chocolate chip oatmeal zucchini cookies

I didn’t mean for this to happen. I meant to make zucchini bread, though why it’s considered perfectly normal to put zucchini in bread but not in cookies is beyond me.  I’d actually already done the whole zucchini in cookies thing, with little success — those cookies turned out fluffy and cakey and sort of slimy because, duh, I put zucchini in them.

So really, I thought this time I’d just put my excess zucchini in bread, where fluffy and cakey are generally welcome.  But when I read through my zucchini bread recipe I discovered a tip for maximizing zucchini flavor while minimizing zucchini moisture and I became a teensy bit obsessed with the idea that this also might be the key to non-slimy zucchini cookies.

It is.  Well, that and I used a completely different cookie recipe as my base, one that contains both oatmeal and pecans in addition to the chocolate chips.  The resulting cookie is exactly the kind of chocolate chip cookie I like to eat — thick and dense and chewy with melty bits of chocolate, crunchy pecans, flecks of mellow oatmeal, and the delicate sweetness of shredded zucchini.   Plus, no slime.

Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Zucchini Cookies
adapted from Cook’s Illustrated’s Baking Illustrated and Carole Walter’s Great Cookies
(makes about 4½ dozen 2½” cookies)

½ lb. zucchini
¾ c.  lightly packed dark brown sugar
2½ c. old fashioned oats
2/3 c. + 2 T. sugar
1¼ c. flour
¾ t. salt
½ t. baking soda
¼ t. nutmeg
1 c. (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temp
1 egg
2 t. vanilla extract
2 c. chocolate chips
2 c. chopped pecans (or walnuts)

1) Preheat your oven to 375°F and lightly butter two cookie sheets.

2) Grate the zucchini using a food processor or box grater to yield 1 c. grated zucchini.   Toss the zucchini with 2 T. of sugar, transfer to the mixture to a fine-mesh strainer and set it over a bowl to drain for at least 30 minutes.  This draws moisture out of the zucchini and prevents the cookies from becoming cakey and slimy, so don’t skip this step.

3) Meanwhile, place the brown sugar, 2/3 c. sugar and ½ c. oatmeal in the bowl of a food processor and process for 2 -3 minutes until the oatmeal is finely ground.  (you could also do this in a blender)

4) In a medium bowl, whisk together the remaining dry ingredients and set aside.

5) In the bowl of your food processor (or of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment), process or mix the butter until it’s light and fluffy.  Add the oatmeal-sugar mixture in three stages, mixing well after each addition.  Add the egg and vanilla and mix until well incorporated.  Add the dry ingredients in three stages, mixing just until blended.  If you’ve done all this in the food processor, transfer the batter to a large bowl and stir in the chocolate chips and nuts, otherwise just stir the chips and nuts into your mixing bowl.

6) After the zucchini has drained, squeeze it between several layers of paper towels or cheesecloth or a dishtowel to absorb excess moisture.  You want to remove as much moisture as possible, so you’ll have to work at it a bit.  Fold the shredded zucchini into the cookie batter.

7) Drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto the prepared cookie sheets, spacing them about an inch or two apart.  They’re not going to spread much so they don’t need a whole lot of room.  Bake for 18-20 minutes or until the edges begin to turn golden brown.  Remove the cookies from the oven and cool on the sheets for 2-3 minutes before removing to a cooling rack.  I think these taste best slightly warm, when the inside is still a bit melty and the outside is still a bit crisp, but they’re also quite nice completely cool and pretty tasty even when frozen.

chocolate beet cake

When I discovered beets in my CSA basket this week I figured I had two choices: toss them directly onto the compost heap or bake them into a cake.

I don’t like cake and I don’t like beets, so I’m not sure what made me think I would like a cake made out of beets.  Possibly it was the assurance that “even confirmed beet-bashers will love this cake” in the introduction to the recipe or the fact that my foodie friend Katie mentioned that she’d tried it and liked it, but I suspect it was the chocolate.  Of all the ingredients on this earth, chocolate seems the most likely candidate for transforming beets from a mouthful of musty dirt into something that people might actually want to eat.

rhubarb stir cake

On an unusually warm afternoon in the summer of 1980, my sister and I wandered into a little thicket of shade created by enormous ruffly leaves curving out from bright red stalks just tall enough for little girls to play beneath.  Elated at such a discovery, we raced home to collect our buckets and shovels and then, for reasons intelligible only to little girls, spent the rest of the afternoon happily digging in the cool dirt amid those leafy stalks.  I’m not sure if this memory has stuck with me for nearly thirty years because that patch of shade was such a lovely place in which to play or because of the boatload of trouble we got into when our favorite digging spot turned out to be the rhubarb patch of a neighbor lady whose Navy husband significantly outranked our father.

lemon lavender cookies

Spring, that elusive little leafy green sprite, is taking her sweet time this year.  Oh sure, I suppose you’re already floating through your days in a pollen-induced euphoria,  adrift in a sea of daffodils and cherry blossoms and baby bunnies going hop hop hop, but here in northern Michigan it’s still colder (as my Geometry teacher liked to say) than a witch’s tit in a brass bra.  I always imagined that must be pretty damn cold — cold enough, at least, to warrant such an expression — and it seems an appropriate way to describe the sort of stubborn, lingering cold that delivers snow in April.  When the baby bunnies are supposed to be hop-hop-hopping.

I haven’t noticed any bunnies, but each time I’ve gone to the window to cuss at the snow I’ve been silenced both by its unwillingness to stick and by the cheerful sight of robins flitting from branch to branch and pecking optimistically at the newly thawed ground.  On a walk yesterday I discovered tender little shoots of green poking their way up insistently through that same ground, and communion with the trees revealed limbs teeming with softly swelling buds.  Spring is quietly transforming brown to green, sneaking up on us like a delightful surprise.

buttermilk biscuits

On a typical weeknight Chris and I like to watch Jeopardy and then, once I’ve finished kicking Chris’s ass, Alton Brown’s Good Eats.  Such is the exciting life of nerds.  Truth be told, I only beat him at Jeopardy about half the time and Chris only tolerates Good Eats because AB occasionally talks about bacon.  We mostly watch because I kind of have a thing for Alton Brown, what with his geeky culinary evangelism and his cheesy impersonations of historical figures.  But the other night instead of Good Eats we caught a very old rerun of the first ever episode of Feasting on Asphalt, in which AB meanders through Georgia and the Carolinas sampling collards and pinto beans, fried chicken and pickled pigs’ feet, and cornbread and biscuits.

It was the biscuits that got me.