By Special Request: Cookie Link Round-Up

Yesterday, I got the same question from Heather in Paris and Book Clubber Amy in West Seattle: do I have any recommendations for a good cookie for the holiday season? Heather is looking forward to visiting her fella across the Channel and having access to a proper oven. Amy is heading to a new mom cookie exchange.

I was, of course, no help on the spot. Amy caught herself as she was asking the question, realizing that her requirements for a recipe (tastiness, holiday appropriateness, relative ease of preparation for a very new mom) and my usual selection criteria (is this the most complicated way to go about making this food stuff, stopping just shy of necessitating growing the raw ingredients myself and/or what weird ingredient will it require me to buy?) might not overlap a whole lot.

Nevertheless, what good is a Google Reader dedicated to food blogs and full to the brim with holiday tips if I can’t expertly slice my way through it like a sushi chef to at least attempt to give my friends some useful info? 

Here’s what I came up with for some tasty but not-too-time-consuming holiday treats:

Actually, this first one for Butter-Nut Blondies is personally tried and tested...

...and the Blondies are a) DELICIOUS and b) super easy to prepare, especially as it is a bar recipe.  Although many people don't often have whole wheat flour on hand, it's worth it to buy some, as then you will have an excuse to make these all the time.  I have never had the butterscotch flavoring called for, and haven't missed it.  Don't skip the potentially odd-seeming vinegar; it helps make these more complex and interesting instead of just sweet.

Mark Bittman’s has an easy-sounding recipe for Butter Cookies that can be made in a food processor and the dough can be split to accommodate different mixins.

Oregon live has: One Dough, Five Cookies.  Starting from the one recipe you can make Master Butter Cookie, Chocolate Peppermint Drop Cookies, Coconut Caramel Bars, Dutch Spice Cutouts, Cranberry-Pecan White Chocolate Cookies

Chow.com has a list of recipes they say are easy enough that you can do multiple at a time. They include: Pumpkin Butterscotch-Chip Cookies, CHOW’s Intense Brownies, Super-Sized Ginger Chewies, Double Chocolate-Caramel Cookies (“thumbprint cookies with a serious dose of chocolate and a chewy caramel center”), Sticky Peanut Cookie Bars, Sugar Cookies with Eggnog Frosting, Coconut-Date Icebox Cookies.

Here are some other miscellaneous cookies that would make a nice addition to a holiday cookie plate: Hazelnut Kiss Cookies, Chai Spice Gingerbread Girls, Icebox Cookies (easy-to-make dough, chill, slice and bake) in Pistachio-Cranberry or Eggnog

And here's a quick round-up of some Cookie Tips and Tricks, along with some other recipes... 

• Tips for Sugar Cookies with link to recipe from Gina DePalma, author of Dolce Italiano
• Epicurious has a slideshow of 25 most popular Xmas cookie recipes with some cooking tips
• Tips on rolling out cookies
• Chow has some Cookie Tips video

Once you are all done with your baking, how about some ideas for drink pairings with holiday cookies beyond the traditional milk?

Fast, Junk and Questionable Food News

On an endorphin rush from tonights installment of the 30-Day Shred, I blasted through 800+ items in my previously-neglected food blog reader.  Here are the highlights of the news related to food you probably shouldn't eat but probably sometimes want to.

Chow has a list of 10 frozen drinks for summer, and, actually, most of them are really probably not fast, junk or questionable.  But I was DEVASTATED to learn that Mr. Misty frozen drinks have been renamed Arctic Rush, which sounds to me more like some kind of mentholated deodorant body wash aimed at men aged 18-34.  This wasn't even apparently its first renaming, which means I am very out of touch with the goings-on at Dairy Queen.

Also on Chow - Burger King now has a $200 burger. Proceeds defensively and pre-emptively going to charity.

The SuperTaster (James Norton) on Chow taste-tests, well, questionable food.  This entry is on "shelf-stable ice cream floats" in a bottle.  As he notes, the product was plainly inevitable:

If there’s one thing that parents dread with the coming of each and every summer, it’s the incredible challenge of making root beer or orange soda floats for the kids. We’ve all been there: First, you have to buy vanilla ice cream. Then you have to buy soda. But, wait, there’s more: You have to put a scoop of ice cream into the soda. It’s crazy, right? And who’s going to clean the spoon?

