Stone vs Sheet: Cookie Test

I conducted this test three weeks ago after a day of touring wineries in NoVa with friends: which bakes better, a baking stone or a cookie sheet? I meant to post the pictures then, but the pizza I made after the cookies were done filled the house with smoke, leading to alarms, thrown-open windows, and undercooked pizza. That craziness was blamed on too-thick pizza dough, not on baking methods.

Anyway, I made a normal chocolate chip cookie and used both a sheet and my baking stone. Here are the results:

After 1 minute:

After 6 minutes:

The final products (stone cookies on top, sheet on bottom):

The stone yielded a faster, more complete bake. Obviously, the stone preheated with the oven, so the cookies were placed onto a hot surface and instantly started cooking. While I generally prefer chewy cookies over crispy, the stone's crispiness was light and not hard.

It took much longer for the sheet cookies to cook, and the tops didn't have the same satisfying crunch as the stone cookies. I think if I had more than one stone or just wanted a dozen cookies quickly, stone is the way to go.

It is not practical for several dozens, however, because there is more spread from each cookie and you can only have one batch going at a time. Which in my house means the first batch and dough from the third will be eaten before the second is out. Also, if there are little ones around, it's not as safe to have the oven open removing individual cookies from the stone, and I do not have anywhere safe to put a whole hot stone while I transfer cookies to a rack.

So there you have it!

Work Out Wednesday: Biker Babies

Average steps last week: 6485/day.

I am LAAAZY. Well, sort of.

We decided to ride around the neighborhood on our bikes for some exercise and threw the boys in our little tow-behind bike trailer now that Owen is big enough to sit up by himself. I realized two things: (1) my neighborhood has HILLS and (2) the pedometer doesn't count pedaling. So in reality I got a tiny bit more exercise than is reflected in my average, but I'm still lazy.

I'm thinking of strapping the pedometer to my wrist to record my movements while I cook, which is what I spent most of the last week doing. Here's to a more active week ahead!

Dinner Muffins

It is nearly impossible to get Joe, the two-year-old wonder, to eat dinner. He apparently eats very well at his preschool during the day, and I usually get a fresh fruit smoothie in him on the way to school in the morning, but in the evenings he is all go-go-go. It's fine--I don't want to force him to eat when he's not hungry, and he will always have some milk and a healthy snack--but I'd still like to find SOMETHING that I know he'll eat.

Enter muffins. Baked goods of most kinds will get Joe's attention and he focuses all of his boundless energy into getting his hands on them. I read about meatloaf muffins in a newsletter I subscribe to and gave the idea a try. The basic idea is meatloaf that is scooped into a muffin tin instead of shaped into a loaf.

Pretty adorable, huh? Topped with BBQ sauce, this recipe also gave me the chance to use up some of my CSA goodies. It was very easy to freeze the leftovers, which is a necessity for all of my cooking. Here's what I used:

Baby eggplant, sweet peppers, and onion--all organic from my CSA share and diced finely. Another interesting addition was whole wheat pearl couscous instead of traditional breadcrumbs (I used 1/3 cup). Combined with a pound of ground turkey*, an egg, and seasonings, it's a very healthy, veggie-heavy dinner. I used an ice cream scoop to portion out the mixture into my muffin pan, which is how I always dole out muffin innards, actually.

The recipe yielded about 8 "muffins," but Joe, unfortunately, did not get past his obligatory "Please try one bite for Mama" taste before he demanded yogurt. He was really excited to have a muffin for dinner before he realized it was meat, so maybe next time.


*Let's talk turkey for a second. Over the summer there were several major turkey recalls all over the country, and I suspect there will be more to come. As Americans try to eat healthier as a nation, they are swapping ground beef for turkey in many dishes like this one. While it is great that people are making an effort to be healthy, industrial poultry producers are simply applying their polluting, inhumane, and dirty chicken production practices to turkey in order to meet the increased demand.

In order to avoid being affected by turkey recalls from the major producers, it is very important to shop for poultry directly from farmers through farmers markets and local co-ops, or by buying free-range, pasture-fed, minimally processed meat from your local grocer (I bought mine at Whole Foods on sale). You may end up paying a few dollars more, but you can be sure that your family will not get sick from contaminants. Worth it, right?

CSA! CSA!

This delightful bounty is what I came home to on Friday afternoon, delivered courtesy of South Mountain Veggies. The CSA, or community-supported agriculture group, is based out of Frederick, Md and sources organic and IPM foods from farms in the state and Pennsylvania. They also have contacts for organic produce like bananas and oranges which are definitely not local, but are still fresher than store bought.

My goal each weekend is to first "put up" the produce I know I won't cook with in the next week so that nothing goes to waste and so we'll have quality produce in the freezer all winter. Then I try to get creative.

This week I will break down some newer recipes I've tried to use up the CSA produce, which included: beets, cauliflower, concord grapes, pears, apples, spinach, bibb lettuce, acorn squash, red potatoes, and rainbow carrots. Some of the things I came up with are definitely surprising! Stay tuned...

Work Out Wednesday: Baby Bound

Last week's average: 8165 steps per day.

