Those peanut butter M&M cookies

No worries about a white Christmas this year. Thank heaven for supremely nice neighbors with snow blowers.Best early Christmas present ever.

More time to stay inside and bake cookies, and then worry about how to deliver them.

This recipe is one I've been making since 1993 when I saw the ad in a magazine that used red and green M&M baking bits. Like many traditions, I didn't realize I was starting one until it was too late. But they turned out to be a big hit with the small children (and larger ones) on Dave's side of the family, so I kept making them. As the boys grew, they were prone to fighting over them, so I started making a double batch to keep up with demand. I realize it wasn't really the cookies themselves so much as three boys that closely spaced in age wrestling over anything not nailed down, but I started giving each of the offspring and their father their own package of cookies, so then we were up to three to four batches. Of course now there are several grands involved, so we're now at four to five batches so they have a fighting chance at getting some.

There have been challenges over the years, like when M&M baking bits stopped being available in local grocery stores -- not just the green and red ones but ANY baking bits. I had to turn to an off brand supplier from overseas via Amazon to make them for a few years. And then there was the year the squirrel tore into the Amazon package, the one and only time we've ever had a package attacked by squirrels, This one seems to have gone into a sugar frenzy, but thankfully the packages were individually wrapped so not all was lost.

Luckily M&M baking bits returned to stores eventually, and although the pandemic posed supply chain issues, they weren't insurmountable.

So as a first annual installment of my multitude of Christmas cookie recipes, here are the M&M cookies. I know they aren't everyone's must have, but they're a reliable kid pleaser, and they provide a splash of color to the cookie tray. 

Peanut butter M&M cookies
From an ad in Midwest Living magazine, Dec. 1993. If you can find the green and red holiday version, they're more Christmasy, but they'll disappear readily either way.

Ingredients
1¾ cup flour
¾ teaspoon salt
¾ teaspoon baking soda
¾ cup peanut butter (I use chunky style)
1¼ cup brown sugar
½ cup shortening
3 tablespoons milk
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 egg, beaten
1 cup M&M baking bits, plus more for garnish

Method
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Combine flour, salt and baking soda in medium bowl. Set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, combine peanut butter, brown sugar and shortening. Cream until fluffy. Add milk, vanilla and egg. Mix well. Add dry ingredients and mix on low speed just until blended. Stir in 1 cup baking bits.

Using a teaspoon (the kind you eat with, not a measuring teaspoon), form balls of cookie dough and place on a parchment-lined baking sheet two inches apart. Press additional M&M bits onto the cookie surface. Bake until they get the slightest hint of browning and are set. The original recipe said 6 to 7 minutes but I’ve found setting the timer for 9 minutes works well in my oven. Transfer to a wire rack to cool. Makes at least 36, depending on how big you make them. If they're smaller, you can eat more of them, right?

Rating: Better than the gas station variety, certainly. A reliable delivery device for peanut butter and chocolate. After 29 years, I can't imagine not making them.

A few other holiday cookies:

Almond double (or triple) deckers

Maple cookies

Confetti cookies

Cookie butter cookies

Pumpkin soup with crème fraiche, toasted walnuts and rosemary

 

 When life gives you lemons, sometimes it also gives you lots of pumpkins, and you make pumpkin soup because it seems Thanksgiving-ish.Thank you pumpkin patch.

Pumpkin soup with toasted walnuts and rosemary
Adapted from “Sunday Soup” by Betty Rosbottom
Note: The original recipe called for a more convoluted way of cooking pumpkin than I usually use, so I went with my standard method of cutting the pumpkin in half, scooping out the seeds and stringy bits, drizzling the inside with olive oil and roasting, cut side down on a parchment-lined baking sheet for 30 to 40 minutes at 425 degrees, depending on size, until flesh is tender. Discard skins and cut into chunks or puree. The original recipe called for a 5-pound pumpkin, but all ours seem to be weighing in at 3 pounds, so I supplemented with some canned puree to make up the difference.

