Jenny's comments (member since Feb 21, 2009)

Jenny's comments from the What's Cookin' group.

My brother and sister-in-law who host Christmas eve often serve pasta. One of my favorite meals was gourmet mac and cheese. One contained chiles and the other did not. Both were delicious.

Molasses Crinkles (makes about 36 3 inch cookies)

Cream 1/2 cup unsalted butter with 1 cup packed dark brown sugar and 2 tbsp vegetable oil. Add 1/3 cup molasses and 1 large egg and beat until blended. Add 2 tsp baking soda, 1-1/4 tsp ground ginger, 1 tsp ground cinnamon, 1/2 tsp ground cloves, and 1/2 tsp table salt. Mix in 2 cups flour until well combined. If you are patient, wrap in plastic and chill until firm -- about 3 hours. Heat oven to 375 F. Roll dough into 1 inch diameter balls, roll balls in granulated sugar to coat, place balls on lightly greased cookie sheets. Bake 9 to 10 minutes. Cool on sheets for 5 minutes, transfer to a wire rack to cool.

I am not patient enough to wait 3 hours to bake the cookies. If you don't chill the dough, it is sticky but the cookies come out fine.

Jenny

I am done with Christmas cookie baking and made one delivery. I had to make more fudge drop cookies and molasses crinkles because my family ate all of the first batch of both.

They were well stocked with sea food when I bought my Christmas ham so I bought a whole, steamed crab for my daughter. She was thrilled and ate quite a bit for dinner on Saturday but there was enough left last night for crab cakes. We went shopping yesterday and had our traditional Japanese holiday lunch.

Jenny

Cranberry cheesecake sounds very good. They have been selling cheeses here with dried cranberries in them -- I tasted the cheddar and the goat cheese, both very good.

I make a black eyed pea soup for new years. My mother is from Texas and she felt the same way about black eyed peas and good luck. The soup is a bean and vegetable soup with a kick from fresh salsa stirred in before eating. The recipe is in one of Crescent Dragonwagon's cook books.

I have started baking Christmas cookies and made two kinds of gingerbread and some rich chocolate cookies. I have dough for in the fridge for some sugar cookies. I will make more through the week and weekend. Sunday, 12/20 I have to make my deliveries to the people who bought my Christmas cookies in the church auction.

We celebrate a lot of holidays (when you mix Southern, Southwestern, and Jewish traditions with Polish Catholic) and so eat a lot of holiday foods. Some time during, or near, Hannukkah we will have my father's latkes. Christmas Eve we will be with my husbands family having some kind of baked pasta. Christmas Day will be at home with ham, sweet potatoes, a green vegetable, corn bread, and maybe mashed potatoes. Desert might be cookies or apple pie with ice cream. Some time during the week after Christmas we will have tamales, which were my family's Christmas Eve dinner. New Year's Eve is ruebens and New Year's Day is black eyed pea soup with the last of the Christmas ham left overs.

Jenny

We finished off our turkey tonight -- I made turkey tetrazinni with the last of it. It was good to have a hot casserole after our first snow of the season.

Jim -- you can go simple or complex on the turkey enchiladas. I bought mole sauce in a can at the grocery store but I have made my own. I don't like the jarred mole sauce in the grocery store but LaVictoria's canned mole was pretty good.

I chopped an onion and sautéed it in a small amount of oil, added chopped turkey (you could use chicken or beef or pork or leave out the meat and just fill the enchiladas with onion and cheese). When the filling was warm, I put it in corn tortillas for me and flour for my husband, put them in a casserole dish and covered it with the mole sauce, grated cheese on top and baked in a 350 degree over for about 20 minutes until hot. I served them with sour cream.

If you are really lazy you can microwave the enchiladas instead of cooking them in the oven. If you are really ambitious, you can make your own mole sauce. Rick Bayless has some of the best recipes I have found for salsa and sauces in his cookbooks.

Jenny

I love to read Laurie Colwin's books Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. To me, they are like visiting with a friend who loves to cook and tell stories. Her recipe for creamed spinach with jalapenos is very good, as is the gingerbread, and like her, I am a fan of eggplant and peppers cooked in olive oil with garlic and eaten out of the pan.

I made a pumpkin pie, starting with the pumpkin, for Thanksgiving and two kinds of cranberry sauce (Mama Stamberg's cranberry relish and a ginger/orange whole berry sauce) and then went to my sister-in-law's. She did not run out of food and one of my husband's older sisters brought a very good wine.