Pros: I remembered to wear my pedometer every day, including the weekend. I also had 3 days of over 10K steps. What helped was I finally wiped down the old elliptical and did some heart-thumping cardio after the boys went to bed one night. Due to some weird running-related injuries, I'm only doing 20 minutes to start, per the advice of my personal, nagging PT...aka my sister.

Cons: Although I was on my feet a lot cooking over the weekend, stepping back and forth along the counter does not accumulate many measured steps. I also received a haircut from a good friend on Saturday--she thankfully makes house calls, but it usually results in me sitting for a few hours and then we sit some more and yammer on for the rest of the afternoon. I also got some much-needed snoozing done on Sunday morning and all told didn't leave the house. Another factor involved the baby being sent home sick from daycare, which resulted in me working from home for 2 days and missing out on my long, snaking walks through the cubicals at work, which usually helps me drive up my step totals.

The upcoming week will present its own challenges, but I'm ready! 

Cheap Eats Chili

First off, I recognize the fact that my "About Me" section needs to change. It's still a little painful to think that I've done an exact 180, so if anyone has any suggestions for this section, I'll gladly take them.

Back to this post. The greatest takeaway from our Oklahoma adventure has by far been the skills I honed in the kitchen and the sourcing strategies I was forced to employ. Here in Maryland there are endless options for sourcing quality food, but my new challenge is how do it on the cheap and how to reduce weeknight cooking times to accommodate our new insane schedule.


It's fall, so chili in the crockpot is an easy go-to, but doing it right takes some preparation. Here's my ingredient breakdown and where everything came from:
*2 lbs ground beef - grass fed, farmer's market, $4/lb
*1.5 lbs kidney beans - dried, organic, Whole Foods bulk w/Living Social coupon, ~1.60/lb
*1 qt diced tomatoes - Roma, farmer's market, $2.50/lb
*2 onions - farmer's market, $2.50/lb
*2-3 green/red bell peppers - organic, CSA delivery, $3.50 for 4
*2 cups fresh corn - cut from the cob, IPM, CSA delivery, $.50/ear
*3-4 cloves garlic - organic, CSA delivery, $1/head
*salt, pepper, chili powder, cumin - my pantry
*1-2 jalopeno peppers - farmer's market, $3/lb (optional)

So we're looking at a grand total of about $20 for the pot, nothing canned, all fresh and almost all local. The most time-intensive part was the beans, which I have never cooked from dried before. I wanted to learn how, not just because dried beans are cheaper than canned, but because canned products are getting a bad rep from chemicals in the liners.

Because I didn't know about soaking overnight first, I used a quick-soak method. I brought the pot of beans to boil, then removed heat and let soak for about 2 hours before simmering them to cook with a little onion and garlic. I held onto the cooking water and froze it in ice cube trays to use later in soups and other recipes.

While the beans were cooking, I was busy chopping and pre-cooking the other fresh ingredients, so most of my Sunday afternoon was devoted to prep. I will note that the peppers and onions had already been chopped and frozen on the day I bought them at the market a few weeks back, so I just had to pull out those freezer bags. On Monday morning, while waiting for my coffee to brew, I literally dumped eveything in the crockpot. There was no room for the beans yet, so those went in when we got home later on that afternoon once everything had cooked down a bit. We took a pre-dinner walk while waiting for the beans to warm up, which I try to do with boys when the weather (and mosquitos) allow it. 

After we ate our fill, there was enough left over to freeze 4 quarts of chili. One quart gives us about 3 servings (2 grown-up dinners and a lunch...Joe still only picks at this). So the grand total per serving comes to around $1.35, and this chili is packed with nutrition and exactly ZERO chemicals and preservatives. We've had it so far as a chili and also in taco shells, which stretches out the servings even further. I'd like to bake up a pan of cornbread next time, but our new rule is to NOT run to the store for ingredients in the middle of cooking and to use what we have at home. So, I will either need to figure out how to make bread from the carton of cornmeal on the shelf, or wait til I remember to pick up a mix at the store (with a coupon, of course).  

Walk It Off: Work Out Wednesday

I'm working on a recipe post, but I wanted to get this post up and running. Pardon the pun.

I'm coming right out and acknowledging that the stress of the last 9 or so months has not been good for my health & fitness goals. I used to be in a place where exercise helped me deal with stress, but the combination of late pregnancy and post-surgery gave me an easy excuse to not work out for long enough that I fell out of habit. And let's face it, emotional eating became a norm as well.

I'm taking steps to get back into a recognizable shape, quite literally. I've had some success in the past using a pedometer to motivate myself to get up and move more, so I've strapped my little Omron back on. The added challenges of a job that requires me to sit and 2 kids that command almost all of my nonworking hours mean that I will have to work twice as hard to find time for fitness.

With the pedometer, I have recorded results that taking the stairs and walking the long way can actually add up. Studies have shown that a minimum of 10,000 steps per day can maintain health, while 12,000-15,000 can result in weight loss. My goal is to average 12,000 steps per day, and I'll post my results here for accountability.

Last week I only measured for 4 days, and averaged 8896 steps. Not great, but it's a baseline for improvement. Can you tell I work for a statistics company now?