Jalapeño Cheddar Bicuits

I've found that the freshest dairy products are bought in alleys

The first thing that you think about when you buy cheese out of the back of a van is safety. How recently was this van serviced? Was the air conditioning on when it drove down from Wisconsin? Is there a Cheese Mafia, and if so does this make me their customer, business partner, or rival? But let me start at the beginning. A guy called the restaurant where I'm working looking to sell some cheese, and gave shockingly few details about where it had come from, who he was, or why he was peddling mystery cheese in the first place. Eventually it was learned that he worked at a new dairy up in Wisconsin that had overproduced for an order, and so he was looking for people to buy some of his discounted sketchy cheese out of the back of his van. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity. The restaurant bought a fair amount of cheese, and I got some for myself. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared in my life, the cheese van drove off in to the night, leaving me with nothing but a weird story, fond memories, and 9 pounds of discounted cheddar cheese. Which brings us to biscuits.

Ingredients:

2 cups Whole Wheat Flour (I'm doing a whole wheat thing right now, so I used whole wheat flour. If you want to switch it out for regular flour, go ahead)
3/4 cup Grated Cheddar Cheese
1 cup Buttermilk
3/4 stick of Butter (This is 6 TBSP, for you math/unit conversion nerds out there)
2 Pickled Jalapeños 
3 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
An average adult human's pinch of Salt

So the first thing you're going to want to do, after having bought the rest of your ingredients out of the backs of whatever vans are available in your neighborhood, is to have a long family history of biscuit-making to rely on. If, like me, the closest your family ever came to biscuits was to have had a conversation with someone from Alabama or Georgia (The longest conversation on record in Georgia and Alabama without somebody mentioning biscuits in some way was 5 minutes and 47 seconds, at a funeral in 1937), you may have to fake it a little bit. In any event, take your flour and whisk in your baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Then take your jalapeños and chop them down to size. You're looking for a pretty fine cut on these. You want them to flavor the biscuits throughout, but you're not looking for people to be biting in to giant chunks of jalapeño. That's how friendships are ruined. Take your butter, grate it in to your flour, and work it in until it forms in to little pea-sized globules. It's important that your butter doesn't melt if you want light flaky biscuits instead of dense lumps of sadness. If, like me, you've been cursed with absurdly warm hands, don't be afraid to take a break and stick your flour and butter in the freezer to cool off.

Yes, I made these today. And no, there aren't any left

Once you've got your buttery flour globules all set, add in your cheese, jalapeños, and buttermilk, and very gently stir to combine. You don't want to overwork your dough, or else you'll form a bunch of gluten, melt your butter, and end up sad and alone at the company picnic like last year (for the sake of this example I'm assuming you don't live in the midwest, where picnicking would be a challenge since its still snowing despite technically being mid-April). If you have things like a traditional biscuit cutter and a biscuit pan that your family has passed down since they were originally forged on the Mayflower, good for you. I don't have any of those things, except for the unwarranted sense of puritanical entitlement, so I'm making drop biscuits, so named because you just splorp a spoon in to your dough and drop it on to your pan. Do your best to get your biscuits close together and equally sized. If you're smarter than I was you'll push down lightly with your thumb in the middle of each biscuit so that they rise evenly and you don't end up with a dome on top of each one. Either way, shove those suckers in to a 450 degree oven for about 15 minutes, then take them out and try not to burn your hands and mouth when you refuse to wait for them to cool down and shove them in to your face. You can totally add some butter on top if you can find any before your friends and family (or you. Just you) devours them all. Enjoy!

Peanut Butter and Jelly Cookies

These cookies are delicious. Dancing strangers in banana
suits will try and steal them. Don't let this happen. 

Peanut butter is interesting stuff. It's a key ingredient in delicious spicy soups and tasty sweet desserts alike. Also people slather it on bread along with jelly and call it a meal. There isn't technically anything wrong with this. The flavors go, it tastes pretty good, and it's filling. Also, it's super easy to just slather assorted goops on to bread and call it lunch for your kids, and easy is a valuable thing when you're a parent. I've seen parents. They need all of the help that they can get. Still, given peanut butter's versatility, it seems like we're not getting everything that we can out of this flavor pairing. Because peanut butter and jelly is straight up delicious. We don't think about it much because we associate the flavors with kids, and we tend to dismiss everything about kids because it helps us ignore how jealous we are that they don't have to pay rent. 

