Katie Joseph’s Blog

With all the talk of holiday stress and the economic meltdown, I wanted do a little something different when it came to Christmas cookies for my hen party gift exchange last week. Inspired by this artist, I decided that if I couldn’t bring actual happy pills to the party, I could at least make my cookies look like them:

Since Zoloft is sort of non-descript, I went with its cartoon mascot instead:

I also made some non-specific pill cookies that were frosted a solid color on one end with sprinkles on the other end (so they looked like capsules).

My attempt at antacid cookies (made multi-colored by adding food coloring to this recipe) was passable but the “T” (for Tums) stamped in them didn’t hold up during baking. The Xanax cookies were a complete flop in all respects but taste since I made them too small to handle any writing.  Hence, no photos of these.

Despite the above-noted mishaps, the cookies produced a big laugh when they were unveiled and were absolutely worth the time.

Note: Lest you imagine our household with candy dishes of pills on every end table, Google Images — not a personal stash — was my visual reference for this project.

The streets were icy on baking day, and between that and the holiday rush I had absolutely no desire to go to the store to get the proper tools.  A glass and a plastic cup (squeezed just so) served as cookie cutters, and I did the cut-out in the Valium cookies with a paring knife.

The frosting is a little sloppy because (a) it’s powdered sugar frosting, and (b) I was using a zip-top bag with a hole cut in it since I don’t have a proper pastry bag or tips.  I had so much fun doing this that I may invest in some decorating equipment.   The possiblities are endless.

Lincoln is gorgeous in the fall, I think because there are so many nice, mature trees hanging over the street.  (Yes, I like old trees despite the fact that one of their number fell on our garage.)  The leaves above are from one of the trees in our front yard.

I love fall, and I love fall cooking.  We had chili for dinner (made with garden tomatoes) on Friday and I’m making “football stew” tonight.  For those of you who aren’t members of the Harr family, it’s basically a beef/vegetable Crockpot recipe that cooks for approximately the length of a football game.  It’s a very guess-friendly recipe and pretty tough to screw up.  That’s my kind of cooking.

We had biscuits and gravy this morning — I used the Joy of Cooking recipe and Bob Evans sausage, with regular old canned biscuits.  Get this: the sausage did not produce enough grease for gravy.  I had to supplement it with butter.  And to add to the unhealthiness of this dish, I accidentally got whole milk instead of skim last time I was at the store.

They changed the packaging of our hippie-organic milk, so I grabbed from the wrong end of the shelf.  When I poured it in the pan I thought their was something wrong with it … it was so opaque and not at all blue. What a decadent mistake.

Last but not least, a sale alert for Lincolnites: the new HyVee near 48th & O has some crazy sales going on.  Fresh, and I believe locally-grown, green beans are $1.18/pound.  I bought five pounds and blanched/froze four of them this morning.  Between that, tomatoes, and apples, our freezer is full; I need to either learn to can or get a deep freeze.

Time to go check on the stew.  Hope you’re all enjoying your weekends.

I’m now out of my broken ankle boot most of the day, and can also stand for a good while without my left foot/ankle swelling to giant proportions, so I’m cooking more.  We’ve got a year-end garden/CSA bounty in our kitchen, so that makes cooking extra cheap and extra fun. Despite evidence to the contrary (frozen pizza boxes in our recycling each week), I actually do enjoy cooking when I have the time.  I especially enjoy mastering a new set of recipes, and tonight’s is one of my new specialties.

The menu included flat iron steak from Leon’s (my favorite neighborhood grocery store, where they actually employ real live butchers), garlic mashed potatoes, and vegetables.  I intended to photoblog the whole thing with my new toy but, as usual, got so caught up in the process that I forgot until the very end.  Here’s the final product:

Meat

The steak is prepared per the butcher’s instructions (pan fried a few minutes on each side with olive oil, salt and pepper), with slightly longer cook time. One of the reasons I love Leon’s is that I can ask the butcher (a) what’s easy to do, and (b) how do I cook it? and he’ll give me usable advice.  It isn’t the cheapest place in town, but I’ll pay a little extra for quality, and a little more on top of that for good service.

The potatoes are a variant of Alton Brown’s Mashers recipe (scaled down for two, and using butter, skim milk, and sour cream).

The vegetables are a combination of store-bought and garden, roasted in the oven with olive oil and salt.  I knew it was time to take these out of the oven when the olive oil started burning and smoke began wafting upwards.  Miraculously, the vegetables themselves were not burnt.  If I had it to do over again, I would’ve done the asparagus and red peppers first, and added the tomatoes in the last five or so minutes. And maybe not have used so much olive oil under a broiler.

All in all, pretty good.  And it took about an hour and a half from the time I walked in the door until the dishwasher started a’whirring.  That’s my kind of dinner.

This post was inspired by The Pioneer Woman, and delicious, tasty beef.