banana coconut white chocolate chip oatmeal cookies

I’ve never made baked goods from scratch.

Stir fry, soup, sauteed vegetables: these are all things you can improvise, no problem. With cookies, though – forget the baking powder and you’ve got flat, sugary lumps of hardened butter-flour.

So improvised baking is a risk. But I like to live on the edge.

My reasoning was this: if I just make a small batch, then the worst case scenario is that I totally screw up and waste only enough ingredients to make a dozen or so cookies. No big deal! It’s a learning process. You can’t be creative without creating a few terrible things first.

That said… these turned out great the first time around! I made a half-batch first and they disappeared instantly (courtesy of me), made the full batch and they disappeared instantly once again (courtesy of the Northwestern Vision Lab), and then made another batch which disappeared pretty quickly as well (courtesy of the Melodeers Music Team) and finally another batch which fed half the Northwestern math graduate students after the vigorous activity of building a snowman on top of the math building.

So here’s the recipe:

1 cup whole wheat flour (if you use regular flour, don’t use as much baking powder)
1 cup oats
½ t salt
1 t baking powder (probably less if you use regular white flour)
½ t cinnamon
¼ t nutmeg

6 T butter
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 t vanilla
2 T rum

~2.5 oz shredded sweetened coconut (about a cup, loosely filled)
~5 oz white chocolate chips
~1.5 bananas

Makes about 3 dozen

1. Preheat oven to 325.
2. Combine the dry ingredients: the flour, oats, salt, baking powder, cinnamon, and nutmeg:
3. In a separate bowl, cream the butter and brown sugar until smooth.
4. Add the vanilla, rum, and egg, and beat until smooth.
5. Add the flour mixture and blend until combined.
6. Mix in the coconut and white chocolate chips.
7. Chop the banana into tiny chunks (smaller than chocolate chips) and fold the chunks into the mixture with a knife.
8. Place tablespoon-sized balls on a lightly greased cookie sheet. Then press them down to flatten them. (If you don’t do this, they don’t spread much while cooking and don’t heat evenly.)
9. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until they start to darken on the bottom. Then let them cool on a rack for awhile. As they cool, they’ll harden – but when you seal them in container they’ll soften up again.

Enjoy!!!!

I have no pictures, because they always get eaten too quickly to photograph. Next time.

Edit: FINALLY a picture! (Even here… they were already half gone by the time I got to my camera.)

cardamom ginger sweet potato soup

This soup evolved from my intense need to escape from the horrors of Real Analysis proofs last fall. Trust me, trying to prove the discontinuity of some obscure function that’s defined to be one on the rationals and zero on the irrationals – it could drive you, too, to some grand soup invention.

I made something with cardamom a few months ago and proclaimed, “Dude, cardamom tastes like Real Analysis!” My roommate Andrea laughed and said “um… okay!” – a bit confused. Clearly she didn’t use soup-making as a means of escape from the horrors of continuity, connectedness, and compact metric spaces.

Anyway. The recipe. Here goes.

1 sliced red onion
3 cloves of garlic, pressed
1 t olive oil

4 cups vegetable broth
2 sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped into bite-size cubes (garnet yams are the besssst)
1 zucchini chopped into rounds and halved
1 big carrot, chopped into rounds
1 chopped red bell pepper (green pepper works too – the red pepper taste isn’t vital here)

1 t cardamom
1 t cinnamon
1/2 t turmeric
1/4 t crushed red pepper
fresh minced ginger (a good amount. this one’s always hard to measure, but probably 1/2 T?)
salt (to taste – depends how much sodium your veg broth has)
black pepper

To be honest, I make it differently every time. The specifics aren’t really important. Even if it turns to sweet potato-zucchini mush – you’ll still have trouble making it last more than a few days.