Ingredients:

1 Cup Peanut Butter (Now ordinarily when you're cooking you'd use smooth peanut butter. And of course, this is no exception.)

3/4 Cup Brown Sugar

1 Stick Butter

1 Egg

1 typically-sized human's pinch of Salt

3/4 Cup Flour

1 tsp Vanilla Extract

1/4 tsp Baking Powder

1/4 tsp Baking Soda

Raspberry Jam

More Sugar!

The first thing you're going to need to do is wait. Like, forever. Because you need your butter to be room temperature, and warming up to room temperature isn't something that butter takes lightly. It's got to take some time and really learn about itself, maybe travel the world and live a little bit, before it makes that kind of commitment. Eventually, when your butter is ready to settle down, punish it for its indecisiveness by creaming your brown sugar right in to its face. Sure, that may sound violent. But "creaming" sugar in to butter is really just rapidly beating the crystalline structure of the sugar in to the butter so that it rips innumerable tiny holes in it which trap in air. Anyhow, once you're done torturing your butter for toying with your emotions, beat in your peanut butter, egg, and vanilla. In another bowl, whisk together your flour, baking soda, and baking powder, along with your pinch of salt. Slowly add your flour mix in to your peanut butter glop, and stir until it's combined. Grease up a baking sheet, and start portioning out some cookies. Grab about a ping-pong-ball-sized chunk of your cookie dough, and roll it in some sugar until it holds its shape well. Put it on your baking sheet, and repeat until you're out of dough. Bear in mind, these things are going to be light, fluffy, slightly crumbly cookies, and as such they'll need some room to spread out when cooking. Overcrowd your baking sheet at your own peril.

Not pictured: The many cookies I ate before remembering
that I needed to take some pictures.

Take your thumb, and lightly press down on to the cookie ball in order to slightly flatten it and make a little well in your cookie. If you don't have any thumbs, do your best with assorted spoons or mannequin hands, or whatever's lying around. Throw those suckers (the cookies) in a 350 degree oven for about 35 minutes, when they darken in color and start to hold their shape. Now let's talk filling. For the most delicious results, take your cookies out of the oven half-way through their cook time, fill them with your raspberry jam, and throw them back in the oven for the remainder of the time. For the prettiest results, let your cookies finish cooking before filling them up with your jam. It's up to you whether you value form or function more. And, just to be clear, it's going to be delicious either way. Just one way will be more delicious, and the other way will be more the wrong decision to have made. I will say this though: if you decide to make the right decision and go for maximum deliciousness, bear in mind that the jelly is hot when it comes out of the oven. So even though you're tempted by the obvious awesomeness, try and resist the urge to just bite in to one because you'll totally burn yourself. With hot sticky jam, which will stick to you, and then keep on burning you. We both know you're going to do it anyway, but at least now you've been warned.

Whole Wheat French Bread

Artist's depiction: The French Revolution

The French have given us a great many things over the years. Canning, the guillotine, cartoon skunks that borderline sexually assault cats. The list goes on and on. But as much as we in our modern society enjoy of all of these French wonders (like eating snails, and defending the eating of snails), none of them are quite as iconic and delicious as french bread. Which makes sense. What's not to love? It's a stick of delicious crusty bread that you can choose to eat immediately, save for later, or brandish as a weapon. That's pretty much the American dream right there. Which makes this the second time that the French have helped facilitate it, and this time Benjamin Franklin didn't even need to get syphilis.

Ingredients:

3 cups Whole Wheat Flour
1.25 cups Warm Water (Most internet sources say your warm water should be about 110 degrees. That's great if you want to set up a candy thermometer in a pot of water and cook it while meticulously watching it to make sure you reach your ideal temperature. Or you could use hot water from the faucet, which on average is between 105 and 115 degrees. Your call)
1 TBSP Honey
1/4 oz. Active Dry Yeast (That's one packet. Or about 2.25 teaspoons for the packetless among you)
Salt
Oil
Corn Meal
More flour. All the flour.
An optional Egg White

