Better Than Brownies: Lower-Fat Blondies Recipe

Blondies are the butterscotch version of brownies, and I did not believe I could ever love them more than brownies, but now I do thanks to this lower-fat recipe found in a recent Cook's magazine. They turn out moist, chewy and with a chocolate bar chopped into it, and nuts. Note: They really ARE best if you wait 2 hours before cutting into them.

These blondies will melt in your piehole.

Lower-Fat Blondies (makes 16)

2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1-3/4 cups packed brown sugar
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1 large egg plus 2 large-egg whites, room temperature
4 teaspoons vanilla extract

Chopping the chocolate bar.

1-1/2 teaspoons cider vinegar
2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped fine
1/4 cup pecans, toasted and chopped

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat to 350 degrees. Line a 13x9" pan with foil sprayed with vegetable oil spray.
2. Whisk flour, salt and baking soda together in a bowl. In a large bowl whisk sugar, melted butter, egg and whites, vanilla, and vinegar together until smooth. Stir in the flour mixture, chocolate, and pecans with a rubber spatula until just combined. Don't overmix. Batter will be thick.
3. Pour batter into the prepared pan and smooth out the top. Bake 17 to 20 minutes until toothpick comes out with a few moist crumbs attached. Cool completely, about 2 hours (I challenged this and they truly are BETTER and easier to cut if cooled completely), and cut into serving pieces.

Southwestern Cream of Pumpkin Soup Recipe

I substitute evaporated milk for the cream; fewer calories and tastes just as good.

Southwestern Cream of Pumpkin Soup (6 servings)

3 cups cooked pumpkin, fresh or canned

4 cups water
1 Tablespoon olive oil
2 cups minced onion
1 large red bell pepper, minced
2 large cloves of garlic, minced
2 teaspoons of salt
1 Tablespoon of mild chile powder (do NOT use hot chile powder.)
2 to 3 Tablespoons of fresh lime juice
freshly ground black pepper
1 12-oz. can of evaporated milk

1. Combine the pumpkin and water in a soup pot. Stir until uniform. Partially cover and heat gently, stirring often.
2. Heat the oil in a medium skillet. Add the onion and bell pepper and saute over medium heat for 5 minutes. Add garlic, salt, and chile powder; stir and cover. Cook over low heat for about 10 more minutes, stirring often, until the vegetables are tender.
3. Add the saute and lime juice to the soup. Stir well, cover, and simmer for 10 minutes. Season with black pepper and salt to taste.
4. Pour in the evaporated milk and heat gently until ready to serve.

Breakfast Pizza with Eggs & Bacon: Recipe

Ordinary breakfast ingredients reconfigured and more tempting. One 9-inch pizza serves 2 heartily or 3 more moderately. Fruit and coffee complete the meal.

Thin-Crust Breakfast Pizza with Ham and Bacon

1 9-inch thin-crust pizza shell, unbaked (don't thaw if it's frozen)
1 pat of butter, melted
1/4 teaspoon oil
2 eggs, beaten
3 ounces of cooked ham, chopped into small dice
1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese (more if desired)
7 strips of cooked bacon, cut small
jalapeno peppers, sliced (optional)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Heat the 1/4 teaspoon of oil in small to medium skillet and spread it around. When the skillet is hot, pour in the beaten eggs. Let them sit and cook in the pan without scrambling them, like an omelet. If the eggs stay wet on top, flip them over until they are fully cooked. When done, let the eggs cool on a plate. Then slice them in strips and slice them again crosswise until you have squares of one inch or less.

Brush the pizza shell to the edges with the melted butter. Sprinkle on the pieces of egg and the chopped ham. Dot with jalapeno peppers if desired. Blanket the pizza shell with cheddar cheese. Sprinkle the bacon on top. Bake on a pizza pan for 20 minutes or until the cheese bubbles. Then let the pizza rest for about five minutes before cutting into it, because that will make slicing easier.

Shrimp Boil Carolina Style: Recipe

Fresh corn in the stores before grilling season...what to do? A Carolina Low Country shrimp boil using a bag of "shrimp boil" herbs and spices is just about the easiest possible way to make a hot tasty meal. I like my shrimp boil dotted with the mustard seeds and herbs, but if you don't, leave the purchased "crab boil" seasoning in the little net bag it comes in.

