Oreo-style Cookies

UPDATE: My brother claims that he adores these cookies. He even asked whether I blogged about them! He thinks that they're amazing and sweet and cookie-ish. My sister also likes them too. Therefore, I will make these for them at some point in the future.

I like Oreo cookies, even though I generally prefer soft cookies over crunchy ones. Oreos, however, have a specifically... dusty, gritty, cocoa taste. I think that I'd make these again, but I'd let them be soft/bake them for a shorter amount of time. I'll just continue to eat Oreos from the packet (without the filling. I don't like Oreo filling much.) I got the recipe from a website (*insert bitter rant here, into which I will not divulge*) that got it from Smitten Kitchen but I changed some of it to include whole wheat flour and less butter.

INGREDIENTS for about 36 flat cookies 6 cm in diameter

100 g white flour

35 g whole wheat flour

240 g caster sugar

120 g butter

pinch of salt

0.25 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

50 g unsweetened cocoa powder

1 egg

METHOD

1. Let butter soften in a bowl.

2. Throw everything into the bowl except the egg.

3. Cut butter. Keep cutting. You will start off with a powdery mixture (west of image below), but over time, you'll get something that looks like cookie crumbs and and SMELLS LIKE OREOS!! (south east of image).

4. Crack an egg into the crumbs and mix until you get a thick, scoopable batter. Each cookie is about one sort-of-heaped teaspoonful of batter. Remember to grease the pan with the butter wrapper!

5. Bake in an unpreheated oven at 182 degrees C/360 degrees F on the lower rack for 8 minutes if you want soft cookies or 10 minutes if you want hard cookies. They will be shiny.

6. Let cookies sit in oven for 10-15 minutes.

7. Take cookies out of oven and stick them on a cooling rack. They may seem really soft when they come out of the oven, but they harden slightly over time. I find it easier to put the cookies upside down on the cooling rack.

ALTERNATIVE METHOD

After step 4: microwave the scoops of cookie dough for 45 seconds. Take out of microwave, flip over, and microwave for another 30 seconds. The cookies from the microwave are crispier (for sure) and taste a little more greasy. However, they cook ~4 times as fast, so that's a plus, right?

Kashi GoLean Crunch! Oatmeal.

Because I don't have a fridge in my room, I also don't have any milk in my room. So, I can't actually have cereal with milk, which is kind of sad because I do love cereal and milk together [next year, my fridge will be filled with milk, chocolate, fruit, tofu, and vegetables].

I didn't feel like eating dry cereal, or cereal with cold water, so I decided to have hot water [yes, I have an electric kettle!] with the Kashi GoLean Crunch! cereal that usually is super sweet and... crunchy... [and reminds me of popcorn].

To my amazement, after absorbing a whole cup of water, the cereal swelled! It tasted like oatmeal mixed with some brown rice, with a really fibrous texture. It was still extremely sweet and had that Kashi company flavour. It was quite a nice change, and I think I like it better than I like normal Kashi cereal.

In this case, why is there even Kashi oatmeal out there? It makes so much sense to just buy a lot of cereal...and watch it puff and cook into oatmeal, instantly. JUST ADD WATER! [Wow, I'm turning into a college kid!]

Toasted Sandwich on Spruce Street. - 4th Sept

I finally met my peer advisor, and some of the other kids he advises. One actually lives on the dorm directly below mine, which is pretty cool considering that the dorms are randomly allocated [or are they?]. So, we went for lunch at this sandwich/salad store on Spruce Street, probably around 37th... Unfortunately, I have forgotten the name of the store at which talked about being freshmen in college. I do remember that I got a vegetarian sandwich [surprise surprise!] and the bread was toasted really well; it was extremely crispy, yet not burned. That's saying something! It was also this multigrain bread... I'm not sure whether its wheat flour is 100% whole grain, but I assume it is. There was tomato, eggplant, goat cheese, and spinach in the sandwich. Actually, I'm not positive it's goat cheese, but my intuition tells me it is. The sandwich was pretty light, which was nice since it made me feel all sophisticated [even though consuming the sandwich was really messy].

Soy Butter

When we were in Weymouth, MA, I bought some soy nut butter because it was on sale. It was $1.43 for 425g, and this was only because its sell-by date was in two months. I, however, consume nut butters at a rate greater than 212.5 grams/month. Actually, I long to consume a jar of peanut butter within 24 hours, but I think that might kill me, or I might end up regretting it after going through seven rounds of liposuction. Anyway.

If I had to choose, I would always choose peanut butter over any other nut butter [okay, soybeans are legumes... not nuts...so it's technically out of the count. So, let's just say, out of all butters, I'd pick peanut butter]. However, the past few days, I have been utterly obsessed with this crunchy soy butter. Jar appearances aside, this stuff. Is. Creamy. With a nice random crunch, once in a while. Unlike crunchy peanut butter [which I haven't had in at least five years], the crunchy soy parts do not get stuck in my teeth, and nor do they make the butter hard to spread. It's a win-win situation! It's quite neutral tasting, so even people who don't like toasted soy beans will probably enjoy this, although it does not in any way taste like peanut butter. The jar is actually kinda cheesy in both appearance and company name/logo [haha... I.M. Healthy...]. It is not completely healthy though, in my perspective, since there are 15 grams of fat per serving. "Good" fat, yes, but "bad" in the sense that it's, well, fat. As a vegetarian, 90% or more of my fat comes from the monounsaturated or polyunsaturated variety, yet I am not skinny. So, it really depends on how MUCH one consumes. In which case I lose. Every day. So, they should instead name themselves SoyJoy, if that name hadn't already been taken by a granola bar company. This is literally Soy Joy.

The last time I tried soy butter was the creamy one from Trader Joe's... two years ago. It didn't leave that much of an impression on me, and I preferred almond butter to it [Have you noticed how THICK and CREAMY almond butter is? It is literally the densest [read: oiliest] butter out there.

So, this is a completely biased and laudatory post, but I do blog about what I consume, and I basically have been chugging through the jar the past week or so.

Honey Mustard and Onion Pretzels!

At one of the Animal Alliance meetings at school in 2007, I was introduced to something called "Honey Mustard and Onion Pretzels". Actually, they were probably called "Nibblers", because that's what they're currently called. Anyway... I had never had honey mustard in my life, before, and I remember asking, "Are these vegetarian?".
The first bite? They tasted tangy, with a hint of bacon. I honestly thought that they tasted like bacon. That's evidently not the case anymore, since now they just taste onion-y and honey-y with a hint of spice. Anyway, that was the first time I had ever encountered Nibblers. In all honesty, I've never been a huge pretzel fan; I've always preferred other forms of carbs, and pretzels are usually covered in coarse chunks of NaCl. However, these Nibblers are the zesty exception [harhar].
A month or so ago, I bought two packs of Snyder's of Hanover Honey Mustard and Onion Nibblers, and I fell in obsession with them again... [aka I went on a thorough binge]. In the first bag, everything was "standard" shaped. The second bag had two mutants, which I think is pretty cool :) Damn sexy flavour. :P