So, at this point we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that this is indeed a whole wheat recipe. *Gasp. I know. Sure, the name of the post could have warned you about this and saved you some shock, but let's not get bogged down on who should have read what and when. The fact is that while modern french bread is probably rooted in Napoleon's regulation of the baking industry, the reason that he did that was to prevent the dissatisfaction the lower classes previously had about being not being allowed white flour. Also I have a giant bag of whole wheat flour I need to use up. So shut it. Anyway, stir together your yeast, water, and honey, and let them sit together for about 10 minutes. When you come back to check on them, they should be kind of frothy. It's actually pretty cool to watch this happen, but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you have better things to do for 10 minutes than watch a bunch of yeast belching. Most (Seemingly all) online recipes use the exact same phrase for the next part. "In a stand mixer with a dough hook attachment..." Yeah, we're not doing that. You know what they had before stand mixers? Hands. That's what. You know what they had before "dough hook attachments?" Big wooden spoons that they also used to hit slackers with. It was a magical time. Once you're done fantasizing about all of the people you'd hit with a wooden spoon if it was socially acceptable, stir two big pinches of salt into your gassy yeast, followed by your 3 cups of flour. Stir the crap out of it until it forms into a dough that doesn't cling to the sides of your bowl. If you need to, add more flour to achieve this.

Best served as far away from people eating snails as possible

Now you need to knead your dough (That sentence was even more ridiculous before revisions). Flour some flat surface in your home that you don't mind getting covered in flour, and plop your dough ball down on it. Press it down, stretch it, and fold it in half. Repeat, adding more flour as necessary, for about 8 minutes, or until your hand starts to hurt and your brain goes numb. Throw it in a greased up bowl and store it in a warm place so the dough can rise. Give it at least an hour for this, then punch it down so that it doesn't get snooty from all of the gas it created (a lot of the issues that people have with the French comes from them having not been properly punched down) and form it into a log. Throw some corn meal down on a baking pan and plop your dough log onto it. If you want to get fancy, take a sharp knife and slice the top of it diagonally 3 or four times (evenly spaced out). Let it sit for about 10 more minutes to puff up a little bit more before throwing it in the oven. If you want to get even fancier, brush some egg white over the top of the dough. In any case, after your 10 minutes, throw that sucker in a 375 degree oven for about 30 minutes. If you want to get your bread extra crusty, throw a couple ice cubes in the oven right before you close it. They say that when french bread is done it should sound hollow. I don't know if that's true, but I do know that if you grab bread out of a 375 degree oven to see how it "sounds," you'll probably burn your hands and/or ears. Happy baking!

Apple Pomegranate Crumble

One of these things is not like the other, one of
these things is 90% seeds.

So the new year is upon us. Not the fun new year at the end of December that starts full of excessive alcohol consumption and excitement, and ends in hilarious tragedy or boredom. The Jewish new year, which is pretty much a time for merriment, introspective self-evalutation, and eating delicious foods until we can't lift our arms to eat any more, at which point a trained staff of hired help will continue to stuff food down our throats until we (or they) pass out. Also, there's a more recent tradition to eat some specific foods for the symbolism, such as pomegranates for a multitude of blessings, or apples and honey for a sweet year. There are like 100 more of these. I won't bore you or me by listing them. Especially since I've already taken this "Jewish Traditions 101" class to its intended conclusion, which was saying the words "apple" and "pomegranate."

Ingredients:

4 Granny Smith Apples
3 Honey Crisp Apples
3/4 Cup Flour
3/4 Cup Oatmeal
1/2 Cup Brown Sugar
6 TBSP Butter
1.5 TBSP Grenadine (Real grenadine. Made out of pomegranates. If you can't make or find it, use Pomegranate Molasses)
1 TBSP Cinnamon
The juice from 1/2 a Lemon (How you convince the lemon to give you its juice is between the two of you, however bribery is the preferred method.)

The first thing you're gonna need to do is skin your apples. This may seem like adding insult to injury after having climbed up into their ancestral homes and kidnapped them by the bushel. But it actually serves the very real purpose of being a warning to the other fruits that you're not to be trifled with. Also something about the skins not softening when the flesh does and creating a tough dish to eat, but that sounds like heathen nonsense to me. Now here's the thing. The second that the flesh of an apple hits the air, it starts to turn into disgusting brown goop. The entire process takes about 3 minutes, so it's time to work fast. As you peel each apple, take a knife and cut it off of the core. Then thinly slice it and toss it in a bowl with a splash of your lemon juice. The lemon juice helps keep the apple from falling completely apart. Sort of like an apple version of a security blanket, a savings account, or functional alcoholism. Repeat until you're out of apples, and then add in your grenadine, cinnamon, and any lemon juice you've got leftover. Stir that sucker up and throw it into a 9x13 pan preferably, but really just any oven-safe containment vessel you have that can hold it. Now the time has come to deal with the crumbly part of this crumble.

Looking at this, all I can think of is that I really need to get
me some of those servants to stuff food down my
throat that I made up in paragraph 1.