Carolina Style Shrimp Boil (serves 4)

-3 ears of fresh corn, cleaned and cut into 3 pieces each (frozen corn on the cob will work)
-1 pound raw shrimp in the shell (thawed if frozen)
-1 pound smoked sausage, cut in 2-inch segments
-1 packet of "Crab Boil" seasoning, such as McCormick's or Penzeys

Slit the "Crab Boil" seasoning bag and pour contents into a pot with a 3 quarts of water. Heat the water and boil for 20 minutes until it is fragrant. Over medium heat, put the corn and sausage in the pot to boil for 20 minutes. Five minutes before you want to serve, put the shrimp in the pot. Set a timer (if you cook the shrimp too long, they will get mealy) for 5 minutes. When time is up, use a slotted spoon to dish up the ingredients into bowls. Serve with hot sauce.

My Favorite Pasta Sauce Recipe: Pasta a la Bandit

This fast and fragrant chunky pasta sauce made with a can of tomatoes along with butter, black olives and capers, is from a cookbook that a library sold me for 25 cents, called Cooking from an Italian Garden (1984). The recommended pasta is a long, hollow spaghetti called bucatini, which cooks in 11 minutes. Bucatini is hard to find here, so I ordered a 20-pound case directly from the DaVinci company. No kidding; I did. Substitute thick spaghetti and it will be fine.

Bucatini Briganteschi ("Highway-Robber Style") (serves 4 to 6)

2 Tablespoons butter
6 Tablespoons olive oil (divided)
1-1/2 cups (or one 14-oz can) diced tomatoes, undrained
1/4 teaspoon of crushed red pepper
1/4 cup pitted and chopped black Italian or kalamata olives
1 Tablespoon whole capers
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1 garlic clove, crushed or chopped
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or to taste (optional)
1 pound bucatini or thick spaghetti
3 Tablespoons freshly-grated Parmesan cheese
2 Tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

Place butter and 3 Tablespoons of olive oil in a saucepan and heat. Add the tomatoes and cook for 3 minutes. Add the hot pepper, capers, olives, oregano and garlic. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes or until sauce thickens. Add the black pepper, if desired, and keep warm.

Cook the pasta in 4 quarts of rapidly boiling salted water, stirring occasionally, until al dente. Drain and place in a warm serving bowl. Add the Parmesan and sauce and combine. Add 3 tablespoons of olive oil, and the parsley, and serve.

Every recipe I have tried from this cookbook is a good and flavorful one!

Shorten Brown Rice Cooking Time

Above, fried rice that uses my brown-rice trick: soak the rice in its water for 20 minutes before beginning to cook it. The rice will then cook in 20 minutes or in one normal rice-cooker cycle, same as white rice.

Black Olive Bread (Bread Machine) Recipe

I sigh at those $6 olive-studded breads I see in the bakeries, but couldn't make one by hand, so I sought a breadmaker/bread machine recipe and this one gave me good results. It's from The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook by Beth Hensperger (Harvard Common Press, 2000). A little bit of rye gives it a boost. Don't be afraid to buy gluten if you make bread by machine; gluten gives homemade bread that nice chewiness. Notice that white sugar is not used.

To make a 1-1/2 pound loaf:

Black Olive Bread

1-1/8 cups fat-free milk
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon of honey
2-1/2 cups bread flour
1/2 cup rye flour
1 tablespoon plus one teaspoon gluten (aka vital wheat gluten. Small boxes are shelved near the flour.)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2-3/4 teaspoons of bread machine yeast
1 full cup pitted black olive pieces, well-drained (I use pitted kalamata olives)

1. Place the ingredients, except for the olives, into the pan according to your machine's manufacturer's instructions. (Mine says: Put the liquids in first, so I did this in order of the ingredient list.) Set the machine to the Basic bread cycle. When the machine beeps (about 14 minutes into the kneading cycle) add the chopped olives, half at a time. If needed, add a tablespoon of flour to help incorporate them into the dough.

2. When the cycle ends, remove the baked bread from the pan and let it cool before slicing.

From Fresh Sage to Dried in 90 Seconds

My sage bush needed harvesting. I bundled several branches and hung them upside down for drying. On a whim I put leftover sage leaves in a single layer on a plate and microwaved them to see what would happen. In 90 seconds they were completely dry and -- big surprise -- they held their green color far better than the air-dried sage. Compare!