Ingredients
2 tablespoon butter
1½ cups chopped leeks
5½ cups roasted pumpkin, cut in chunks or pureed
6 cup chicken stock
2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary leaves
2 teaspoons kosher salt
⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper
1½ cups crème fraiche, divided
⅓ cup chopped walnuts, toasted
6 fresh rosemary sprigs for garnish

Method
In a large heavy pot, melt butter. Add leeks and cook until softened. Add roasted pumpkin, chicken stock, rosemary, salt and cayenne. Bring to a simmer and cook about 20 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool slightly before pureeing mixture. Stir in 1 cup of crème fraiche and heat through. Serve with an additional dollop of crème fraiche, walnuts and a rosemary spring. Serves 6 first-course portions.

Rating: It seemed like it could hardly go wrong, and it didn't. Nice and creamy, with the teensy-weensiest bit of heat balancing out the sweetness of pumpkin and rosemary. Pretty too. I'd make it again, with squash if necessary if the squirrels don't plant more pumpkin patches next year.   

Those pumpkin seeds got tossed with a bit of olive oil, sea salt and Tajin and roasted for 25 minutes at 375. Free snacks, another bonus.

 

Crab rangoon pizza

 

There are cheese pizzas and then there are pizza ideas that are potentially cheesy. I first heard of crab rangoon pizza when some of the Fong's Pizza locations in Iowa closed and commenters were lamenting the demise of a source of this pizza variation. A little research indicates this oddity has spread and has been available on the menu locally at Day Block Brewing, where the beer list is likely to make cheesy ideas seem less of a stretch.

Crab rangoon pizza
The recipe started with an amalgam of several recipes I found online and my standard crab rangoon wonton recipe, and then I experimented a few times until I came up with something workable. Dinnerthendesert.com and the Brownie Bites Blog were among the more useful sources. You can either use purchased sweet chili sauce or make the recipe that follows.

Ingredients
4 ounces cream cheese, softened
2 large garlic cloves, chopped
½ tablespoon toasted sesame oil
½ tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
¼ teaspoon onion powder
1 (4.25-ounce) can crab meat, divided
2 green onions, chopped, divided
½ cup grated mozzarella
2 tablespoons grated Parmesan
5 to 6 tablespoons sweet chili sauce, divided
Premade wonton crisps for garnish
1 prebaked or parbaked pizza crust

Method
Preheat oven to 425. Combine cream cheese, garlic, sesame oil, Worcestershire sauce and onion powder in a small bowl. 

Set aside 2 tablespoons of the crab meat. Stir the rest into the cream cheese mixture. Set aside a generous tablespoon of green onions for garnish. Put the rest in the bowl with the cream cheese mixture and mix well.

Place prebaked crust on a pizza pan, or else parbake a crust on a pizza stone. Spread cream cheese mixture over crust. Top with remaining crab meat. Sprinkle cheeses over the top and drizzle with some sweet chili sauce. Bake for 15 to 18 minutes (for a parbaked crust) or 10 to 12 (for a prebaked crust like a Boboli) or under golden brown. (Remove from oven and top with wonton crisps, remaining green onions and some more sweet chili sauce.

Sweet chili sauce
From dinnerthendessert.com

Ingredients
¾ cup sugar
⅓ cup white vinegar
⅔ cup water
¼ cup soy sauce
1 tablespoon ketchup
2 tablespoons cornstarch

Method
Combine all ingredients in a small sauce pan and cook until the mixture comes to a boil and thickens. You will have tons leftover, so if you don’t use sweet chili sauce often, you might want to cut it in at least half. 

Rating: Can there be an authentic crab rangoon pizza? (Or even authentic crab rangoon, when you think about it.) I have no idea whether this is anything like the original restaurant version, because I've never had it. But since it seems we're unlikely to eat inside a restaurant any time soon, I figured I might as well try it. The first version I made had way too much cream cheese, and the crust clearly couldn't stand up to all that moisture. So we dialed back the cream cheese the next time and used a prebaked crust. I'd say this version works well enough, at least as an oddity. If we survive long enough, perhaps some day we'll run across it on a menu.