Whisk together your flour, oatmeal, and brown sugar. Then chop up your butter (Or butter substitutes, for those intolerant folk who can't abide by dairy) into little bits and add it in. Now it's time to "cut in" the butter, which essentially means to squish it thoroughly into the flour mixture until it incorporates into little crumbs of deliciousness. I've been advised by obvious lunatics to use something called a "pasty cutter" for this task, but I've found that my hands work better and faster. For those of you who don't have access to my hands, use your best judgement. Take your crumbly crumbs and sprinkle them on top of your apple mixture. Then toss that sucker into a 350 degree oven for about 40 minutes, once it gets golden and awesome looking. Then just sit there and let it taunt you while you wait for your guests to arrive. Make sure to ask them to bring dessert, because there's no way this thing is lasting until then.

S'mores Cookies

I think my favorite part about this picture is the pierogi stand
towards the back, because it seems so out of place.

It's kind of funny. Last week I worked so much that I didn't have time to post. A non-stop stream of 12-hour shifts, it seemed. This week, I'm working even more because apparently my current employers don't understand the concept of a regular schedule, but that's besides the point. The point is that, despite being overworked to the point of exhaustion/thoughts of sweet sweet vengeance, I managed to make it to a county fair last week. It's one of those things I've always heard about and seen on TV, but never actually experienced myself. And it was pretty awesome. People playing the stupidest games of "chance"you can imagine, rickety rides that were clearly put together wrong by the carnies running them, and food stands selling the most ridiculous foods you can imagine. Deep fried everything, random bits-'o-beef, and even one place that just called themselves "hot Wisconsin cheese," which sounds wrong on at least 3 levels. So I got to thinking about random foods you could make in weird ways. And since s'mores are never far from my mind during the summer (Or winter, or fall. Don't ask about spring.), I got to thinking about how to combine all of that s'morey goodness into something easy the snack on that doesn't require you to have a campfire immediately available. I also got to thinking that I'm avoiding the state of Wisconsin for a while.

Ingredients:

2 sleeves Graham Crackers

1 cup Powdered Sugar

1 cup Chocolate Chips

1.25 sticks Butter

2 Eggs

1 tsp Vanilla

1 largish human's pinch of Salt 

Mini Marshmallows

The first thing you're gonna need to do is stop drooling. Because let's face it: even the concept of S'mores Cookies is enough to set off a pavlovian reaction in any creature with taste buds and the capacity for memory. Once you've got your various excretions under control, unceremoniously shove your graham crackers into a ziploc bag and crush the life out of them with a rolling pin, frying pan, or series of well placed karate chops. Now take a large bowl and throw your butter, which should be room temperature, into it along with your powdered sugar. Realize that you forgot to let your butter warm up, and wait the approximately 3 days that it takes for it to do that. Then beat it together with your sugar until it forms a cohesive paste that already kind of smells awesome. Then take the remains of your Graham Crackers and mix them in. Once the mix gets cohesive, and kind of sludgy, mix in your eggs one at a time, and then your salt and vanilla. Once the whole thing comes together, gently stir in your chocolate chips, and then scoop the cookies out on to a baking sheet (about a teaspoon of cookie dough for each cookie, and leave room because these suckers will totally expand outward trying to escape the terrible heat of the oven you shove them into. Isn't baking fun?)

Not pictured: me writhing on the floor at the taste explosion
going on in my mouth after eating these.

Now comes the fun part, and by "fun" I mean "the heavy burden of decision-making." So I tried these suckers a couple different ways. I tried stirring the marshmallows into the batter, which didn't even kind of work well. Then I tried partially baking the cookies and then shoving marshmallows on top for the second half. And finally I tried completely baking them, then adding marshmallows on top and shoving that whole mess under a broiler for like 30 seconds. The last two ways both worked pretty well. I'd recommend either really, although I think I slightly preferred the half-baked, marshmallowed, and then rest-of-the-way-baked version. In any case, the cookies bake in a 375 degree oven for about 10 minutes. So make them however you choose. Or follow my advice and make them the way I said I prefer. You know, because you ostensibly came here for advice on how to make these things in the first place. Or you came here by mistake thanks to my deceptive advertising. Either way, you're welcome.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Early in the morning, before they doll themselves up, cookies
are just shapeless motionless blobs. Just like the rest of us.