Single Women Want Meat

"Eww!! Meat! It's touching my eggs!" said my friend when her breakfast eggs arrived with a sausage patty she hadn't ordered. I took it and ate it myself, but women aren't supposed to do that. It's fattening. It's fried. Worst of all--ewww--it's meat! (It also abuses small children, and greases the convent staircase!) Women today like "Thai places" and "good salads." Listen: The Piehole is sick of julienned raw carrots and some days I have no interest in veggie burgers. It's practically impolite to eat meat in public anymore.

Even some of the men are that way. On a lunch date I said I grilled my own steaks and maybe I'd grill one for him sometime. The guy said, "I don't eat red meat." Then I mentioned a great glass of wine I'd had the other day. He said, "I don't drink," and began an hour-long whine about his software company. I mentally crossed this pantywaist off my list and ordered a plate of carpaccio and a beer and let him pay for it.

I think peer pressure has a lot to do with eating rabbit food in public and everything else in private, and you know we do, because we're always dieting. I too used to put on a show of being health conscious and weight conscious and avoided hearty meals and then, 90 minutes after my 340-calorie Healthy Choice lunch, I was at the vending machine for a 400-calorie two-pack of PopTarts I hid in my jacket on the way back to my cubicle. One evening after a workout I felt dizzy and unwell. I stopped at the firehouse and let the firemen ambulance me to the hospital. I told the doctor I'd been exercising and felt faint but he found nothing wrong. He asked me, What did you do at the gym? I said, Elliptical, weights, and treadmill. He said, "What did you have for lunch?" I said, "A spinach salad."

He said, "You thought you could work all afternoon and then work out at the gym on a spinach salad?"

So here you see my healthy single-woman lunch: four ounces of grilled flat iron steak and homegrown tomatoes, and I didn't feel hungry again until dinnertime. Avoid between-meal snacking, women and men. Eat a little meat!

Recipe: Zucchini and Avocado Salsa Salad

This foolproof recipe from The New York Times in 2009, written by Martha Rose Shulman requires no skill, just chopping. Here's the link to the published original. I like my own photo and slightly changed recipe better. It works as salad, salsa, taco stuffing or pizza topping. So good it was chosen for the best 250 recipes from the NYT.

Zucchini and Avocado Salsa Salad

1 medium zucchini, cut into small dice
salt to taste
3 medium tomatoes, finely chopped
1 or 2 jalapeno or serrano peppers, seeded and chopped
1/4 to 1/2 cup chopped cilantro or to taste
1 Haas avocado, ripe but not too soft, cut into tiny dice
3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon or lime juice
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1. Sprinkle the diced zucchini with salt and drain in a colander for 15 minutes. Rinse if it tastes very salty and drain it on paper towels.
2. Combine tomatoes, chilies and cilantro in one bowl and zucchini, avocado, olive oil and lemon or lime juice in a serving bowl. Put tomato mixture in zucchini mixture and toss gently and salt to taste.

I serve this to guests with home-baked tortilla chips along with drinks. I eat it as salad, but in the Midwest you do not serve guests a main-dish salad. They will wonder where the meat is and why you are cheaping on them.

Make this soon or you'll wish you had. It's September and the homegrown tomatoes and zucchini are getting scarcer. And zucchini already feels a little bit passe.

Recipe: Sausage and Peppers, Super Easy in Microwave

Men love this entree and you can cook it faster than they can eat it, and that's fast. Serve over mashed potatoes or pasta, or with Italian bread, or by itself. Only one dish, the casserole dish, gets used; no skillets. Please try it when harvesting bell peppers and basil. Recipe can be doubled; just use a bigger casserole dish.

Sausage and Peppers (2 large servings)

3  fresh Italian sausage links, cut into 2-inch lengths
1 medium onion, peeled and chopped into 2-inch chunks
3 bell peppers, stemmed, seeded, deribbed and cut into 2-inch chunks
3 tablespoons tightly packed fresh basil leaves or 2 tablespoons of basil pesto
Few spoonfuls of tomato sauce, or a small tomato, cut up
Salt (optional)

1. Place sausage pieces in a 1-1/2 quart casserole dish, cover loosely with paper toweling and microwave at 100 percent for 5 minutes, then stir and check that the sausage is cooked through; that's how you want it. If not, microwave it minute by minute until it's cooked through.
2. Remove casserole dish from oven, uncover it, and use the paper towel to soak up most of the rendered fat. Discard the paper towel.
3. Add remaining ingredients to the dish, stir to coat, and cover the dish tightly with microwavable plastic wrap. Cook at 100 percent for 7 minutes.
4. Remove dish from the microwave. Uncover and sprinkle with salt if desired. Serve.

