Almond Tea Cookies

To continue with my Christmas cookie baking frenzy, I got this recipe for Almond Tea Cookies from my mom, and like the Coffee Fingers, she said she got it from an old church friend, this time named Marge Martens, and who knows if she was the original creator or if she also got it from someone else, but whoever created them, they are delicious!! When you read the ingredients on this one, you may just have to turn a blind eye to the amount of margarine – it’s certainly not about being healthy here folks!

Almond Tea Cookies

1 pound (2 cups) margarine, softened
1 1/2 cups ground almonds
1/2 cup sugar
3 cups flour
pinch salt
1 tsp. vanilla
1-2 cups icing sugar

1. Make the dough.
Cream butter with sugar. Add almonds. Work in flour and salt. Add vanilla. Like the Coffee Fingers, you may need to play with the dough and mush it in your hands until it all sticks together nicely and becomes a soft and pliable dough. If it’s too soft, you can refrigerate it for a little bit for easier handling, but when I put mine in the fridge overnight, it turned into a solid brick and I had to let it sit on my counter and return to room temperature again before I could roll it out.

2. Roll the dough.
Roll out on a lightly floured surface into 1/4″ thickness and cut into rectangular pieces about 1 1/2″ x 2 1/2″ (the size doesn’t really matter, but this seems to work good for me).

3. Bake at 350F for 10-14 minutes.
Take them out while still creamy colored, before they start browning too much.

4. Dip ‘em.
Cool partially and then dip until nicely coated in icing sugar. This seems to be the most tedious and time-consuming part of the whole process.

5. Enjoy!!
They can get kinda messy, but it’s worth it!

Coffee Fingers

I’ve been posting some pictures of the Christmas cookies that I’ve been making this year on my Instagram and Facebook feeds and someone requested this recipe, so I figured I’d post it on my blog. This is my first year making my own Christmas cookies, as I’ve been content to mooch off of my mom until now. But now that I have kids of my own along with pregnancy cravings and nesting instincts, I’ve been on a baking frenzy the last week!

I got this recipe for Coffee Fingers from my mom who said she got it from an old church friend named Liz Plett and who knows if she was the original creator or if she also got it from someone else, but whoever created them, they are delicious!! I’m also loving my early Christmas present from my mom of the fun Christmas tins – they are so festive!

Coffee Fingers

1 cup margarine, softened
1/2 cup brown sugar
1-2 eggs, separated
1/4 cup icing sugar
1 tsp. instant coffee
2 cups flour
2+ cups walnuts, finely chopped or coarsely ground

Yields: 4-5 dozen “fingers”

1. Mix dough.
Cream together margarine, brown sugar, one egg yolk, icing sugar and instant coffee. Add flour and mix well. The dough may seem kind of dry when you try to form it into a ball. If so, just play with it and mush it in your hands until the margarine becomes warm and the dough becomes soft and pliable.

2. Roll dough.
Roll dough to about 1/2″ thick on lightly floured surface. Cut into about 1/2″ x 2″ lengths – they’ll look about the same size as your thumb.

3. Dip and roll.
Dip fingers into beaten egg white (you may need more than one, depending on how many fingers you’ve made), then roll in your chopped walnuts and place on a greased cookie sheet. I bought walnut pieces and then ground them up further using my mom’s old manual grinder.

4. Bake at 300F for 20-25 minutes.

5. Enjoy!!

Homemade Tomato Soup

Homemade Tomato Soup is something I grew up with and which has always been a family favorite that my mom learned from her mom. When I moved out, I would always try and get a stash from my mom for my cupboard, but as I started my own family, I finally learned how to make it myself and now it’s a tradition for myself and my sisters to spend a day of making soup with my mom each fall to stock our pantry for the year ahead.

There is a lot of work that goes into this recipe, but it is well worth it to have those beautiful jars on my shelf for a quick and easy meal throughout the year! I love this meal so much, as do my husband and kids, and I want to share it with you, because I always feel compelled to share the things I love in the hopes that others will come to enjoy it as much as I do.

Homemade Tomato Soup

14 pounds of tomatoes (about 2 heaping 4 L. ice cream pails)
5-7 large onions
2 green peppers
1 bunch of celery
1 bunch of parsley
1 cup margarine, melted
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup flour
1/4 cup canning salt

Yields: 7-8 quart jars.
To serve: Add 1/2 quart jar of milk to 1 quart of soup and serve with thin egg noodles (optional).