On multiple occasions here, I've posted recipes that I've adapted from things that I used to eat growing up. And sure, stealing things from your parents is harmless fun for the whole family, but rarely has anything been stolen quite as brazenly as this chocolate chip cookie recipe. There are no clever little changes I made to enhance the recipe, like altering the ingredients, changing the quantities, or slapping my name on it. This is just, straight-up, cookies that my mom makes. I wasn't even planning on making this week's post be cookies. It was gonna be egg salad. But then I went over to my parents' house for a minute, smelled cookies, and realized that egg salad is a garbage food for garbage people. I'll probably make it next week.

Ingredients:

1 Cup Whole Wheat Flour 
1.25 Cups Unbleached Flour
3/4 Cup Light Brown Sugar, packed (Brown sugar is essentially sugar with molasses. So if you squeeze it, it packs together, kind of like wet sand. So make a sand castle out of brown sugar and a measuring cup.)
3/4 Cup White Sugar
3/4 Cup Butter or Oil (If you're using butter, because you have taste buds, 3/4 of a cup is the same as 1.5 sticks. You're welcome.)
2 Eggs
1.25 tsp Vanilla (Technically, my Mom's recipe calls for a "generous teaspoon of vanilla," but since that's totally not a thing that actually exists, I decided to change it slightly)
1 tsp Baking Soda
1 tsp Salt
No fewer than 12 oz. of Chocolate Chips

The first thing you're gonna need to do is find yourself a couple of bowls, or bowl-like objects. Fill once up with your various forms of flour (Personally, I'm guessing that the whole wheat and unbleached stuff got into this recipe because of my sister who, as a rule, doesn't eat white flour, consume any sugar, or enjoy life), along with your salt and baking soda, and whisk them all together until you can't tell them apart, even though some of your best friends are baking soda, and you swear you're not a bake-ist. Next, take a completely separate bowl, and cream your sugars into your oil or butter (butter). I used up my parentheses telling you the obvious truth that you should be using butter, so I couldn't use them to tell you that "creaming" is whisking the crap out of your sugars and butter so that the sugar crystals actually rip little holes in the butter, trapping air inside of it, and making it light and fluffy. So....make a note of it. And then whisk in your eggs, one at a time, along with your vanilla.

So, how's that not shoving burning hot cookies into your face
going? Asking for a friend.

Now it's time for the fun part, and by "fun" I mean "flour will be on your clothes until the day you die in a grease fire." Take your flour mixture, and start incorporating it into your sugar glop. Mix it in slowly, in a couple batches, and your clothes might live to see another day. Then add in your chocolate chips. It has been stressed to me that you cannot have too many chocolate chips, nor can you skimp on the quality of the chocolate. That said, some of these brands in the store are like 3 dollars per chip for some bespoke hipster nonsense. So for my money, I say don't get "uncle joe's chocolate-like chip-substance," and also don't get any chocolate chips that come with moustache wax and kombucha tea. Just get regular chocolate chips. And add them in to your batter. Then take a teaspoon, and scoop some heaping mounds of said batter on to baking sheets, leaving room for them to spread out, lightly experiment with drugs, and do their own thing, and shove them into a 375 degree oven until they're golden-brown and delicious. About 12 minutes. (Pro-tip: After they're done and you take them out of the oven, the baking sheet is still hot. So maybe get your cookies off of it before they burn on the bottom). Then try to wait until they cool before shoving them in your mouth so that you don't end up burning yourself horribly, despite the fact that everybody knows cookies are best fresh out of the oven. Enjoy your moral quandary!

Orange Chocolate Cake

I can do that, but I don't wanna

The Olympic Games are in full swing right now. Those of us who care are spending our days watching the world's best athletes perform astounding feats of athleticism to try and bring home medals for their home countries. Also, synchronized diving is happening. Because while there are many Olympic events and incredible ordeals that you can look on with awe and wonder, some of them are really ridiculous. Who decided that ping pong is an Olympic sport? I don't know, but they were obviously smoking something. The point is, however, that we're all watching incredible athletes perform at the highest levels in front of the entire world. And watching something like that isn't really complete unless you're stuffing your face with cake.

Ingredients:

2 cups Flour

1.5 cups Sugar

1 Orange

3 Eggs

1/2 cup Butter

1/2 cup Milk

1 TBSP Baking Powder

1 tsp Vanilla Extract 

1 average human sized pinch of Salt

Powdered Sugar

Cocoa Powder

More Milk!