This came from Microwave Gourmet (1987), a truly inspired cookbook by Barbara Kafka, who developed great microwave recipes for ribs, poultry, seafood, vegetables, brownies & c. The book is a revelation; do check it out.

Recipe: Homemade Peanut Butter

Organic, low or no sugar, no chemicals, lower fat and cheap: That's what I wanted in peanut butter, couldn't find it ($6 pricetag on a jar of organic peanut butter at the store; same high price for "grind your own" at natural food grocery, plus the plastic container) and I finally got it by making my own in a blender. It is the color and texture of hummus, but that is natural.

Place the end product in fridge overnight before using. Minus the normal peanut-butter preservatives and salt it won't stay good forever. This recipe, making about a cup, stays good for about a week.

1-3/4 cups dry roasted organic unsalted peanuts
1 cup water
Combine peanuts and water in blender. Blend until smooth. Store refrigerated overnight before using. Use up within a week.
55 calories per tablespoon, 5 grams fat.
From Barbara Kafka's Microwave Gourmet Healthstyle Cookbook, 1989.

Low-fat Chocolate Biscotti

Heh-heh, I know what you want. . .chocolate. I copied this recipe from SkinnyTaste.com and make it all the time. Yes, eggs are the only liquid in it.

Chocolate Biscotti recipe from SkinnyTaste.com 

1 2/3 Cups Flour
1/2 Cup Cocoa Powder [Piehole likes the Natural Cocoa from Penzey's Spices]
1 1/2 teaspoon Baking Powder
Pinch of Salt
3/4 Cup Sugar
3/4 Cup Mini Chocolate Chips (optional)
2 Eggs
1 or 2 Egg Whites
Hazelnuts/Almonds/etc. (optional)

Preheat oven to 375F.  Line a pan with parchment paper.

Combine flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, salt and sugar. Add chips and nuts if using. Add eggs one at a time, mixing in between. Add an egg white.  

If the dough isn't holding together, add one more egg white and mix well. Form into one or two long ovals on the baking sheet.

Bake 20 minutes. Cool about 15 minutes, then cut into slices. Bake an additional 5 minutes, flip, bake 5 minutes more.

Cool completely.  Makes 16 to 24 biscotti. [Piehole says: They are still great without the chips.]

Pasta with Olives and Peperoncini

A wildly flavorful pasta good hot or at room temp.
1. Blend two Tablespoons fresh basil with one half cup olive oil. Pour into very large flat bottomed pan. Add 2 Tablespoons butter. Heat till butter melts.
2. Chop 1 cup mixed olives. Chop finely garlic to equal two to four Tablespoons. Chop 1 cup sundried tomatoes. Add 2 cups of whole peperoncini peppers. Add all these vegetables to the heated pan. Cook and stir a few minutes. Cover and simmer until peperoncinis puff up, about 10 minutes.
3. Cook one pound ridged tube pasta (penne) until al dente. Drain and place in bowl. Pour oil and vegetable mixture over pasta and toss till blended.
4. Salt and pepper to taste (it won't need much). Optional grated Romano cheese.
Serves 6 to 8.

The Best Zucchini Recipe

This side dish looks and tastes so good you'll be sneaking bites out of the pan before it gets to the table. I used orange and red bell pepper. This strangely sexy dish makes a great side but also a wonderful pasta or pizza topping. Chili oil can be homemade by putting several whole dried red chili peppers into a bottle of olive oil.

Chinese Charred Peppers and Zucchini

2 cups of zucchini, chopped into large dice
1-1/2 to 2 cups of red, orange, or yellow bell pepper, chopped
1 tablepoon soy sauce
2 teaspoons wine vinegar
1 teaspoon chili oil, divided
1/2 teaspoon sugar
salt

Chop zucchini in chunks and place in a bowl with a half-teaspoon of salt; toss. Let this mixture sit for 30 minutes to an hour. Then rinse, drain and pat dry. It's important that it not be wet.