1. Cut up and steam vegetables and herbs.
Cut up onions, green peppers, celery and parsley into large pieces and steam in a large pot with a bit of water (a couple cups or so) for an hour.

2. Scald, peel, mush and cook tomatoes.
While your vegetables are cooking, put tomatoes in sink full of boiling water until you see the skin start to crack. Carefully use tongs or some other instrument to drain the water. Peel the skin of the tomatoes and mush them up in your hand into a very large pot. Cook until tomatoes are completely soft (about 20-30 minutes).

3. Put it all through the blender and strainer.
Blend and strain the tomatoes, getting out all the seeds. Blend and strain your cooked vegetables. Combine together. When blending, it’s easier to do it while the ingredients are still hot, but you have to use great caution with trying to close the lid on your blender, since the steam will make it want to fly off and your mixtures go flying as well. It works best to hold the lid lightly over the blender so the steam can still escape and to only fill your blender half full or less.

4. Heat jars and boil lids.
Heat your oven to 200F and place your canning jars (without lids) inside to heat up. If using new canning lids, follow the directions on the box for boiling them. If you’re reusing lids, you might want to boil them for up to 10 minutes so that the rubber portion is nice and soft.

5. Create thickening agent.
Melt margarine or butter in a medium sized pot. Add sugar, flour and canning salt and combine until smooth. Add some of your tomato/vegetable juice mixture (about 4 cups) to thin it out, blending well with a whisk and bring to a boil. Pour this mixture back into your original tomato/vegetable juice mixture and stir until well combined. Bring the entire large pot of soup to a boil and whisk often.

6. Pour into canning jars.
Using oven mitts, take one canning jar at a time from the oven and place on a towel. Carefully pour your soup into the jar using a ladle or glass measuring cup or small pot to scoop it out of your large pot. This step can sometimes get messy! When full, make sure the top of the jar is clean and dry and then tightly screw on the lid (dry it off too when you take it out of the water).

7. Pray!
Time to let the jars sit and pray that you hear that magical popping sound as the lids seal tight! After letting them sit for a few hours, gently test the lids to see if they are sealed (don’t try too hard to remove them & end up breaking a good seal!). If any of them fails, you can take it as a sign that you’re supposed to eat that jar for supper tonight or you can dump out the soup back into a pot & bring it to a boil again, clean the jar & heat it in the oven again, boil the lid again & try the whole sealing process over.

8. Enjoy!
When you’re ready to partake of some of this delightful soup, simply heat on the stove with half a quart jar of milk (about 2 cups). We like it best served with thin egg noodles – yummmm! And since we love this soup so much, we usually make two batches of this recipe so that we have enough in our pantry to have it at least once a month.

Baked Stuffed Pasta Shells

A couple weeks ago, I went through a bunch of recipes that I had ripped out of magazines that had been sitting in a folder for years, and I inputted them into my recipe program, MasterCook Deluxe (which I love!), and was then inspired to actually try to make them!  I think Joe was a little overwhelmed when I tried 3 or 4 new recipes last week, so I toned it down to only 2 new recipes this week.   But this Monday, I found that the Baked Stuffed Pasta Shells was a hit, so I thought I’d share it with you!  (My comments throughout the instructions are in italics.)

 

Baked Stuffed Pasta Shells
Madeleine Greey
March 2008 Today’s Parent 

32 jumbo pasta shells
1 1/2 pounds ground beef, pork, turkey or chicken
2 cloves garlic, minced
8 ounces package fresh spinach (227 g), coarsely chopped
1 1/2 cups shredded mozzarella or Asiago cheese
1 cup fresh bread crumbs
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese, divided
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper, divided
3 cups spaghetti sauce

• Bring a very large pot of salted water to a full rolling boil. Drop pasta shells in, a few at a time, stirring to keep them separated. Cook, stirring occassionally, until flexible and almost tender. Be careful not to overcook because if shells are too soft, they’ll tear. Drain thoroughly and rinse under cold running water. Set aside.  (The box of pasta shells I bought had 31 shells in it & one of them tore during the cooking process, but 30 ended up being the perfect number)

Cottage Cheese Rolls

I recently gave you all the recipe to my favorite cookies, but Cottage Cheese Rolls are my favorite dessert of all time!  They are so amazingly delicious, that I’m pretty sure they will be served at the marriage supper of the Lamb!   Now, if like most people I share this recipe with, you think, “I don’t think I like the sound of cottage cheese in a dessert”, let me reassure you that you will never know there’s cottage cheese in it – trust me.