And rounding out the Chow update, here's a brief one, but a caution!  Think carefully before you click on the link in this Chow post.  It takes you to a picture of French fry-coated bacon on a stick.  NSFA (Not Safe For Anyone)

Do you need your bacon portable, but are afraid that French fries simply won't be adequate protection?  Slog has a picture of bacon in a can.  Rolled in its own paper towels.

Epicurious has news of the temporary Hydrox comeback, and a Hydrox cookie contest.  Is it uncool to admit that you sort of like Hydrox better?  I've never really admitted it to myself, but I'll say it now.  That's right: I like Hydrox better than Oreo cookies.  They are crisper.  You don't know what you got 'til it's gone and then temporarily brought back.

Potentially winning the Most Questionable award for this entry, Lego Fun Snacks (gummy fruit snacks shaped like childhood toy and choking hazard Lego blocks) are featured on Accidental Hedonist, who predicts, "Next up for Kellog's - fruit roll-ups recreated to look like shards of glass."

You can add Pringles can designer Fred Baur to the growing list of fast and questionable food notables who passed away recently but whose relatively long life spans belie the idea that the foods are questionable at all.  Of course, we don't know how many Pringles Mr. Baur actually ate in one day, but he was proud enough of his can design enough to have a portion of his ashes buried in a Pringles container.  Which I find oddly touching.

Link Round-Up: (At Risk of Irritating Myself) Eating in Season

Seasonal and local eating is all the rage nowadays, and as mentioned before, my general knee-jerk aversion to trends makes me a bit skeptical about all of the hype.  Will people keep doing this two, five, ten years from now?  It can take more effort, more planning, more trips to the market, more creativity and, quite frankly, a heck of a lot more money sometimes. 

I just remember being in middle school and being very very concerned about the environment, and it felt – at the time – like it was a Thing, you know?  REM's Green album and whatnot.  Saving the rainforest was very trendy back then; did that actually help the rainforest at all?

Click to read more ...

Link Round-Up: Eating Right in 2008

Okay kids, the fun is almost over.  For most people in this country, holiday eating hit its peak on Tuesday, and will start to decline through the New Year, at which point our guilt and shame will kick in and we’ll make lots of plans to fix how we eat.

Or at least that’s the clichéd version of American holiday eating…I actually feel like because of the time off from the 2367 jobs, I was eating less during the holidays since I wasn’t stress-eating to get through my over-packed day.  And, I have to say, this little website project has made me more excited about cooking (it’s always more fun to cook for more people, even if it’s virtually and just to recount your experience), so really, I’m rolling into 2008 without my usual load of guilt and shame.  Check me out!

Nevertheless, I can still improve and losing some weight is always a good idea for me, so I put together a Link Round-Up of some healthy diet links – both diet in the sense of what you eat everyday regarding of weight status, and in the sense of wanting to weigh less. 

How to Eat

• How to Eat in Seven Words – advice from Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  Those seven words?  "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
• Dr. Weil also has a great and concise resource - I’ve linked to this in the past - that’s called The Anti-Inflammatory Diet.  It has some excellent basic information.
• Epicurious has a short article on healthy eating, including some nutrition guidelines and links to resources, like the Tufts University Health and Nutrition Newsletter and, for the parents out there, a Feeding Kids Newsletter written by a dietician.

What to Eat/Pantry Stocking

• What to Eat by Marion Nestle – I haven’t read the book yet, but I listened to this podcast from KUOW’s Speakers Forum and decided I really would like to.  In the podcast, she describes how readers of her first book, Food Politics, expressed to her at readings and signings that they wished the book told them what to eat.  As a New Yorker who didn’t do her shopping in large supermarkets, she didn’t quite understand what their confusion was about…until it took her at least three visits to the grocery store just to get adequate data to compare the seven different types of romaine available at one market.  The book is supposed to be an aisle-by-aisle analysis of the grocery store to help empower you to make the best possible decisions.
• Yahoo has a list of “127 Foods that Fight Fat.” Well, not exactly, Yahoo.  More like some lower-calorie options for common foods.  However, keeping some of these options in the forefront of your mind when shopping might help you make good choices.
• Eating Well has a feature on stocking your pantry for eating healthy in a hurry.
• Dr. Weil’s advice on Pantry Stocking and some background on the Science of Nutrition to help clarify the "why" behind the "what."   
• Here’s my own little addition: my list of the 14 Top Healthy Foods based on my cross-referenced review of several recent lists and articles.
• And if all this healthy eating seems a bit expensive, here's an MSN story on eating healthy and organic on just $7 a day. (Spoiler: It helps if, like me, your peasant genes give you a natural affinity for beans.)
  

