Chocolate anise crinkle cookies

December 06, 2021 by Rebecca Davis in Holidays, Parties, Recipes, Sweets, Toddler eats, Vegetarian, Winter

Heading to the spice cabinet can up your cookie game considerably! A subtle hint of anise elevates this basic chocolate crinkle cookie, but is still chocolate-y enough to be a crowd favorite.

Take me to the recipe!

I used to hate the flavor of licorice. HATE with a hard H, long A, and hard T. Hate. But somewhere between kid one and kid two, I had a weird impulse to try black licorice again and…I love it. I can eat a whole bag in one sitting. I can’t explain it. Except to say that tastes change and I’m not sure I ate a piece of licorice between the ages of 5 and 37, so I may have been unnecessarily denying myself for years.

So, if you think you hate the taste of licorice, maybe try again? Or try these cookies instead? The anise flavor is VERY subtle. It’s just enough to make you take another bite and wonder, “What is that? Licorice?”

The chocolate is still the star of the show and the texture is her very talented co-star.

This recipe is BARELY adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s one for Snowy Topped Brownie Drops from her cookbook Dorie’s Cookies. I made about 1 million of these cookies before circling back to this base recipe. I swapped in bread flour for the AP, tried a combo of melted chocolate and cocoa powder, and fiddled with many ingredient ratios. Nothing beat the original, which should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who’s baked or tasted one of Dorie’s recipes.

What I love about these cookies isn’t just the taste and texture. I also love how they are SO EASY to make. Nothing needs to come to room temperature. You don’t need a mixer. You only need one pan. There are only a handful of ingredients, all of which you probably have in your cabinets right now. They are perfect.

A quick note about oven temperatures: If I’ve said in once, I’ve said it 1,000 times: Get to know your oven. It will make you a better baker and save you heartache and wasted ingredients. I bought two cheap oven thermometers and placed one in the back of my oven and one in the front. Wouldn’t you know it, the back of my oven is about 25 degrees warmer than the front. So now I always set the oven slightly below whatever temp the recipe calls for and rotate my pans halfway through baking. Works like a charm!

Chocolate anise crinkle cookies

Adapted from Dorie Greenspan
Time: 20 minutes of prep, 30 minutes of chilling, 12 minutes of baking
Yield: 12 cookies

2 1/2 Tbsp butter
4 oz chocolate chips
6 Tbsp granulated sugar (75 g)
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 - 1 tsp ground anise
Heaping 1/4 tsp fine sea salt
6 Tbsp AP flour (51 g)
Powdered sugar for rolling

In a large bowl, melt the butter and chocolate chips in the microwave or over a small pan with 1/2 an inch of simmering water. If using the microwave, start by heating on high for 30 seconds. Stir, and then heat in 10-second bursts until everything is nearly melted. Stir well to let the residual heat finish the job.

Let cool for about 5 minutes.

Add the sugar and mix well with a spatula. Add the egg and the vanilla and mix well.

Add the anise, salt, and flour and mix well. If you are feeling fancy, you can whisk the dry ingredients together separately and then add them to the wet ingredients, but I have not had a problem with distribution when dumping everything into the bowl together.

Cover and freeze for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350. (See note above!)

Scoop about 1-2 Tbsp of batter and roll into a ball between your palms. Drop into the powdered sugar and cover completely and liberally with the powdered sugar.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through. The cookies should be slightly under-baked because we want them to have a gooey, brownie-like texture in the middle.

This simple dish celebrates summer produce and herbs like zucchini and sage. #caramelizedonions #sage #simplerecipes #dinner #lunch #vegetarian

Zucchini with sage and caramelized onions

August 19, 2021 by Rebecca Davis in Cooking, Fall, Gluten-free, Kid eats, Quick meals, Recipes, Summer, Toddler eats, Vegetarian

This 5-ingredient dish (I’m not counting water, salt, and pepper) is super simple, but tastes surprisingly complex and can be customized in endless ways to suit your family’s tastes.

Take me to the recipe!

