Why did we put this one off so long?

For the past six months we've been meaning to do P-Dub's Oatmeal Crispies (p. 227), but we just finally got around to doing the recipe in the past couple of weeks.

This has become one of our new, favorite cookies. We would even rank it among our top ten favorites. And that's saying something. These are our vehicle of choice for ice cream at the present time. And, they make the house smell like a cinnamon sugar candle. Yum.

We began by chopping pecans with a large knife.

Next we mixed granulated sugar, brown sugar and shortening.

We beat two eggs and a smidgen of vanilla. The egg mixture was added to the sugar.

We combined our dry ingredients of flour, baking soda and salt. In a moment of inspiration, we decided to add a dash of cinnamon. You can't go wrong with cinnamon in this recipe. We gradually added the flour mixture into the sugar concoction.

Next, we folded in our oats and pecans. Don't you just want to eat the dough right now? We wanted to, and we did.

We formed two logs and wrapped them in Saran wrap, placing them in the refrigerator to chill.

When we were ready, we cut the logs into cookie-sized pieces. Note, these cookies do expand quite a bit, so make your log of dough long and thin if you'd like smaller cookies. Ours, however, became monster cookies. Not that we're complaining.

These were baked for approximately 10 minutes at 350-degrees.

And we were so excited to eat them, we do not take a final picture of the baked cookies. Please trust us when we say that they were delicious and make for great ice cream sandwich cookies. Hopefully, the following picture of The Bean will suffice.

The oatmeal crispies are like oatmeal raisin cookies, but with pecans instead. We all agreed, between bites, this cookie was a great variation off of the classic oatmeal raisin cookie.

Happily full,

Roasted Corny-ness

With the extra-mild winter weather we've been experiencing, our men had the itch to smoke some meat. So they did. Uncle He-Man and Lou brought some baby back ribs to share. Mmm...tasty.

The task left to Lou and Jo was to decide on what dishes to serve along with the wonderful ribs. We decided upon Katie's Roasted Corn Salad (p. 26).

Since the grill was being occupied by the ribs (Hallelujah! - corny style), we began by roasting our corn on the broiler pan in the oven. It was prepared with olive oil and roasted for approximately 10 minutes.

Next we sliced red onion, red bell pepper and yellow squash. These were prepared for roasting, with olive oil, just as the corn was.

We sliced two roma tomatoes while the veggies were roasting.

Next we made our dressing. We mixed oil and balsamic vinegar.

We cut basil leaves - chiffonade style (we were wearing our fancy pants). This is done by rolling a stack of basil leaves length-wise, slicing the leaves width-wise to form long strips. See? We really were wearing our fancy pants.

To the dressing we added salt and minced garlic. All the ingredients were whisked together.

We sliced the corn kernels off the cobs.

We diced the remaining vegetables.

Once these were combined, we drizzled the dressing over the mixture. This was thoroughly folded into the salad.

We chilled the salad for a short time, allowing the flavors to mingle and marry. Katie's Roasted Corn Salad is good by itself or served with tortilla chips.

Happily full,