How to Cook

• Eating Well has Quick (under 30 minutes) and Ultra-Quick (under 20 minutes) recipes.
• Some cooking tips from Dr. Weil.
  

What to Eat When Eating Out

• Eating Well has a couple of sets of tips for eating in restaurants; nothing earth-shattering, but some good reminders. Set 1 and Set 2. 
• Lifehacker has a link to a chart comparing the calorie count and fat of various fast food options.  If you are out and about, sometimes that is your only option, so this is one way to minimize the damage.
• Lifehacker also has link to another article about how to lessen the impact of fast food eating. 
• And this has been making the rounds forever, but just in case you think Chipotle is a less-fattening option, you might want to confirm that by checking out the calorie content of your favorite burrito.

Miscellaneous Tips and Techniques for Weight Loss & Weight Maintenance
(Note – this is weight maintenance for those who have a tendency to put on the pounds, as opposed to quick-metabolism’d people who have trouble keeping weight on. )

• Body + Soul’s article on “Mastering Your Metabolism” which takes the anti-inflammation angle and applies it to weight loss and gain.
• Body + Soul also has some tips on “Curbing Your Cravings.” 
• LifeHack has a post on overcoming stress-eating through mental imagery. 
• Ben Popkin from Consumerist.com “Lost 14.6 Pounds Sitting in Front of a Computer.”  While I can’t really get behind the Shangri-La diet aspect of his success, mainly because I like to cook too much, the technophile part of me loves how he used all these different technologies to help him out.
• And Accidental Hedonist is running a poll about New Year's Resolutions and diet.  Weigh in with your opinion!  Get it?!? Ha ha...eh.

Gift Links Overview

So I've done a bunch of posts on gifts, here's a quick overview of them all for quick reference...

• Homemade Gifts
• Not-Homemade Gifts to Order Link 1
• Not-Homemade Gifts to Order Link 2
• Pacific Northwest-Produced Gifts
• Charitable Gifts
  

Link Round-Up: Last-Minute Gift Options

Are you scrambling to send something last-minute for Xmas?  For most retail websites, today is the last day to order.  And oops (checks watch), for some of those, it might already be too late since many have 12pm Eastern limitations.

But if you want to try your luck, here are a couple of mail-order (mail-order?  Do we still call it that?  It’s really online-order for the most part now…) options that you can frantically click through and check the cut-off times.  If I were really thorough, I would have researched the cut-off times for each link, but if you’re frantically looking for last-minute gifts, what are you judging me for?  (Eyebrow raise.)  Ha!  Gotcha there, don’t I?!

Here’s a link back to my first post with a lot of online-ordering options. 

Epicurious has a nice list of best books of 2007, organized in such a way that it makes it easy to drill down to the right one for your recipient, and a blurb about each one.  1080 Recipes and Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian look especially useful.  Actually, so does The Essential Baker.  You know what, just look at the list, why am I highlighting a highlights list?

Chow has a list of online gift sites, both inedible/edible and all sweets. 

Link Round-Up: Charitable Gifts

Don't want to give stuff? Or foodstuff?  Recipient already owns everything?  Charitable gifts might be an option.  Here are some links related to different charitable gift ideas...

Help local producers recover from the early December rainstorms by donating to the Good Farmer Fund.  Scroll to halfway through page for contact info.

Here's a NYT article on how to decide how to allocate your charitable giving, including a charitable "gift card" that allows the recipient to choose one of 200 charities to give to (good idea if you're not 100% clear on their politics, etc.).

You can donate to FareStart's job training and placement program (which is truly is a gift that keeps on giving, much in the "teach a man to fish" tradition), or you could directly donate items that the homeless and disadvantaged FareStart students have on their wishlists.  Pillows and pillowcases are the most requested item!  If you're at a big box store or Ikea or something this weekend, why not pick up an extra one - even very comfy ones can be quite inexpensive - and the site says they "can be dropped off (please label) at the FareStart Administrative entrance at 700 Virginia St. or contact FareStart to arrange. 206-443-1233."