So, I love zucchini. I actually kind of grieved when my glorious early zucchini plant withered and died thanks to a hungry squash vine borer this summer. But, truth be told, zucchini is kind of a zero in the flavor department. One of its best qualities is that it takes on the personality of whatever it’s paired with, right?

Take zoodles, for example. You would think the titular veg would be the star of the show, but those fake noodles are nothing without a great sauce!

Anyway, THIS zucchini dish has caramelized onions and plenty of salt for flavor, sage for herbiness, and goat cheese to give everything a creamy, saucy vibe. The zucchini is really there for body and to provide a base for the other flavors and it totally does the job!

But can we talk about sage for a second? Where our zucchini flopped, our sage flourished and we ended up with the most gigantic and brilliant green leaves. But sage feels so autumnal that I struggle to use it in the summer time. And in all fairness, the combo of caramelized onions, goat cheese, and sage does have an autumn vibe. But when paired with the summery zucchini, you can totally eat this in July without feeling like you’re trying to speed up time.

A couple of notes:

I spiralized the zucchini, but when cooking the zoodles, they produce a lot of water. If you want something a little dryer or just don’t have/don’t want a spiralizer, just chop the zucchini into 1/2 inch cubes. They’ll be less wet, but no less delicious.
We added white fish to this dish the first time we made it and it was my favorite iteration by far. You can absolutely add a can of beans, shredded chicken, or any other protein as well. But anything that requires more than a few minutes of cooking time (the white fish was thin and cooked in about 6 minutes) should be pre-cooked and added along with the zucchini to heat up during the veg’s short cooking time.

Zucchini with caramelized onions and sage

Time: 30 minutes, all active
Yield: 2 large adult servings, 2 kid servings or more if you add protein

2 large onions, thinly sliced
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 -3 cups water
1 tsp salt, divided, or to taste
5-10 x-large sage leaves (about 1½ to 3 Tbsp chopped fresh sage), to taste
2 large zucchini, chopped or spiralized
Pepper, to taste
½ cup soft goat cheese, or to taste

Heat the olive oil in a large pan with a tight fitting lid until a drop of water sizzles.

Turn the flame to medium* and add the onions. Stir frequently until some browning begins on the onions or in the pan. Once this happens, add 2-3 Tbsp of water (or, enough to loosen those browned bits from the bottom of the pan), stir and scrape to loosen the browned bits, cover with the lid, and let cook for 2 minutes.**

Repeat this process until the onions are soft and have turned a dark brown color.

*If the onions or the pan are browning too fast, turn down the flame.

**If there is too much water in the pan when you take off the lid after letting the onions cook for 2 minutes, turn up the flame and let the onions cook with the cover off until there’s more browning on the pan that can be deglazed.

Once the onions are browned to your liking (I usually stop after about 20 minutes), add ½ tsp salt and pepper to taste.

Add the sage and stir well.

(If adding protein to the pan, add it now and cook to your preferred doneness.)

Add the zucchini and stir into the onions and sage. Cook for 2-3 minutes, or until the zucchini is slightly wilted. I like the zucchini to have a bit of crunch, so if you like it cooked a bit more, add a few more minutes here.

Add the rest of the salt and pepper to taste.

Top with the goat cheese and serve.

Lemon and rosemary turkey and couscous en cocotte

March 08, 2019 by Rebecca Davis in Dairy-free, lunchbox, No refined sugar, Recipes, Toddler eats, Winter

Don’t be intimidated by the “en cocotte” portion of the title. It’s just French for “cooked in a covered pot that you can also use for serving.” An alternative translation is: How to cook a really good turkey breast the lazy way; no overnight brine, no basting, nothing.

Take me to the recipe!

Lemon and rosemary turkey and couscous en cocotte | Me & The Moose. This one-pot (ish) meal has a low and slow cooking time, but is mostly hands-off and a much faster way to make delicious turkey breast without brining or drying out the meat. #t…

A quick note before we talk about the ins and out of this recipe: Anyone who knows me, understands how very much I hate the word “moist.” (I refer to is as “the ‘M’ word.”) Even saying it in my head feels wrong. I’m not alone here, I know, but I do feel that I have a particularly strong reaction, which made my search for the easiest turkey cooking method particularly grueling. Because it’s damn near impossible to read a blog post, watch a video, or see a cooking show about poultry without people shouting it from the rooftops.

