Category Archives: Recipes

Beach House Oatmeal Cookies

This lighter oatmeal cookie has quickly become Donna’s fave cookie.

Ingredients

  • 1-1/2 cups A/P flour
  • 1/2  cup Old Fashioned oatmeal
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 cup light brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 1 cup dried berries

Preheat your oven to 375° (F). In a smallish bowl mix the flour, oatmeal, salt, and baking soda. Set aside.

Whip the butter to make sure it’s uniformly soft. blend in the eggs, one at a time. Add the brown sugar, sugar, and vanilla, and blend them in until smooth. Slowly add the dry mix. Add the berries (I use a premix called “Berries and Golden Raisins” available at Wal-Mart, it has a good balance of cherries, cranberries, and golden raisins).

Roll the dough into balls about 1 tablespoon each, and bake on a cookie sheet for 8 – 10 minutes. Cool on a cooling rack for 4-5 minutes. Makes 0 – 50 cookies depending on how generous you are and whether your spouse comes into the kitchen when you’re distracted, so you can enjoy your cookies while you work or play games like WoW Classic, and if you want to get gold for this game, this is the guide for you.

Protip: moisten you hands with clean water to keep cookie dough from sticking to your fingers.

Mythical Meat Loaf

After years of my daughter bugging me for the recipe, I’ve finally decided to share it with the world.

Ingredients:

  • 8oz ground beef
  • 4oz hart venison (ground)
  • 3oz Abyssinian goat meat (ground)
  • 1oz breast meat from a wren (ground)
  • 1 medium onion (diced)
  • 1/2 cup sweet pepper (diced)
  • 16oz puree made from Roma tomatoes, fresh sweet basil, and extra virgin olive oil
  • 1 cup bread crumbs from my special recipe for sesame, quinoa, and amaranth bread
  • 2 dove’s eggs

Directions

Preheat oven to 449.8° K.

In a large, salt-glazed bowl, combine meat, onion, peppers, eggs, salt pepper, Tibetan saffron, 8oz puree, and 1/4 cup bread crumbs. Fold gently facing the nearest ley line intersection (if that information is not available, facing a major landmark of religious or historical significance will have to do) until thoroughly mixed.

Turn the mixture out into a 13.2″ by 7.7″ by 4″ casserole dish. Form into a loaf shape. Pat the remaining breadcrumbs onto the surface of the loaf. Top with remaining puree. Cook at 176.65° C for 3582 seconds (or until bored). Allow to rest for 0.0014 weeks.

Slice into 1cm slices at a 62 degree horizontal and a 93 degree pitch.

Serve with powdered potatoes and MD 20/20.

Spring Food—Tiny Cheesecake

Crust

  • 1-1/2 cups of crushed crisped rice cereal (about 4-1/2 cups when whole)
  • 3 Tbs firmly packed brown sugar
  • 1/2 tsp cinnamon
  • 1/3 cup butter. melted
Filling
  • 16 oz cream Cheese, softened (usually 2 packages–unless you find the big one)
  • 2 eggs
  • 3/4 cups sugar
  • 1 tsp vanilla
Preheat oven to 350º. Insert baking cup into muffin tin. Mix ingredients for crust until crumbly (but will stick together if pressed). Press crust into the bottom of baking cups.
Further soften cream cheese by hitting it with a blender for a few minutes. Add other ingredients and mix until creamy. Spoon into cups on top of crust. Bake at 350º until firm (about 25 minutes). Stick into refrigerator to set for at least 8 hours. Makes about 18 tiny cheesecakes, maybe more; it depends on how generous you are.

Winter Food 2 —Salmon Patties

Salmon Patties

salmon

  • 1 12 oz. can Salmon, deboned.
  • 1/4 cup celery, minced
  • 1 yellow onion, minced
  • 1/2 cup sweet peppers, minced
  • 1/4 mushrooms, minced
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 sleeve saltines, crushed (or the breading of your choice)
  • 1/4 cup vegetable oil (ish)

Mix all ingredients except oil in a medium bowl.  Heat oil in a skillet or sauté pan to about 350-400 degrees.  Form salmon mix in patties about three inches across and half an inch thick.  Fry both sides in oil for about two to three minutes.  Pat dry.  Makes about 12 patties.

This one I came up with on my own.  My mom used to make us salmon croquettes (ball-shaped, fried salmon and vegetables) but I never got the recipe.  This is a really good one for people with crowded schedules.  The whole batch can be made in about a half hour (maybe forty-five minutes if you need to mince by hand), and the cooked croquettes reheat well and are even good cold or in a sandwich.

Winter Food 1 — Seafood Chowder

Giving up some of my hard-earned recipes.  Because–I dunno—science, I guess.

Feel free to use these recipes and even to pass them along to your friends, but please remember that everything here (with notable exceptions) is copyrighted by me (Brett Hainley) and is not in the public domain.  If you like it so much, simple courtesy demands that you at least credit me before republishing any of these elsewhere.  I understand that cooking is never done in a vacuum, and that all of my recipes started with someone else’s, but most of these were years in development after I acquired the base, and it’s simple courtesy.  Anyway, wherever I remember where I got a recipe, I plan to credit the source.

So anyway, this first one has been a staple in our house since the first time Donna and I visited her relatives in Nova Scotia, one August (or, as we in Texas call it, Winter).  Donna’s Uncle Eugene and Aunt Audrey invited us over one afternoon for lunch, and he’d prepared an amazing whitefish chowder.  He hinted at some of the ingredients, but it took a couple years of experimenting before I got something that I consider close.  As far as I know, chicken or pork can easily be substituted for the seafood with no other adjustments.

Seafood Chowder

  • 1 qt. Heavy Whipping Cream
  • 1 qt. Whole Milk
  • 1/2 lb. Butter
  • 1 lb. Seafood (I usually go with half a pound of cod or haddock and half a pound of some sort of shellfish)
  • 4-5 medium potatoes, cubed
  • 1 medium yellow onion, chopped
  • salt
  • pepper

Begin heating the milk, cream, and butter together in a large stew pot on low heat.  Milk and cream get kind of pissy if exposed to too much heat too fast, so I usually start and the lowest possible setting on my stove and work my way up to medium over the course of about an hour.  Stir in the seafood, potatoes, and onion.  Keep increasing the heat incrementally until it reaches medium and begins boiling.  Boil on medium heat for about an hour.  Salt and pepper to taste and allow it to cool enough to eat.

Don’t worry if it gets a little grainy looking.  That can happen due to various oils and acids in the fish, but it doesn’t affect the taste and really doesn’t hurt the texture of the soup in your mouth.  This soup reheats well, and is both filling and satisfying, especially on the cold, wet days of early autumn and mid-spring.  Or, as we Texans call it, December.