Chopped Salad

Several handfuls of any combination of greens

3 stalks celery

1 cucumber, peeled, and seeded

Handful or two of grape tomatoes

Several springs of fresh herbs

2-3 small to medium beets, roasted

4-5 strips of bacon, crisped

3 hard-boiled eggs

About 1/4 cup crumbled blue cheese

1 avocado

For the dressing:

1 part Dijon mustard

1 part white wine vinegar

3 parts olive oil

Salt & pepper

Wash and chop the greens, then add them to a big bowl.  I used several handfuls of baby spinach, about 1/3 of a head of red leaf lettuce and about 1/3 of a head of romaine.

Chop some tomatoes, celery, and herbs.  Add them to the greens.  I used several sprigs of both parsley and chives.

Chop cucumbers, beets, eggs, and bacon.  Add them to the bowl as well as some crumbled blue cheese.

Toss everything together.  Drizzle with vinaigrette and serve.  If you think you’ll have leftovers, add the dressing to individual plates instead of to the big bowl.  Same goes for the avocado, as brown bits of avocado make the leftovers much less appealing.

Goes well with a toasted slice of quinoa, flax, and poppy seed bread!

The original plan was to make a BLT(A) pizza with lettuce and chopped avocado thrown on after baking.

Then we got hungry and I got lazy, and I failed to chop up lettuce and avocado.  We ended up with an oven roasted tomato and bacon pizza, which is nothing to complain about.

Next time I might sprinkle on some chopped, fresh herbs when the pizza comes out of the oven, although they certainly wouldn’t be necessary.

Enter the Women’s Law Student Association annual bake sale, a three day event with the proceeds benefitting a very good cause.  Now that I have an excuse to try out recipes and not have to eat all of the results, I’ve been baking up a storm.  I wish we could have bake sales every week.

At the top of my list of things I wanted to bake were these Compost Cookies from Momofuku Milk Bar, which I found on The Amateur Gourmet.  They’re called Compost Cookies because you can dump in ingredients of your choosing from around the kitchen – baking items and snack foods.  Some of the suggested snack foods are potato chips, pretzels, and goldfish crackers, and it was the potato chips that really sold me.  Salty and sweet in cookie form?  I’m in!

You get to add in 3 cups total of baking items and snack foods, so I added pretty much equal parts chocolate chips, caramels, pistachios, potato chips, cheez-its, and bacon.  The bacon was kind of unnecessary, but once I had the idea in my head it would not go away and I had to go for it.  To avoid upsetting any vegetarians at the bake sale I made labels warning of the possible presence of bacon.  It’s unfortunate that they had to miss out on some great cookies.

Compost Cookies

From Momofuku Milk Bar, recipe available here

1 cup butter

1 cup sugar

3/4 cup light brown sugar

1 tbsp corn syrup (I skipped this)

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 large eggs

1 3/4 cup flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

2 tsp salt

1 1/2 cups baking ingredients (chocolate chips, candies, pb chips, caramels, nuts)

1 1/2 cups snack items (potato chips, pretzels, crackers, bacon – that’s a snack food, right?)

Cream the butter and sugars for a couple minutes until fluffy and pale.  Scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Add the eggs and vanilla and mix to combine.  Turn the speed up to medium-high, set a timer for 10 minutes, and let it go.

It will get even lighter and fluffier after the 10 minutes and look similar to this.

During the 10 minutes of whipping, you can get the other ingredients ready.

I had some salted caramels laying around that I chopped up into smaller pieces.

The baking ingredients: chocolate chips, caramels, pistachios.

Plus chips and cheez-its.

Plus about 1/4 cup bacon.  I used more potato chips to fill up the measuring cup to hit the 1 1/2 cups mark.

Snacking + baking goodness.  

When the 10 minutes have gone by and the mixture is light and fluffy, add the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.  Beat for 45-60 seconds until all of the dry ingredients have been incorporated, but don’t overmix.

Add the baking and snack items, and beat on low speed until just incorporated.

Use an ice cream scoop or a big spoon to scoop the dough onto a parchment-lined baking sheet.  The original recipe tells you to use a 6-oz ice cream scoop, and I have no idea what size that is so I just scoop out portions that were about the size of a kiwi.  A kiwi?  I’m not very good with coming up with comparison sizes.

Cover the dough with plastic wrap and refrigerate for anywhere between 1 hour and 1 week.  Do not bake immediately!

When the dough has chilled, preheat the oven to 400.  Arrange the balls of dough so they’re 4″ apart on the baking sheets.  Bake for 9-11 minutes, browned on the edges and starting to brown on the center.  The cookies pictured above and below?  Not quite done.  I had to throw them back in for a minute or two.

These cookies are really, really, really good.  They’re wonderfully chewy and full of exciting treasures.  Remember those candles they sold in the 90s with charms and doo-dads that revealed themselves as the candle melted?  These are those candles in cookie form.  Next time I will probably skip out on the bacon and use pretzels or crackers, but experimenting by throwing in random ingredients from the cupboard is half the fun of it.