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recipe not!Friday
Jul. 30th, 2014 01:43 pmA while back I bought three jars of knock-off Nutella (not quite as good as the real thing, but not bad) at the dollar store, so I've been looking for ways to use it besides spreading it on Lattemiele cookies from Trader Joe's (highly recommended, by the way) or, um, eating it with a spoon. This morning I baked some Peanut Butter Nutella Swirl cookies. They're nice, but the Nutella kind of disappears among all the other ingredients (the fact that I added a bunch of chocolate chunks probably didn't help) and the cookie dough is quite dry, creating a crumbly, shortbread-like cookie whereas I wanted something softer.
If anybody has Nutella recipes that highlight the Nutella itself, please link me. I know crepes with Nutella are the obvious thing, but I don't have the right kind of pan to make crepes and I'm not going to try.
For lunch, I used some frozen corn to make corn pakoras. I omitted the green chile because I didn't have one, omitted the fennel seed, and went for the medium onion option instead of the green onions. I didn't have enough oil to deep fry them, so I poured maybe 3/4 inch of oil into a saucepan and that worked very well, much better than when I've tried frying things like this in a skillet, where because of the size of the skillet you have to use a ton of oil to get any oil depth, and the shallowness of the skillet means you splatter oil everywhere, plus whatever you're frying often sticks. A key thing is not to make the pakoras too big--a gently rounded tablespoonful of dough works well--so that you can use nicely hot oil but the outside won't brown before the inside is cooked. I ate some of the pakoras with sweet mango chutney and sweet-and-sour lime pickle, and now I have lots of cooked pakoras to freeze and reheat in the oven.
And returning to baking, a while back I wanted to use up a bag of pecans I'd bought on sale, so I made Chocolate-Glazed Toffee Bars:
( recipe from The Joy of Cooking under the cut )
If anybody has Nutella recipes that highlight the Nutella itself, please link me. I know crepes with Nutella are the obvious thing, but I don't have the right kind of pan to make crepes and I'm not going to try.
For lunch, I used some frozen corn to make corn pakoras. I omitted the green chile because I didn't have one, omitted the fennel seed, and went for the medium onion option instead of the green onions. I didn't have enough oil to deep fry them, so I poured maybe 3/4 inch of oil into a saucepan and that worked very well, much better than when I've tried frying things like this in a skillet, where because of the size of the skillet you have to use a ton of oil to get any oil depth, and the shallowness of the skillet means you splatter oil everywhere, plus whatever you're frying often sticks. A key thing is not to make the pakoras too big--a gently rounded tablespoonful of dough works well--so that you can use nicely hot oil but the outside won't brown before the inside is cooked. I ate some of the pakoras with sweet mango chutney and sweet-and-sour lime pickle, and now I have lots of cooked pakoras to freeze and reheat in the oven.
And returning to baking, a while back I wanted to use up a bag of pecans I'd bought on sale, so I made Chocolate-Glazed Toffee Bars:
( recipe from The Joy of Cooking under the cut )
