Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Maggots to the rescue

My cooking mojo left me on Sunday.  I woke up early and tried a new recipe - cauliflower soup.  It was made from fresh ingredients, and sounded like it'd be great; but after 3 hours of preparation and simmering, it was declared to be so bad that it was flushed down the toilet.

Then I made beet salad.  I'd roasted some beets the night before, and had the idea to mix them with an onion salad recipe that I 've got.  The onions are marinated in a vinegar mixture until they're almost pickled, and then drained and mixed into a creamy sauce.  It's yummy; and I figured it'd be even better with roasted beets.  That probably would have worked out a lot more successfully if I'd had about 4 times more beets.  I ate what I could, but had to pick through a lot of onions to get to the beets.

Then I set about my cooking club assignment.  We did a cookie exchange yesterday.  I know it seems a little early; but I think the idea was that the next meeting would be too late.  So, on Sunday, I set about baking a whole lotta cookies.  I had the perfect recipe picked out.  They're called Fatal Attraction cookies (how can you go wrong with that?), and they are almost more like individual brownies than cookies.

I made one batch - it came out almost raw.  I put it in for a while longer, and they dried out but didn't have the right texture.  I made another batch, and raised the temperature of the oven by 25 degrees.  This didn't work. The third batch, cooked on a metal cookie pan in case my stoneware had somehow failed me,  was the closest to being right but still didn't seemed cooked properly after I cooked them significantly longer than ever before.  These were for the cooking club girls!  They're supposed to be perfect!

After panicked calls to both my neighbour Jen and my mom, I had offers to go to either of their houses to use their kitchens.  I thought about it; but frankly I was worn out.    I packed it in for the night, which left me with the dilemma of what to bring to the cookie exchange.  You can't exactly bring bought cookies for a cooking club's cookie exchange, can you?

And so, I made Maggots.

Maggots are a Christmas tradition in our family, handed down from my grandmother.   The first time my mom saw the recipe for these bars, she said they'd be sweet enough to gag a maggot.  She made them anyway, and they are sweet; but we liked them.  And we've called them maggots ever since.

1 package of mint chocolate chips
1 cup of honey
1 cup of peanut butter
1 cup of peanuts.
3 1/2 cups of rice crispies

Melt the chocolate chips, honey and peanut butter in a double boiler.  Mix in peanuts and cereal.  Spread out in large bar pan, and let cool in the fridge.
These are extremely sweet, so you'll want to cut them into small bite-sized portions.

4 comments:

  1. Dang girl, that's a lot of hours in the kitchen! You are driven! And the Maggots sound like a kid's dream!

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  2. That's almost a maggot I could eat. How important are the peanuts, or have you tried them with a different nut.

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  3. Peanuts are not important at all. I'm not a huge peanut fan, so my mom used to make them fairly often without them. You can leave them out or use some other kind of nut... just about anything would work.

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  4. very interesting about the maggots!! Aside from that you are an incredibly healthy eater/cook - I need to get that way!

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