Pantry Collective

Around Thanksgiving, when cranberries were readily available and inexpensive, I bought an extra bag and froze it so I’d have some around once they were gone for another year. For some reason supermarkets think we don’t want to eat cranberries any time of the year except late fall. While it’s true that they happen to be in season then, it’s not like seasonality has ever concerned the grocery store before (see: tomatoes RIGHT NOW).

These muffins are delightful. Have I ever made muffins from scratch before? Nope. Were these super easy? Yep. Tart cranberries, fresh orange zest, and yummy toasted walnuts, with a crunchy muffin top thanks to the sugar sprinkles. You could make blueberry muffins with the same recipe, although I would use lemon zest in that case. I might increase the amount of fruit, too - 1 1/2 cups is fine, but I think they could have handled two cups and would have been all the more full of cranberry flavor.

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I know that’s a strange name, but these cookies are so full of butter (and therefore amazingly good) we could only make them once per year in my house growing up. I guess since Christmas and Thanksgiving were already full of bad-for-you treats, Valentine’s Day got these cookies. The original recipe, from a set of recipe cards from 1984, calls them “Chocolate Nut Logs”, but for whatever reason we stopped making them with nuts long ago. To make them seem more appropriate for Valentine’s Day my mom would sometimes shape the cookies into hearts. Now that I live in Chicago I’m rarely home for Valentine’s Day and I miss these cookies like crazy, so I convinced my mom to make them with me over the Christmas holiday.

They’re amazing straight from the refrigerator - something about them works best when they’re nice and cold, although you can certainly eat them at room temperature.

For about 4 dozen small cookies or 1 1/2 dozen large cookies

INGREDIENTS:

3/4 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 pkgs (12 oz) semi-sweet mini chocolate chips
1 tbsp shortening
(2 cups finely chopped nuts, optional - not used in the cookies we made this time)

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Cream butter, sugar, vanilla, and egg until light and fluffy.
2. Mix flour and salt. Add to first mixture. Using hands (or a wooden spoon and a lot of muscle) mix until well blended.
3. Stir in 1/2 bag of mini chocolate chips.
4. Use 1 level tablespoonful of the mixture for each cookie (for small cookies). Ours are probably closer to 2 tablespoonfuls each. Shape into logs, rounds, hearts, whatever. Arrange on ungreased baking sheets.
5. Bake at 350˚ for 12-15 minutes or until the bottoms of the cookies are just turning golden brown. Remove from oven and let sit on the baking sheet for 2 minutes, then transfer cookies to wire rack.
6. Melt remaining chocolate with the shortening (we do this in short bursts in the microwave, stirring frequently).
7. When cookies are cool enough to handle, dip into chocolate. If using nuts, sprinkle or coat with nuts at this time. Let stand on wax paper until cool, then pop them in the fridge to firm up. We leave them in the fridge and eat them cold.

Apparently, I am a big fan of beef bourguignon, since I actually have another recipe here for it. This one is quite a bit better, though. The sauce is thicker and more flavorful, and doesn’t rely on canned mushroom soup for flavor. I saw the recipe over at Ezra Pound Cake last week and knew I had to make this yummy winter stew again.

I left out the bacon (intentionally) and the pearl onions (unintentionally). I just never have bacon on hand and really didn’t want to buy it just for this dish. And I am one of those people who doesn’t love bacon flavoring in everything, although I know many people do. I’m sure it adds a lot of flavor to the dish, but I promise, if you leave it out it is totally fine. The pearl onions, on the other hand, were forgotten about until it was already served. Oops! I might throw them in when reheating the leftovers.

That’s fresh baked No-Knead Bread on the plate, along with creamy mashed potatoes and roasted asparagus (two accompaniments I repeated from the first recipe). Yum!

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This side dish is crazy delicious. It’s pretty rich, so even though it seems like there’s not much once you’ve made it, don’t worry - you don’t need a lot for it to fill you up. The flavor combination is awesome. Caramelized onions and sweet squash and pungent gorgonzola… mmmm. Technically the original recipe calls for crispy fried sage, but I must be missing something, because when I tried to fry my sage it just turned black and gross. Needless to say, that didn’t make it into the dish. I chopped a little of the fresh sage I had left and tossed that in; it was delicious. Also, don’t overdo the gorgonzola - a little goes a LONG way. You can save the leftover gorgonzola for next week’s dish - Apple, Walnut and Gorgonzola Galette.

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First order of business: sorry for the bad photo. It doesn’t look nearly as good as it tastes. I was in a hurry and didn’t let John take a proper photo, plus it’s not really the most beautiful dish in the first place (although I’ll be they could make it lovely on Top Chef or something).

Second order of business: the window of opportunity is kind of over for this sort of thing at this point, since we’re no longer at the height of fresh tomato season (in Chicago, anyway). But maybe you have a secret source of delicious, juicy, non-mealy tomatoes in the winter. If you do, make this. Really. It’s amazingly yummy.

Back when the summer was in high gear, I saw a lot of recipes for panzanella, which is basically a bread salad. I thought, why not combine my love for caprese salads with my love for bread? And thus, caprese panzanella was born. This was made for a picnic and there wasn’t a bite left over if I recall correctly.

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