But figuring out this recipe made it all worth it! And I promise you, this is the easiest route to not-dry turkey.

I first learned about cooking “en cocotte” from an episode of Cook’s Country. They made “French Chicken in a Pot” and I wanted to try it with turkey. I’ve also wanted to make a version of the famous Greek Avgolemono Soup, which is broth thickened with a cooked grains and egg yolks, but soup isn’t always psychologically satisfying as a meal, you know?

Instead, I used the broth and egg yolks to thicken the grains instead of the other way around.

A couple of cooking notes:

After roasting the turkey, there should be about 1/4 of an inch of liquid at the bottom of the Dutch oven. If there isn’t, add another 1/4 cup of stock before cooking the couscous.
The only extra step in this recipe is to blend together some broth, egg yolks, and lemon juice to add to the cooked couscous. I really recommend using a blender EVEN THOUGH it’ll dirty another appliance. If you don’t get a really good emulsion of the liquids, you can end up with scrambled eggs rather than a rich, thick sauce over your couscous.
The oven temperature (275!) will seem very low and it is. But the Dutch Oven with a lid and an extra layer of foil really seals in the heat and moisture and cooks the turkey despite the low oven temperature. Our oven runs very hot, so I actually set it 10 degree lower.
The only downside to this cooking method is that the steam softens the turkey skin. If you like crispy skin, just strip it off and seer it on a really hot skillet to crisp it back up.
I love serving this with a quick tzatziki sauce.

Lemon and rosemary turkey and couscous en cocotte

1 bone-in turkey breast, about 2 ½ lbs
2 Tbsp olive oil, divided
1 small onion (or ½ of a large onion), chopped
4-5 extra large garlic cloves, smashed and roughly chopped
1 Tbsp fresh rosemary, minced (or 1 tsp dried)
1½ tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp kosher salt
4 cups low sodium chicken stock or water, divided
3 cups Israeli couscous
2 egg yolks
1/3 cup lemon juice (juice of 2 large lemons)

Preheat the oven to 275.

In a large Dutch oven or oven safe pot with a lid, heat 1 Tbsp olive oil over medium high heat. Seer the turkey breast on the top, bottom, and both sides, adjusting the heat if the turkey browns too quickly or if the oil starts to spit uncomfortably. When browned all over (this should take about 10 minutes), remove to a plate.

Add 1 Tbsp of olive oil to the same Dutch oven and heat over a medium low flame for a few seconds. Saute the onion until translucent, about 3 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute more. Add the rosemary, smoked paprika, and salt. Cook for 1 minute more until fragrant.

Turn off the heat.

Add the turkey back to the pan. Cover the top of the Dutch oven tightly with a large piece of tin foil and then top with the lid.

Bake for 1 hour. Check the internal temperature of the turkey with a thermometer in the thickest part. When the thermometer reads 165, the turkey is done. If the turkey isn’t up to temperature yet, return it to the oven and check it every 5-10 minutes to avoid overcooking.

While the turkey is cooking, blend together 1 cup of chicken stock, 2 egg yolks, and 1/3 cup of lemon juice. Set aside.

When the turkey is done, remove the Dutch oven and carefully take off the tin foil from its top (watch the steam!). Remove the turkey to a plate or cutting board and cover tightly with the tin foil. Let rest.

Add 3 cups of stock to the turkey cooking juices in the Dutch oven and bring to a boil. Add the couscous, reduce the heat to low, and simmer for 8-10 minutes, until the couscous has absorbed all of the stock. (Check after 4 minutes to make sure the couscous isn’t cooking too fast or sticking too much. If it is, turn down the heat.)

When the liquid is absorbed, add the broth/ egg yolk/ lemon juice combination. Stir it into the couscous and bring the mixture back to a boil. Once it boils, turn off the heat and stir a few more times.

Slice the turkey and serve with the couscous.

Yield: 5-6 large servings