I roasted a turkey for us on Friday and made turkey mole enchiladas for dinner tonight. The most popular side dish at our house this weekend was pureed sweet potatoes with mini marshmallows on top. The teenagers inhaled them along with a pound and a half of ham on Sunday night.

I hope everyone had a very happy thanksgiving. We had a fairly good time and there was plenty of food at my sister in laws but nothing very exchiting. I have a turkey to cook for us tomorrow and I am trying to decide what to make to go with it. I have some acorn squash, two butternut squash and a pie pumpkin so I am sure that one of them will be serviced with the turkey. My husband will want mashed potatoes since there were none today. I think I still have some brussels sprouts too. That should make a good meal.


Jenny

I love homemade cinnamon rolls, My dinner was not so exciting -- I had toad in the hole and then had to make some for my son who thinks they are delicious.

It is basketball season -- 8th grade game yesterday, 8th grade game today, travel practice today, tomorrow and Thursday. I am team mom for the travel team so I am getting the schedules and other information sent out. My husband is planning a church fundraiser -- he has the art fair part down and the auction catalogue is gorgeous but this is the first time he has put on a dinner.

I think dinner tomorrow is going to be italian beef cooked in the crock pot.

My parents used to have dwarf pomegranate bushes in the front of their house. They would have small fruit but they were edible.

Will -- roasted pears with onions and turnips seasoned with rosemary are very good. I cooked them with a pork roast. You could do the same thing just with the pears. I tossed them with a little bit of olive oil, but you could use butter. I had ripe bosc pears and they did not need any sugar.

Jenny

I think the avocado and ham sounds better than mayo and potato chips. I have been cooking but that does not mean the food has been exciting. Beef and vegetable stew last night served on buttered noodles and pasta with broccoli and alfredo sauce tonight.

I had leftover butternut squash bisque for lunch -- that was wonderful.

Jenny

Leshawn -- watermelon sounds indulgent this time of year. I made butternut squash bisque for dinner -- perfect fall food, and we grated a bunch of different vegetables for my daughter's lizard who can feast on butternut squash, carrots, beets, and kale tomorrow.

Jenny

Will -- my childhood friend who now lives in Colorado Springs was celebrating a snow day today -- sounds like the storm made it to you. We don't have snow yet but just more rain which means muddy dogs. The elementary school near my house has a holiday craft fair and sells tacos in a bag which are similar to the frito chili you remember from DQ. I remember when the dilly bars were all different sizes, we knew which west Texas DQ had the best ones and which one had the best cheeseburgers and barbeque sandwhiches.

Taco salad last night with sauteed peppers (poblano and Italian red peppers) and onions. Tonight, I made Nigella Lawson's pumpkin fish curry for dinner with butternut squash and curly cabbage. It was really good.

Where has everyone disappeared to?

I love turkey and so does my husband, but our son will not eat anything that once had feathers. We don't host Thanksgiving but I often buy an small turkey and roast it so we can enjoy leftovers.

I like homemade cranberry sauce -- I have a recipe with ginger and one with jalapenos in it. I also like homemade pumpkin pie and bring it to Thanksgiving dinner every year.

Erica and Sandi -- maybe some ginger tea will make you feel better.

Jenny

Will -- the original recipe tasted good, but I hate to think of the amount of fat and calories in it, especially when you cover the top with sour cream.

I have made a version of it with onions and chiles added to the meat, used different combinations of cheeses, and used low fat and lower sodium version of the soups. It is good comfort food.

Another simple recipe that is surprisingly good if you like liver sausage and horseradish is to combine more or less equal parts liverwurst and cream cheese with 1 tbsp prepared horseradish per 8 oz of cream cheese. I use a food processor to mix this completely. Mold into a ball or square and serve with crackers. If you want to be real fancy you can add sliced red onions and small sweet pickles to the plate.

Jenny

Will -- when I met him, one of my husband's favorite meals was a casserole made with ground beef, shredded cheddar cheese, flour torillas and a can of enchilada sauce, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and a can of tomato soup. You cook the ground beef, fill the tortillas with meat and cheese and put in an 9 x 13 pan, mix the contents of the cans together and pour over the top, add more shredded cheese and then bake.

Over the years, he had decided that he likes fresh vegetables and meals cooked from scratch.

Jenny

Fall is really here -- it is 30 outside, the high will be in the high-40s, and there are still some green trees but also a lot of red and gold. A perfect morning for hot coffee and the Sunday papers. Karate tournament today and a day off work tomorrow for Columbus Day.

No real cooking today although my son asked for a 3rd grade school lunch to take to the tournament -- peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and fruit. Tomorrow, I am thinking vegetable soup or stew, home made bread and cookies.