The recipe is SUPER simple:

1 1/2 cups cottage cheese (the wet kind – not dry)
1 cup margarine (softened)
2 cups flour
pinch of salt

1.  Blend together all ingredients. 
Form into a ball and chill dough overnight in a sealed container.  (This is so the dough isn’t so goopy and sticky & makes it easier to handle and roll out later)

2.  Divide into four parts.
Take one part at a time and roll dough into a circle on a lightly floured surface (about 10-12 inches in diameter).  Cut into 12 wedges and roll up each wedge (start with large end) to form croissant shape.

3.  Bake at 350F for approximately 20 minutes. 
Alternatively, you can freeze them and bake them at another time.  Personally, I find that I actually like them better when they’ve been frozen.  For some reason, when you make them fresh, they turn out a little differently.  You also don’t really need to thaw them out before baking for more than a few minutes.  I wouldn’t recommend placing them on the pan quite as closely as the picture depicts below (I had them this way for freezing), but they can be pretty close when baking, since they don’t get much bigger than their raw form.

4.  Frost with icing. 
Now, the icing is actually the part that makes these so good!  The rolls themselves are not sweet at all and really only transform into a dessert once the icing is added.  The icing happens to also be one of those things that I don’t have a recipe for and sort of just “wing it”.  It’s maybe roughly 2 teaspoons softened margarine (optional), about a cup of icing sugar, maybe 4 tablespoons of milk, and several dashes of cinnamon.  You can experiment with the amounts until you get something you’re happy with.

Mmmmmmm…I just ate those delicious manna from heaven pictured above.  They are best accompanied by a nice glass of cold milk!  You really should try them & then tell me what you think!

My Favorite Cookies

So, I’ve been wanting to post this recipe for quite some time because they are my absolute favorite cookies in the world and I feel that you are all greatly deprived if you have never had them!  Unfortunately for those with peanut allergies, you will have to remain sorrowfully deprived, but I will pray for your divine healing so that you can partake of their yummy goodness!

Chocolate Peanutbutter Chip Cookies

1 cup margarine, softened
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 cups flour
2/3 cup flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup peanut butter chips

1. Cream margarine, sugar, eggs and vanilla together.
2. Mix dry ingredients and stir into sugar mixture.
3. Stir in peanut butter chips. Shape into balls and bake at 350F for 8-10 min.

If you can refrain from eating half of the cookie dough on it’s own, this should yield around 3 dozen cookies.

Spicy Sweet Potato and Smoked Sausage Soup

Since I’ve been off of dairy to see if it’ll help ease my little guy’s tummy pains, I’ve been searching for new recipes that don’t use milk or cheese, since many of my staple menu items use these ingredients.  I tried this recipe a little while ago for the first time and really loved it, so I thought I would share it with you all, with a few minor modifications that I’ve made to suit our personal taste.  I got this recipe from a recipes program that I got for Christmas from my brother’s girlfriend called MasterCook Deluxe, in the Mealtime cookbook, recipe coutesy of The Florida Department of Agriculture. 

8 ounces smoked sausage, diced
1/2 cup onion, diced
1/2 cup celery, diced
1 tablespoon jalapeño pepper, minced (I used a whole jalapeño pepper)
3 cups sweet potatoes, peeled and large-diced
2 tablespoons flour
3 cups chicken stock (I used 6 cups)
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
Green onions, garnish

1. Sauté sausage in a large sauce pan for 5 minutes over medium heat.  I used local Pioneer Meats smoked all pork farmer’s sausage (the best sausage in the world) that comes in packages of approximately 800 grams (1 3/4 pounds or 28 ounces).  The last time I made this, I used one whole link which would be about 14 ounces instead of the 8 ounces called for by the recipe and it was a little too much meat, so this time I did more like 10 ounces.  I just sliced it as opposed to dicing it.