In the meantime, make the sauce by mixing the soy sauce, wine vinegar, a 1/2 teaspoon of  the chili oil, and sugar in a small bowl.

Heat 1/2 teaspoon of the chili oil in a skillet on medium-high heat until it smokes. Dump the zucchini and pepper chunks into the pan, stir, spread them around and cook for 5 minutes, stirring and pressing down with a spatula now and then so most pieces get scorched a nice brown. If it's going too fast, turn down the heat. Then turn off the heat. Stand back and pour the sauce over the vegetables. It will bubble and simmer until it's absorbed. Good eaten warm or at room temperature.

The $4 Steak Plate

Why dine out when you can cheaply home-cook and plate yourself some grilled London broil and fresh vegetables? Sliced cucumber I got from gardening: free. Tomato came free, a bonus from the farmer I buy eggs from. Lettuce is one-half of one-third of a package of three organic romaine heads, which means what's on the plate cost 70 cents. London broil got on sale, 18 ounces for $7.47, is 41.5 cents per ounce. That times the six ounces you see here is $2.49. That's $3.19 total. Add in the onion and the cup of cooking wine that went into the marinade, and the homemade steak sauce (recipe follows), and the meal cost around $4. Optional: a Stella Artois whose green bottle and red label matched prettily with the meal. It's a clean-tasting beer good for summer, with a great buzz factor. It came from a six-pack, so it cost $1.16.

Easy Homemade Steak Sauce. Very simple and you'll never want store-bought again.

1/3 cup raisins (Yes, raisins. You'll see.)

1/3 cup boiling water

1/4 cup ketchup

3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

2 tablespoons mustard

2 tablespoons plain white vinegar

salt and pepper

• Pour boiling water over the raisins in a bowl and let them sit 5 minutes until they're plumped. Then pour the raisins and their water into a blender with the rest of the ingredients except salt and pepper, and then puree until smooth. Salt and pepper to taste. Makes a little over one cup. I discovered that this sauce freezes well if you want to make it ahead.

Secrets of a Slim(mer) Midwesterner

A long spell of 100+-degree weather forces me to grocery shop at night, when most folks are home watching the 10 o'clock news, and I find that while the fish and butcher counters are closed after 9 p.m. they've packaged up what didn't sell that day and sell it for cheap. This is handy because after many years of making and eating pastas and homemade breads those now just make me gain belly weight visible the very next day, and I have shifted to raw vegetables and lean proteins, including an egg at  breakfast and lots more fish. This being Missouri, the Walmart doesn't even have a seafood counter, so I go to the name grocery that's open 24 hours, and am trying all sorts of their on-sale offerings like this pound of breaded sole fillets here, and skewered shrimp, and The Piehole is also learning to grill hunks of beef, so far successfully. (Chicken has never struck me as being as healthy and tasty as people say it is, so I never buy or eat it unless somebody else cooked it first.) I also bought tonight a fatless hunk of select-grade London broil for $7 that will feed six people, $4 off normal price. And for lunch I had one three-ounce burger of organic ground-beef raised in California, MO. Just halted all that bread and pasta and suddenly I have a waistline again.

Now's The Time

Go buy a watermelon. Cost about $5.99-$7.99 per this year because of fuel prices from trucking them up to here from Kennett. You will not regret your purchase. When we were kids we'd drill a hole in a watermelon and pour a bottle of vodka in it, slowly, and wait til the booze was all absorbed, then we'd eat it and get down with some Three Dog Night and Elton John. We weren't as ashamed to dance then as folks seem to be now. Our churches didn't say we couldn't.

Welcome to Piehole Midwest

"Piehole" in Midwestern means "mouth," as in "Shut your piehole." Preferably we shut it on some tasty home cooking. Sometimes we eat healthy, sometimes not, but we love to grow, market, buy, cook, bake, grill and serve stuff to fill our pieholes, feed our faces, chow down, pig out, scarf & whatnot. I'm a hard-core born Midwestern home cook in Missouri, and I'll be posting foods and meals that show up in front of me, because like all Midwesterners I eat what's put in front of me. Like this bowl o' blueberries here. They got piled on French toast with maple syrup for breakfast. Coffee was our drink.