 

Happy Halloween

 

I once intentionally grew pumpkins. It was one of my first forays into growing things from seed as a kid. It was not a particularly auspicious start for my gardening career. The pumpkins grew large, sprawling out on wayward vines, but their tendency to take up residence in a little-used laneway was their undoing, and my brother ran over them with a tractor.

This year we unintentionally grew pumpkins and had a much greater degree of success. We nearly always have some sort of mystery vine that volunteers, but this is the first time it's turned out to be pumpkins. They did an impressive job of taking over a large area of the lawn where presumably a farmer squirrel had deposited the seed the previous fall. 

I can't claim that it was the most sincere pumpkin patch, and of course since we've had frost it's no longer extant and eligible to be visited by the Great Pumpkin in any case. Having grown them, we now question how Linus could spend any time sitting in a pumpkin patch, because those vines are very scratchy.

Our main question was whether these were eating pumpkins or ones best left for decor. They aren't the really large jack-o-lantern shape, but they aren't the cute pie kind either. We roasted a small one yesterday as a test and the flesh turned out to be suitably mashable just with a fork and not particularly stringy, so I think you'll be seeing a lot more pumpkin recipes soon.

 We opted for this soup recipe for lunch to use up our first small pumpkin.  

Oktoberfest pizza

 

Pizza Lucé teamed with Kramarczuck’s for a special Oktoberfest style pizza. We happened across it on one of those nights where you start out thinking you’re actually going to get to go out for a walk after work like you planned, but then someone encountered a problem just after you should be done for the day. So then the mental bargaining begins, and you pass through the denial stages where you think maybe a short walk and stop at the pizza place down the hill since it’s getting late. And then you’re three hours into trying to help someone and you ask if it’s OK to order pizza. But otherwise we probably wouldn’t have got to sample this one. Which of course we then tried to reverse engineer because it was only offered during their Oktoberfest celebration.

The Krautwürst
Inspiration: Pizza Lucé
Note: For quick pickled onions, you could follow the instructions in this recipe, or try the recipe below.

Ingredients
Pizza crust (either prebaked like a Boboli or dough for one pie)
½ tablespoon olive oil
¼ teaspoon garlic powder
2 tablespoons coarse grainy mustard
¾ cup grated muenster cheese
⅓ cup well-drained sauerkraut
¼ pound smoked knackwurst, sliced ¼-inch thick (1 link)
2 ounces bratwurst, sliced ¼-inch thick (1 link)
½ grated mozzarella
2 tablespoons pickled red onions (see recipe)
1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley

Method
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. If using a pizza stone, place in oven while preheating.

Place a prebaked crust on a pizza pan, or form pizza dough into a round on a peel sprinkled with cornmeal. Combine olive oil, garlic powder and mustard. Spread over crust/dough. Top with muenster cheese, followed by sauerkraut, sausages and then topped with mozzarella. Place pan in oven or slide pizza onto baking stone. Bake for 12 minutes for a prebaked crust (or 15-20 minutes for an unbaked crust) or until pizza is golden. Remove from heat and served topped with pickled red onions and parsley.

Rating: Again, not really an approximation of the original pizza. Again, not really caring, because this one works for me. Both of them taste mostly of Kramarczuck’s smoked knackwurst and pickled onions, and both are plenty tasty if you like something that tastes kind of a like a really good sausage roll in pizza form. And boy, is Kramarczuck's crammed on a Saturday mid-morning these days. Glad to see they're busy, but vowing to get going earlier in the morning next time.

Quick-pickled red onions
From “Picture Perfect Parties” by Annette Joseph

Ingredients
1½ cups red wine vinegar
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3 to 5 whole cloves
1 large red onion, cut into ¼-thick slices

Method
In a medium saucepan over medium heat, combine vinegar, sugar, salt and cloves. Simmer for 2 minutes. Add onion and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and let onion cool. Transfer to a jar for longer term storage in the refrigerator.

Feel free to mix up the spice to your liking. Fennel, caraway or celery seed would be viable alternatives. 

This was the inspiration pizza.

Here's where we landed. This one mixes bockwurst and knackwurst.