Oven Roasted Cabbage

Cabbage: it's not just for St. Patrick's Day! Oven roasted cabbage is a surprisingly simple, tasty, and inexpensive winter side dish.  

There are only four ingredients.  Cabbage, olive oil, salt, and pepper.

Shred the cabbage. I tried using a food processor but found it to be faster to use a knife.  

Bonus:  less equipment to clean up.

Place shredded cabbage in a large bowl and drizzle with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Stir to coat. It’s going to look like a lot, but it cooks way down. And you'll wish you had cooked two heads. Ok, maybe one will be plenty.

Layer it all on a baking pan and cook at 400 degrees for 30-40 minutes. Stir occasionally to cook evenly.

There should be plenty of brown bits when it's done. The brown bits are the best part.

This stuff is good. Really good.

1 head shredded cabbage

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

salt and pepper, to taste

Preheat oven to 400 F.

Toss all ingredients together and spread evenly on a baking sheet. Roast for 20-30 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes or so to make sure everything is cooked evenly.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

This is an old, old recipe from my old, old Betty Crocker's Cooky Book ( ©1963)! I like it for a couple reasons - first, because it isn't attached to any one brand of chocolate chips, and second, because it makes about 3 dozen, using a 6 oz bag of chocolate chips.  Which just happens to be the size of the bags of the Scharffenberger chocolate chips, and is plenty of cookies for Ian and me.  You should double this recipe if you are using a regular (12-14 oz) bag of chips.

2/3 cup shortening (part butter or margarine) -- I use 1/2 cup plain Crisco, plus 2-2/3 tablespoons of butter.

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1 large egg

1 tsp vanilla

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 six-oz package semi-sweet chocolate pieces (1 cup)

1/2 cup chopped nuts (I usually omit these - Ian doesn't like them and I don't care)

1. Preheat oven to 375ºF (quick mod).  (use 350º if you have a convection oven combo)
2. Mix shortening, sugars, egg, and vanilla thoroughly.
3. Stir dry ingredients together (add 1/4 cup more of flour for a more rounded, softer cooky) and blend in.
4. Mix the nuts (if using) and chocolate pieces in.
5. Drop rounded teaspoonfuls of dough about 2" apart on an ungreased baking sheet.
6. Bake 8-10 minutes, or until delicately browned (cookies should still be soft)
7. Cool slightly before removing from baking sheets.
8. Makes 4 to 5 dozen 2" cookies (I only get 3 dozen, but I think they are bigger than this)

Thanks to Susannah Skyer Gupta for the lovely photo (above) she took of the cookies she made (with nuts) using this recipe.

Gluten Free Gingerbread Cake House

Helen and Luke like to decorate gingerbread houses at Christmas time so I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try this recipe.  One of the things I liked about it was that it spelled out all the ingredients rather than calling for a “gluten free flour blend”.  I haven’t baked gf enough to have a favorite blend, so I like a recipe that calls for specific amounts of each flour/starch.

The recipe calls for “sweet rice flour”.  Another name for this is “glutinous rice flour”.  I find most of my flours and starches at a local Asian market.  Much cheaper than the gluten free baking aisle of the local grocery store.

The recipe also calls for buttermilk which I never have.  I do, however, always have these two ingredients on hand: 

Mix together 1 tablespoon of lemon juice in 1 cup of milk.  Let it sit for five minutes before using it in the recipe.

Look at this beautiful batter.   If that doesn't scream gingerbread, I don’t know what does. 

A couple of years ago I bought this nifty Nordic Ware Gingerbread House Bundt pan.

I use cooking spray to grease it well.  Gets all of those nooks and crannies.  It took 55 minutes at 350 degrees to cook completely.

After it came out of the oven, the challenge was to get it out of the pan in one piece.  Success!  Or so I thought...

 When I went to trim a little off of the bottom to even it out:

Disaster struck.  Magnitude 8.2 quake? 

The flavor of the cake is very good.  One of the biggest problems with gluten free baked goods is that they’re very crumbly.  Luckily I had a couple of traditional spice cake mixes in the pantry so gingerbread house decorating was able to go on as scheduled.