Peanut butter cookies: variations on a theme.

I have a weekly commitment to make cookies for a friend's Sunday school class (if that's not the sign of a wild and crazy college student I don't know what is). This week's installment is the fantastically nomable peanut butter cookies from Smitten kitchens.

However...I am constitutionally incapable of leaving a recipe as is... so I made a couple changes. First, as usual, I used Ener-G egg replacer instead of (surprise!) the egg. Also, I ran out of brown sugar, so I used roughly 1/4C brown sugar and 1 C sugar (this was actually a recipe for which I didn't feel the need to drop the sugar content!) Also, I use salted butter, as it's what I had on hand and I really like salty/sweet combinations. If you don't then use the unsalted butter called for by the original recipe, as the resulting cookies from the salted version definitely have a salty flavor to them.

Also... I had extra butterscotch sauce on hand. I didn't cook the sauce quite long enough, so it has a slightly grainer texture than it should, but it's still very tasty. Again, I used the maximum salt recommended by the sauce recipe, as I really like it that way. I did realize that I do not need to go through an entire batch of sauce myself (although I'd happily do so, my bathroom scale would complain), so I tried taking the peanut butter cookie dough, pre-chocolate and peanut butter chips, pressing an indentation into the cookie with my thumb, and adding some chilled butterscotch sauce. The result was fantastic, if I do say so myself.




I added chocolate chips and peanut butter chips to the rest of the dough as called for by the recipe. These cookies were also very good, and will be dutifully sent along to the class tomorrow.

What to do with mediocre supermarket tomatoes.

I've seen this trick in any number of cookbooks, and it is one of my favorites. It's hard to get decent tomatoes out here except for a month or two during the summer. What I do to compensate is to buy 2 lbs or so of tomatoes from Costco, slice them in half, then sprinkle salt, pepper and basil over the halves. I then roast them in the oven... 200F for a couple hours is best, but I don't like running the oven that long, so I often roast them at 350 or so for maybe 15 minutes, then turn off the oven and let them cook as the oven cools. Roasting the tomatoes like this concentrates their otherwise too dilute flavor. I use these for everything from salads to soups...or just eat them plain. Guiltless nom nom nom.

Note: roasting the tomatoes can make a bit of a mess on your pan. If you have Silpat (or some other equivalent silcone sheet) I recommend using it, as it makes cleanup a lot easier.