Brownies

Yes, it's another dessert recipe and I promised something different....but here's the thing. When it's been raining for 40 days and 40 nights all I want to do is sit inside and bake stuff like this - an incredibly simple, no fuss brownie.

This is the brownie recipe I grew up baking. It's simple, delicious, and can be made with regular ingredients in the cupboard without special grocery trips.

I'm not a huge chocolate fan but when I was flipping through the recipes tonight I kept coming back to the brownies.

Make us......MAKE US.....

So I did. It's been at least a decade since I've made these and I had forgotten how simple and delicious they were. The forgotten brownie amidst the overly sweet and complicated world of boxed brownies with too many layers of decadence.

My mother always added walnuts to the batter. Tonight I topped half with sliced almonds, leaving 1/2 of the pan un-contaminated by nuts for the nut-hating husband.



What you need:

• 1 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup cocoa powder
• 1/3 cup melted butter
• 2 unbeaten eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 3/4 cup flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder

Nuts for mixing or topping if you wish. 

Git 'er done

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. 

Mix together sugar and cocoa. Stir in melted butter. Stir in eggs and vanilla extract. Make sure everything is mixed really well. 

Sift together or otherwise mix the remaining dry ingredients together really well....then combine with the wet mixture. 

Mix in nuts if desired.

Pour into a greased 8x8 baking pan. 

Top with nuts if desired. 

Bake 20-25 minutes, until the edges start to slightly pull away. DO NOT OVER BAKE. In fact....just go ahead and pull it out of the oven at designated time. You will then panic when it appears completely unbaked in the center....but trust me. It will be perfectly cooked as it sets and then you will have chewy perfectly baked brownies instead of crunchy little chocolate-like brownie cardboard. 

Tortillas (with bonus salsa recipe and others!)

Today's *recipe is the humble flour tortilla because soon I'm going to share some enchilada recipes. You can use store bought tortillas to make them, but believe me when I say that making a quick batch of home made is doable, practical, and worth it.

*and then I got carried away and added a few bonus things to the end of the post. But whatever. The post started as *just* the humble tortilla recipe. 

I grew up on home-made flour tortillas made by my decidedly gringo mother, who could turn out tender yet stretchy containers for family burrito nights as quickly as she could whip up a batch of buttermilk biscuits the next.

In my 20's living on my own and diligently following the recipe I couldn't get them to turn out. They were stiff, burnt, had holes in them, and did not do tortilla-like things like contain a filling. Store bought tortillas were tough and had a weird aftertaste, but I gave up and settled for them until last year, when I gave the homemade ones another try.

Before digging up my mother's recipe I used a different recipe I had on hand which used olive oil in place of crisco. I think having the fat source in the recipe already "melted" made a big difference in getting the consistency of the dough right and having them roll out nicely. My conclusion when I realized my mom's had crisco was that the exact fat you use here doesn't really matter - use what you have on hand, and if it's not an oil, heed the directions on my mother's original recipe to use very hot water. And if you do try crisco or some other solid-at-room-temp fat and can't get the recipe to work, try an oil.

One other small change, the copy of the recipe I have calls for a bit of (optional) dry milk. I've never added it, so I omit it here.

Every recipe I've used says to use an ungreased skillet - this is mostly true. I keep a paper towel handy to wipe out the skillet 2-3 times to keep excess flour from burning and smoking, and will admit to spritzing the pan with *just a bit* of pam or similar, or perhaps having some grease on that towel when I wipe it down every 2-3 tortillas.

What you need

This makes ~6-8 medium tortillas. This recipe easily doubles.

• 1 cup flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon olive oil or crisco or other fat (see recipe notes above)
• water (if using crisco, use very hot water. If using oil, doesn't really matter)

How to get 'er done

Mix together dry ingredients in a bowl. If using a solid fat, incorporate with a fork or pastry blender into flour mixture (or for a modern touch a la Mel, whir around in a food processor). If using oil, eye ball it in and mix it around. Add water a little at a time while mixing until mixture is a soft dough. If you screw up and held it under the faucet too long, add a little more flour. 