The first thing you're gonna need to do is develop the unrealistic opinion that you could totally do what those Olympians on TV are doing if you just started working out a little more. Once you've got that taken care of, you're in prime cake-gorging mode. So whisk together your salt, flour, and baking soda in a bowl. Then take another, even better bowl, and throw in your butter and sugar. Whisk the crap out of them to cream your butter ("creaming" butter is a concept we've dealt with here once or twice. Basically, it means violently whisk together your sugar and butter, forcing the sugar crystals to rip into the unsuspecting butter until the whole thing turns into a smooth sludge. This works best with room temperature butter, but if you want to be a rebel, use cold butter, and end up sobbing in the corner over your life choices, be my guest). Once your butter is creamed to death, whisk in your eggs, one at a time. Zest your orange, and chop the zest into itty bitty zest bits. Then add them in to your butter and egg mixture, along with the juice from the orange, your 1/2 cup of milk, and your vanilla. If you're smarter than I was, save a little bit of zest for later, to sprinkle daintily on top of your cake like you're fancy and have tuxedo pajamas, which apparently are actually a thing somehow.

Remember, if you watched people exercise while you ate it,
it totally has 1/2 the calories. 

Once you've finished mixing your second bowl, googling tuxedo pajamas, and subsequently buying tuxedo pajamas (you're welcome), add your dry ingredients into your wet gloppy ones in 3 equal batches, taking time between each batch to whisk everything together and freak out over whether your batter is getting too thick or not. Once you're done, grease up 2 round 9-inch baking pans, cover your grease in a thin coating of flour, and distribute your sludgy batter equally between the two pans. Throw them into a 350 degree oven for about 40 minutes. While you've got 40 minutes or so to kill, it's time to think about some frosting. Because shoving unfrosted cake into your mouth while watching fantastic feats of athleticism happen is un-American. Or maybe partially American. Like Guam. Don't be Guam. So take 3 parts powdered sugar, one part cocoa powder, and one part milk, and mix it together. The actual amounts don't really matter. Make as much or as little as you like on your cake. But keep the proportions 3 to 1 to 1 if you want it to taste right. Now that your kitchen is a powdery mess, take your cakes out of the oven. Slather frosting on top of each layer, and if you're already fancy enough to be rocking those tuxedo pajamas, add the layers on top of each other to make a double decker cake to shove in your face hole in a flurry of sweet orange flavor, denial, and calories. Happy Olympics!

Brownies

Artist's rendition: Me at every party

Brownies hold a special place in my heart, and several other major organs. They're the perfect combination between a cookie, a cake, and licking delicious raw batter off of a mixing spoon, FDA-be-damned. You can eat them plain, or add various toppings like fruit, whipped cream, or caramel sauce. And yes, your mouth just watered when you read that, yet again confirming Pavlov's famous experiment where he annoyed the crap out of his neighbors. But let's be honest. Your mouth started watering back when you first read the word "brownies." Because brownies are special. They're exciting, and awesome, and if you're lucky enough to have some in your life don't let them go. If you have to stab other partygoers with a fork, so be it.

Ingredients:

1.75 Cups Sugar
1 Cup standard-issue Flour
2/3 Cup Vegetable or Canola Oil
2/3 Cup Cocoa Powder (It's important to note that Cocoa Powder straddles the fine line between "powder" and "gas." It will get everywhere if you're not carfeful with it. It probably will regardless, but at least this way you have the sweet illusion of control.)
4 Eggs
1 tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
1 tsp Peppermint Extract
1/2 tsp Salt

Before we get started, it's important to note that this is part of a number of recipes I got from my mom and then gussied up (from the latin GUH, to blatantly steal, and SEED, to alter very slightly to assuage guilt). Why is it important to note this? Mostly so that I don't get sardonic phone calls all this week. The point is...well, I don't remember what the point is, which makes this a good time to start the actual cooking part of the recipe. Whisk or sift together your flour, baking powder, and cocoa powder. Allow 3-5 minutes to adequately curse at your cocoa powder, and at the stylish cocoa powder stains covering everything you're wearing. In another bowl, because we're high class snobs like that, whisk together your eggs, and beat them until they're light and a little fluffy, so you know they're no longer a threat. Then add in your sugar and beat it for about a minute, just to show it who's boss and keep it from getting ideas.

Words fail me. All I can say is: you're welcome.

