The Funky Kitchen

When Mr sets off on his adventures with work I make a point of trying to send him with a snack of some sort. I do it so that he’s reminded that I’m thinking about him and sending my love, but also so that he’s got something to munch on if he gets hungry, or he can share with the people he’s with.

On Monday morning when he headed out, he left with a container of Fudge Drop cookies in his bag. They are kind of a cookie-brownie hybrid, gooey and unctuous but still cookie like enough to hold together. From what I hear, Mr and his fellows quite enjoyed them.

Fudge Drop Cookies

(Recipe from King Arthur Flour)

8 oz chocolate (I used 4 oz dark (70% cocoa), 4 oz milk)

3 Tbsp butter

1 Cup sugar

3 eggs

1 tsp espresso powder

1 tsp vanilla

1 Cup flour

1/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1 Cup chocolate chips

Directions

• Melt together the chocolate and butter.
• In a second bowl, beat together the sugar and eggs until they are frothy.
• Combine the chocolate mixture with the egg mixture, and then stir in the rest of the remaining ingredients.
• The batter will be very loose, it will look like brownie batter. If you try to form it into cookies now, you will end up with puddles. So pop your cookie ‘batter’ into the fridge so that it firms up into a dough (~1 hour).
• Spoon the dough onto cookie sheets, to your desired size, and bake until just set (~11 minutes) in a 325° oven.

What I really love about these cookies is that they are covered in the shiny, cracked top that brownies have when you bake them. So cute! The espresso powder in these is a little bit much for me, coffee flavor makes my stomach turn, but it does intensify that chocolate (and Mr loves his coffee).

Mr says: These are like brownies disguised as cookies; soft insides with a nice crusty outside.

This time last year: How to Hard Boil an Egg

And the year before: Potato Salad Revisited

Wednesday nights growing up, my Mum, my brother and I would trundle down the highway a town over to have supper with my Grandma. In a perfectly grandmotherly scheme of fairness, my brother and I got to take turns to choose what we would eat for supper.

One week it would be my younger brother’s turn to pick, and he would pretty much invariably choose macaroni and cheese with breakfast sausages and carrot sticks. And the next week it would be my turn and I would ask for mashed potatoes and gravy.

I can hear your thoughts now, “But Dana, that isn’t a meal. That’s a side dish.” Which is true, but it was the part of the meal I cared about being on the table. So she would roast something, make gravy, and make her unbelievably awesome mashed potatoes. She made these lusciously smooth mashed potatoes, affectionately called cloud potatoes, because somehow using heavy things like  potatoes, butter and milk she made them gorgeously light, almost ethereal. Grandma’s are magical that way.

These aren’t her mashed potatoes (though now I feel I should make a phone call and find out how she does it), but from one mashed potato fiend to and of you lurking out there, these ones are pretty darn good too!

Browned Butter Mashed Potatoes

2 pounds potatoes

1/4 Cup butter

1/4 Cup milk

salt and pepper

• Peel half of your potatoes (or all of them if you are opposed to skins) and cut them into rough chunks.
• Boil until tender, then drain well.
• Place a saucepan over medium heat and brown your butter: After the butter melts it will foam up, but as the foam subsides, watch for the milk solids to start browning. Remove from heat.
• Mash the browned butter, milk, salt and pepper into the potatoes until luscious and smooth.

I’m going to love a potato pretty much no matter how it is presented to me, and like I said above, there is a special place in my heart for a potato that has been mashed. Adding browned butter to your mash is a really simple way to amp up the dish with extra flavor without adding too many extra steps. Nutty, buttery, creamy potatoes? I’ll have seconds!

Mr says: Brown butter makes everything better.

This time last year: How to Hard Boil an Egg

And the year before: Potato Salad Revisited

Normally, I wouldn’t make something so tart to talk about an anniversary. We are certainly much more sweet than sour; the pucker you experience from all the lemon is  fitting though.

xoxoxo

Happy anniversary my dear handsome Mister. The last four years have been the best, and here’s to hopefully at least 60 more. I think we’re going to be adorable old people together. There isn’t a better best friend, or person to be in love with, I could ask for.

Blackberry Lemonade Popsicles

1 punnett blackberries

1/3 Cup sugar

6 ice cubes

2 lemons

water

Directions

• Put the blackberries and sugar together in a small saucepan.
• Mash the berries (a potato masher does the trick nicely), and place the pan over medium-low heat. Cook until the juices are bubbly and the sugar is completely dissolved.
• Remove the pan from heat, then add the ice cubes. They will cool the berry syrup quickly so that the flavor stays more fresh.
• While the ice cubes are melting, juice the lemons into the berry mixture.
• Blitz everything through the blender to break up any chunks, and then pour it through a fine mesh sieve to strain out the seeds.
• Add enough water that the recipe will fill your popsicle molds (~1/2 Cup).
• Pour into popsicle molds and freeze.