Divide dough into equal portions and form into balls (I find that doing this helps me roll out a more circular tortilla). Roll out on a floured surface - I usually do it right on the counter top next to the stove so I can flip them in the skillet and roll more out at the same time. Cook at medium-high temp in a heavy skillet (not a thin non-stick) until it starts to brown, then flip. 

Recipe notes: 

(from my mom, Carolyn)

"With practice, these become easy. They beat the store ones for price, tenderness, and freshness". 
~From Mrs. Diaz, homemaking teacher

PS from Mel - Corn tortillas and a bonus salsa recipe

If corn tortillas are more your style, did you know they are even easier? Buy some masa flour, add water according to directions and form little balls. Place inside of a ziplock bag and smash down with a large flat bottomed and heavy dish to press it into the right thickness. Then cook like described above. IMO if you've never had a fresh corn tortilla you don't know what a corn tortilla is. It's *not* the dry cardboard things that come out of the plastic packages. No siree. These are tender little pieces of heaven just begging to be baked into home made chips, or be topped with lime juice marinated cabbage and your choice of seasoned meat filling, with perhaps a bit of pineapple salsa on the side.

Oh, you want my Pineapple Salsa recipe?

1 can of cubed pineapple
Zest of 1 lime
Juice of half a lime (use the other half to marinate the shredded cabbage that is going in your tacos)
Chopped pickled jalopeno peppers to taste

Marinate at least 10 min. Sprinkle a bit of mexican spice blend over the top. My family's favorite that we mix up to have on hand for enchiladas, tacos, refried beans, or any other appropriate dish is:

• 2 parts chili powder
• 2 parts ground cumin
• 1 part corriander
• 1 part chipotle chilli powder
• Smoked paprika to taste

~Barely adapted from a Blue Apron recipe

And even more ideas....

Cheap Mexican Burritos: 

• Make your own refried beans (soak beans, boil beans, and then mash beans in a skillet and season). 
• Make a big pot of rice. Did you know that this cheater way of making rice totally works? I never worry about measuring water or it sticking to my pan any more. 
• Make flour tortillas
• Assemble burrito and garnish with salsa or pico 

Veggie Wraps: 

• Cut veggies into bite sized strips. Mushrooms, bell peppers, onions, asparagus work really well. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper to taste. Grill or roast in the oven. 
• Mix mayo with balsamic vinegar. 
• Slather a tortilla with the dressing, add vegetables. 

This is a good "kitchen sink" recipe to use up your left over vegetables at the end of the week. I know it sounds so simple and plain, but the combination of mayo and balsamic vinegar pairs everything together and it's AMAZING. I can eat an entire cookie sheet of roasted vegetables this way.

Seasme Wafers

In the early 90's my dad was an undergraduate student at UC Davis and as a family we would often visit the coffee house, where each of us kids got to choose a cookie. I can't remember what cookie I usually chose, but it probably wasn't this sesame wafer cookie - my tastes running towards something big, dark and rich looking at time.

Two years later my dad graduated and we moved away. I can vaguely remembering my mom buying the cookbook that the coffee shop had published before we left and over the years she tried various recipes from it. This was a keeper from the very first time she baked it.

The dough is a rather unassuming sugar cookie that completely transforms when you cover it in sesame seeds. The sesame seeds add a toasted, chewy element that is sheer perfection - I promise.

The recipe originally called for 1/2 butter and 1/2 crisco and now I make it with all butter. Unlike the molasses crinkles, getting the final product texture right with this substitution wasn't a big deal. I think in part because not being dark colored cookies, it's easier to see when they are done and not let them get over cooked.

As usual with a all-butter cookie recipe, I find the temperature of the batter prior to baking is critical. After forming the balls chill in the freezer for 5-10 min before baking - it makes a huge difference. If you don't the cookies will spread and be hideous and weird. I like coating them with sesame seeds BEFORE chilling, because otherwise the dough isn't quite sticky enough to pick up enough sesame seeds to coat the ball.

The copy of the recipe I have now is a re-typed version of the original and somehow the sugar was left out of the ingredients.... even though the instructions say clearly to cream the fats and sugar. Based on typical cookie ingredient ratios, something in the 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 c. range should work. When I remade the recipe recently for this blog, 1 1/2 cups of sugar worked just fine.