Add the rest of your ingredients, including your cocoa mixture, into your egg/sugar ooze. It's gonna get pretty hard to stir. It's gonna be a thick gloppy mess. That's how you know it's good. Take a pan and oil it up, or cooking-spray it up, or whatever. How large of a pan should you get? That's really up to you. The larger the pan, the more spread out the brownies will be, which means they'll be crispier, and cook faster. Which is great if you hate joy and liberty, and love things like kicking puppies and siphoning gas out of the school-buses at the orphanage. The rest of us know that brownies are supposed to be gooey and thick and delicious. So we're all gonna take a 9x13 pan, lube it up, load it up with our brownie sludge, and bake that sucker at 350 degrees for 40 minutes. We might even say that this time we're not gonna eat the leftover batter off the spoon and/or bowl. But we are lying.

Chicago Pizza

Chicago: City of broad shoulders and thick pizzas

Let's get one thing clear. This post isn't about bashing New York pizza as inferior. That said, this will be the best pizza you've ever had. Also, New York pizza is terrible. Well, at least it is now. Because when I say "New York pizza," I'm not talking about what New York pizza used to be, which most of us would just call regular pizza. I'm talking about the nonsense that's popped up more recently where New Yorkers, feeling threatened by the thick slab of awesome that is Chicago Pizza, started taking pride in getting their crust as thin as humanly possible, to the point where you're pretty much just eating a cheesy cracker. The point is, there is absolutely nothing wrong with regular pizza. But there's something incredible about Chicago style pizza, which is full of flavor and weighs more than you do. And also, modern New York cracker pizza is an abomination to the pizza lord. Their time will come.

Ingredients;

3 cups Flour

1 cup warm Water (if you can't find warm water at your local supermarket, but some regular water and throw fire at it)

32 oz. Tomato Sauce

10 oz. Mozzarella

10 oz. Spicy Sausage (If, like me, you fall into the religious Jew category of life, or if you fall into the vegetarian category, use vegetarian sausage. If, like me, you've discovered that vegetarian sausage sucks, make your own using fake ground meat, spices, butter, flour, tomato sauce, and fire.)

1/4 cup Vegetable Oil

1/4 cup Olive Oil 

1/4 cup softened Butter

1/4 cup Corn Meal (Chicago Pizza is very 1/4 cup-centric. This dates back decades to the Bears inability to get a decent quarterback. It's a sad story, but it makes for good pizza. I'm gonna call it worth it)

2 tsp Salt
1 packet of Instant Yeast

More Olive Oil!
A cast iron skillet!

The first thing you're gonna need to do is channel your inner Chicagoan. For me, that's not a problem, since my inner Chicagoan happens to also be my outer Chicagoan. So much so that I hunted down a Packers bar out here in LA, and watched a Bears/Packers game there dressed in an array of Bears gear. For the rest of you, just fake it and commit hard. Once you've got that down, mix your Yeast and your Water, and let them sit for a couple minutes to get to know each other. If necessary, play some smooth jazz. Then mix in your Vegetable and Olive oils and whisk until it all looks homogenous. Add in your Corn Meal and your Flour, and get ready for some fun. In case you were wondering, by "fun" I meant "kneading. All of the kneading. All that there could be." Some swanky recipes will tell you to use a "stand mixer," with a "bread hook," to make this part easier on your hands. But since I happen to be a man, and not some sort of nonsensical hipster boychild, we're doing this by hand. Also, I don't own any of those things. Mix your dough until it starts to form a goopy ball of dough in the middle of your bowl (By the way, you should have been mixing these things in a bowl, not just throwing them down on an increasingly messy table) then start to knead the crap out of it. Take the heel of your hand, and press it into your dough mound. Then stretch it over itself. After about 2 minutes, add in your Butter, and then continue until your arm hurts, and you wish you'd never read this blog in the first place. About 5 minutes, all things considered.

I warned you. The best pizza you've ever had. Chicago
pizza: anything less would be uncivilized.

Take your dough ball, and put it in bowl you rubbed down with Olive Oil. Let it sit there for about 40 minutes to rise. Once it rises, punch it down to teach it a valuable life-lesson. Then let it rise again just to give it hope for a better tomorrow. Now it's time to assemble this pizza. Rub some Olive Oil on your cast iron skillet, and plop your dough ball down in the middle. Gently press it down and out towards the edge of the pan, and eventually up the sides of it, forming a thin layer. It will try to spring back down into the pan like a jerk. Keep pulling it back up the sides of the pan. Be persistent, and break its will. Then spread out your sausage in a layer along the bottom. Top it with a layer of your Mozzarella, and finally a layer of Tomato Sauce. Take that whole pan full of awesome and throw it into a 425 degree oven for 40-60 minutes, until the crust gets golden and awesome looking. Once it's ready, try your best to let it cool slightly before digging in. Fail at this, and give yourself consolation points for not just shoving yourself face-first into the pizza, disfiguring burns be-damned. Fail at this too. Enjoy!

