 tsp. AP flour
• 2 tbsp. cornstarch
• 1 2/3 tsp. vital gluten
• 1 ¼ tsp. baking soda
• 1 ½ tsp. baking powder
• 2 tsp. kosher salt
• 2 ½ sticks (1 1/4 cups) unsalted butter
• 2 2/3 C packed brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp. instant coffee crystals (optional – for a stronger chocolate flavor*)
• 2 tsp. vanilla extract
• 2 tsp. butter extract
• 10 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 10 oz. dark chocolate chips

Preparation:

1. Mix together flour, cornstarch, gluten, baking soda, & baking powder into a medium bowl.
2. In a large bowl (preferably of a stand mixer) cream butter, sugar & salt together (using paddle attachment) until very light, about 5 minutes.
3. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, making sure they are fully incorporated before adding the next.* If adding coffee, add after 1^st egg.
4. Mix in the vanilla & butter extract.
5. On low speed, add the dry ingredients and mix until just combined, only 5-10 seconds.
6. Gently incorporate the chocolate into the dough.
7. Press plastic wrap against the dough and refrigerate 48 hours (at least 24, can be up to 72 hours). Dough can be used in batches, if desired.
8. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees.
9. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.
10. Scoop golf-ball sized dough balls onto baking sheet, making sure to leave about 1” between each.
11. Bake 7 minutes, rotate pans & bake for an additional 7 minutes until golden brown but still soft.
12. Transfer sheet to a wire rack and cool 10 minutes, then move cookies onto the rack or other surface to continue to cool.
13. Repeat, as needed, and in as many batches as desired, until all the dough is used.
14. Eat warm and make sure you have a napkin near (for crumbs, melted chocolate, and the drool that will inevitably accumulate due to the overwhelming deliciousness)!