What you need

1 c. unsalted butter
1 1/2 c. sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 1/8 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
Enough sesame seeds for rolling, ~1 cup.

How to git 'er done

Oven preheated to 375 degrees

Cream fat and sugar.

Mix in egg and vanilla.

Premix dry ingredients and then add to wet mixture.

Roll into dough balls about the size of a walnut. Coat with sesame seeds and place on an ungreased cookie sheet. Partially flatten with a flat-bottom glass. Chill dough for 5-10 minutes (I usually do this on the cookie sheet in the freezer).

Bake ~10 minutes, until golden brown on the bottom.

To make a freezer batch I roll the balls and freeze without the sesame seeds (otherwise they just fall off in the freezer during storage). To bake Let the dough balls thaw while oven preheats, and then roll in the seeds. Doesn't pick up as many, but is still sufficient. Bake for ~12 minutes.

Makes ~2 dozen cookies

Adapted from the UC Davis Coffee House Cookbook

Molasses Crinkles

The chewy rim and soft moist center of this cookie that I remember from childhood is really easy to get when using the originally call for crisco. Nowadays I try to avoid crisco in favor of butter when I can and I won't lie - getting that texture was really difficult to replicate when I switched it to an all butter recipe.

I ended up reading a lot of science about the physics of cooking with butter versus crisco because I was really frustrated when I couldn't get the texture right in these cookies.  It boils down to relative melting temperatures and differing moisture contents and I was *this* close to throwing my hands up in the air and using lard in the recipe when I finally figured out how to manage the butter.

There are 2 tricks.

• Pay attention to the temperature of your dough when you go to bake it. Chilling the batter and/or using a stand mixer to cream cold butter with the sugar is recommended not something I say just because I'm trying to delay your cookie experience.  It actually will result in cookies that don't over spread and end up as dry little biscuits. 
• DO NOT OVER  BAKE. This is so much harder then it sounds. Dark cookies on a dark pan cooked with all butter have a very short window. I overcooked THREE batches of these cookies before deciding that indeed the original 10-12 min (lower end for dough that has been chilled, higher end when cooking from frozen) was perfect and JUST TAKE THE DAMN THINGS OUT OF THE OVEN - even if it looks like they can't possibly be done. They really are and are dang near perfect once they cool a bit (which I let them do on a rack, not on the hot cookie sheet). 

If you don't have an objection to crisco and want to make it that way the butter does not significantly flavor these cookies thanks to the strong flavor of molasses and spices and switching results in a softer moister center and chewer edges without needing perfect timing.

Nope nope nope. I absolutely did not allow my 18 month daughter to lick the cookie dough off the beater. Ummm....yeah that's my story and I'm sticking to it. 

Makes ~2 dozen

What you need

3/4 c. butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup molasses
2 1/4 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
scant 2 teaspoon baking soda (don't ask me what the hell this exactly means I just go with it)
1/2 tsp cloves
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
Sugar (for tops)

How to get 'er done

Bake them in an Oven 375 degrees

Cream the fats and sugar. Chilled butter and a stand mixer is highly recommended. Add the egg and molasses and mix well.

Mix the dry ingredients (except for the sugar) together and then add to the wet mixture.

Roll into walnut sized ball cookies, dip tops into sugar. Chill the cookies "for a while" (10 min?) in the freezer before cooking. I know a lot of recipes have you chill the dough before shaping them I don't like how dry hard to shape the dough is after chilling, so I prefer to chill it after it's in ball form.

Cook for 8-10 minutes.

Freezing: Freeze formed balls in freezer before dipping tops if wanted. A friend told me to thaw the cookies on the cookie sheet for the amount of time it takes the oven to preheat, and she was right - they cook up perfectly. I usually flatten the cookies slightly with the bottom of a flat dish if cooking from frozen-ish because otherwise they don't spread enough and get the chewy cooked rim that I love.

If cooking from frozen, cook for 12 minutes in a preheated oven.

- According to my mother, original recipe came from a very old paperback Gold Medal flour cookbook. Early 60's or late '50's. It was the first cookbook she ever baked anything from.