Blueberry Muffins

I prefer wild blueberries over the ones you see in zoos

It was a rainy and dreary morning, so I made muffins. I feel like that needs some explanation, so this one time I'm going to fight my natural impulse to drop a ridiculous statement and just walk away. Or possibly more times, to be determined as I feel like it. The point is, we in the LA part of the world experienced an uncommon phenomenon known as, and I believe I'm spelling this ethnic word correctly, "weather." This made me vaguely nostalgic for my distant homeland, which made me think of all the other things I'm missing that I don't have easy access to here. Like bars that are open late, the ability to go to the bank on Sunday (Well, you can go, but you'll be the only one there), and of course Dunkin' Donuts. I used to get their Blueberry Muffins all the time. And I figure that if a minimum wage employee working for a faceless corporation can pretend to have baked delicious muffins that obviously came from a factory, I, a zero wage employee of cooking crap and writing about it, can totally actually bake delicious Blueberry Muffins from scratch. That totally makes sense.

Ingredients:

1.5 Cups All Purpose Flour
1 Cup Sugar
10 oz. Blueberries
1/2 Cup Butter
1/3 Cup Milk
2 standard-issue Eggs
The Zest from 1 Lemon
The Juice from 1/2 a Lemon (The astute observers among you may have noticed that this leaves you with half of a zested lemon for which you have no use. Fortunately, I have expert advice on the matter: Deal with it.)
2 tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
1 Average Sized Human's Pinch of Salt
Another 1 TBSP of Sugar
1 Small Person's Pinch of Nutmeg

The first thing you're gonna need to do is let your butter come to room temperature. This is gonna take, at a rough estimate, about 2 presidential terms, so prepare some snacks and activities. Maybe bring a sweater of pair up with somebody to make the time pass faster. Pretty much the same rules your 3rd grade teacher gave you on a class field trip apply. Once your butter is nice and room-temperatury, it's time for  the fun part, and by "fun" I mean "whisking until your arm tries to fall off out of spite." Pretty much, you're going to add your cup of sugar in with your butter, and whisk it until it gets an almost fluffy consistency. This is the part where you're really gonna feel the pain if you punked out and only waited 1 presidential term for your butter to warm up. Anyway, once your butter and sugar are together, whisk in your eggs, one at a time (this gives your second egg a chance to watch his fate, and the fear that he develops releases chemicals throughout his egg body that are delicious), followed by your vanilla, lemon juice, and milk. Grab a second bowl from your magic bowl cupboard that has a never-ending supply of bowls, and mix together your flour, baking powder, and salt. This is a good point to get you to start freaking out about the "muffin method," which sounds like the name of a terrible DJ for kids parties. His slogan would be "your ex will gloat about this for years." Pretty much, if you mix flour with any liquid it starts to form more and more gluten, because flour is a jerk. All that gluten will make your baked goods super bready. Which is awesome for bread. Not so much for muffins. So you want to minimize the mixing as much as you can.

Adorable muffin-cups added to show adorable bad-assery 

Add your wet mess of a bowl into your dry floury bowl and mix it for less time than you think you should. The consensus of the internet is about 10 seconds, and the internet directly stole that from Alton Brown. Make sure to nervously watch a clock the entire time you're stirring because of paranoia induced by this paragraph. Now add in your blueberries, and neurotically stir a couple more times, until they're just barely incorporated (Pro-tip: if, like me, you don't live somewhere where magical berry bushes of deliciousness provide fresh berries at reasonable prices year round, and you're using frozen berries, keep them in the freezer until the very last second. Otherwise they'll make everything purple. They might anyway. If you're using fresh berries, toss them in some flour before you mix them into your batter to help keep them from just sinking to the bottom and disappointing us all, like every politician ever). Scoop that goop into a muffin tin, and throw it in a 375 degree oven for 20-25 minutes. 20 seconds after you put your muffins in the oven, frantically run back and take them out because you realized you forgot to add the topping on. Mix your lemon zest, nutmeg, and tablespoon of sugar together, and sprinkle some on top of each fledgling muffin. Then throw them back in the oven for another 19.6-24.6 minutes. And that's all there is to delicious muffins. And you didn't even get paid minimum wage! You didn't get paid anything!