 

2. Add vegetables and continue to sauté for an additional 5 minutes. 

 
I cut up the celery and onions quite small, and if you can see on the picture, my trick for cutting onions is to cut the onion in half and then in slices so that the layers are like a rainbow and then cut around the curve so that the layers work to your advantage to create nice small pieces with less cutting. 

 
For the sweet potato, I hate cutting these because they are quite dense and hard, sort of like trying to cut a huge carrot, but I have found that it helps to cut lengthwise with the grain.  I cut the sweet potato into bite-size pieces approximately 2 cm cubed (1/2 to 3/4 inches).  Also, the recipe calls for 1 tablespoon jalapeño pepper, but I found this wasn’t spicy enough, so I just did the whole pepper this time. 

 

3. Add flour and cook for 2 more minutes.  The first time I tried this, I thought it was really weird to add flour to vegetables without using any water or butter or something, but it actually works quite well. 

 

4. Add stock, salt and pepper and stir until smooth.  Since the soup was quite thick the first time, my husband Joe requested that I use more broth, because a lot of the broth seemed to cook out when cooking the sweet potatoe, so this time I used 6 cups of broth instead of 3, using 6 teaspoons of chicken OXO with 6 cups of hot water.  This soup would probably taste quite different if you used actual chicken stock as opposed to OXO, but I like it this way.

 

5. Simmer for 20 minutes until potatoes are soft. Garnish with green onions.  I left out the green onions mostly because I didn’t have any, but also because it seemed unnecessary to me. 

 

So there you go!  I really enjoyed this recipe and I think you’d like it – so give it a try!

Delicious Pumpkin Cookies

I found this recipe while blog-surfing at “Jesus and Dark Chocolate” and it sounded good, so I tried it out today, with a couple minor modifications…

Ingredients:
1 cup of pumpkin
1/2 c. of butter (softened)
1 1/2 c of sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla
2 c. of white flour
3/4 c. whole wheat flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 tsp. salt
1 c. of raisins (to soften, boil 1/2 c. of water and add raisins, and let sit about 5 min., drain, and add to mixture) **I substituted the raisins with chocolate chips, ’cause I don’t like raisins & I love chocolate!**

     
1.  Pre-heat oven to 375.  In a large bowl combine, granulated sugar, pumpkin, butter, egg and vanilla.
2.  Beat at medium speed until well blended. **It looked kinda chunky to me at this point, but I blended it as well as I could & I think it turned out fine. **

    
3.  Add flours, baking soda, baking powder, spices and salt.
4.  Beat at low speed, until soft dough forms.  **My blender’s lowest setting isn’t very low, so at this stage I ended up with little chunks of cookie dough splattered over my work area!**
5.  Add chocolate chips (or raisins).
6.  Drop dough onto cookie sheets.  **Normally, I would want to form my cookies into perfect little balls, but this dough is VERY sticky, so that didn’t work!**

 
7.  Grease cookie sheets.  Bake for 10-12 minutes, until cookie is set. Cool completely.  **For my first cookie sheet, I set the timer on the microwave but apparently I forgot to press ‘Start’!  So I’m not sure how long they were in the oven – they got a little crispy on the bottoms.  For my second cookie sheet, I baked them for 12 minutes which seemed perfect.  Then for my third cookie sheet, they looked done already at 10 minutes!  I’d say keep an eye on them & take them out when they are just golden brown.**

Now for the frosting/icing!

Ingredients: 3/4 c. packed brown sugar 1/4 c. butter 1 1/4 c. icing sugar 1 to 2 TBSP. half & half  **I just used milk** 1 tsp. vanilla
		1.  Melt butter in small pot. 2.  Add brown sugar and cook over medium heat until mixture can be stirred smooth. Do not allow it to boil. Remove from heat. 3.  Add remaining ingredients. Stir until smooth. 4.  Spread frosting evenly on cookies and ENJOY!!!

I personally found the icing difficult to spread on the cookies, as it’s very sugary and not very spreadable.  It tastes good but is a little too sweet for me.  But the cookies were great!!  With or without the icing!  I would definitely recommend them.  I’m now going to bring them to my friend’s birthday party tonight and see what everyone else thinks of them.