Okay. So here’s a vague outline of what I do:

Sauté the onions and garlic in the olive oil in a big pot, and then add the broth and the sweet potatoes, carrots, and bell peppers. Bring it to a boil, add the delicious spices, and then turn it down to simmer for awhile (~10 min? I hate clocks and have none in my kitchen…) and then add the zucchini and cook for another 15 minutes or so. The zucchini tends to turn to mush no matter what, but that’s part of the appeal. You could totally eat this soup without teeth. Almost. When the sweet potatoes and carrots are done, you’re done.

Oh my god. It’s 9 in the morning and I want to eat this NOW. Probably should start with some cereal…

you did WHAT to your peaches??

Stir fried ‘em. Yup.

With pork and vegetables and all that good stuff. I’m not crazy. It’s totally legit. In fact, to be totally honest, it was my fabulous friend Audrey who came up with the idea.

Okay, so, here’s the REAL story. Sometimes peaches go on sale. Big time. And so, inevitably, sometimes Lauren gets a little overzealous and likes to buy the entire grocery store. Or at least the entire produce section. (Sometimes Audrey does too. We’re a dangerous duo.) Now, I can eat a LOT of peaches, trust me. But not that many.

So those last two lonely, neglected, overripe peaches sitting on my counter were just destined for stir fry.

Now, I’m no good at giving precise recipes for stir fries. All I have are suggestions. If you want to know what I did precisely, well, I danced around my kitchen and threw in random amounts of whatever seemed mildly delicious.

Fine, FINE, I’ll give you rough amounts. This is what I used, and it made about 2 servings. I haven’t had meat in at least 3 months  – and this was definitely a good way to briefly return to it. Just for an evening.

pork (~3oz), marinated for a few hours in:

• juice from 1 lemon
• 1 T soy sauce
• 1/2 T rice vinegar
• garlic (~3 good-sized cloves)
• fresh ginger!! (a thumb, as “they” say…)

16 snow peas (2 to the 4th power. obviously)
1/2 c carrots
1/2 c red onions
1/2 c broccoli
1 green bell pepper
ground black pepper
cardamom
cinnamon

and….2 peaches!

1. In a big non-stick skillet, cook the pork in the marinade first.
2. Once the meat is cooked, add the veggies and spices. I often add veggie broth if it needs more liquid. And I cover them to let them cook in their steam a bit.
3. When the veggies look about half done, throw in the peaches and cook until the veggies are as cooked as you want them.
4. Serve it over some kinda grain. I’m a big fan of toast. I’m sure it’s good with rice too.

Peachy.

avocado obligato

“The co-op NEEDS this recipe,” she begged. “We NEED it. You have no choice.” How could I deny her? She was on her knees. Granted, she was already kneeling on the ground by the snack table, but, I’m just trying to paint an accurate picture here.

Okay, here’s the whole story. I went to a housewarming party the other night and – in standard Lazy Lauren fashion – made guacamole. Why is it lazy of me to make guacamole? I mean, it’s not thaaaaat easy to make. I don’t usually have avocados lying around, and I’m usually missing one or more of the other ingredients.

But still – it’s lazy of me because it causes me absolutely no stress.  Because it’s always a hit. Under no circumstances are mashed up avocados not delicious. It’s just a fact of life.

One of the hosts insisted that I open a restaurant. I told him that was a bit drastic and that guests were going to get a little tired of chips and dip. He said he’d come to the grand opening. I said I needed more than one patron.

We compromised on a food blog. I already blog about cognitive science - so why not about food? Food and science aren’t all that different. Food is a science, after all – and cognitive science is food for my intellect.

But I digress. Here’s the recipe:

3 avocados
juice from 1 lime
1 t salt
3-4 cloves of garlic, pressed
2 roma tomatoes, diced
1/4 c red onions, diced
1/4 c cilantro, chopped
cayenne pepper (a teeensy bit!)

Mash the avocados with the salt and lime juice. Then mix in the onions, cilantro, and garlic. Tomatoes go in last, so they don’t get too too mashed up. And finally – add whatever cayenne pepper you dare.

Out of chips? Spoons work too.

And if people don’t start begging you to blog about food after you make this, you can come pelt me with avocados. For real.