Monday Recipe – Brownies

BROWNIES

HISTORY: While I was growing up, my parents were friends with another couple with kids, and my mom made this recipe for them EVERY time they came over, for some unknown reason.  But I think they kept coming because they knew they’d get these brownies.  People’s brains are so tied to food, even when they don’t realize it!  This was also a great go-to for birthday “cake,” especially for my dad, who could live off chocolate bars, fudge, hot chocolate, chocolate ice cream, chocolate croissants, and chocolate-covered cherries.

RECIPE:

Put two squares of butter (REAL butter is always best) into a saucepan on medium heat.  Stir in 5 generous (ie. overflowing) Tbs cocoa and turn off the heat when the butter is melted.  Then add 2 cups of sugar, followed by 4 eggs.*  Stir in 3/4 cup flour, 1 tsp baking soda and 1 tsp vanilla.  Bake in a greased pan at 350 for 25-ish minutes.  Voila!

With or without frosting, you will never taste better brownies.

 

This is exactly how they look, although I found this picture online. Yum!

* IMPORTANT – it helps to mix these separately and then stir them in quickly.  Once, in my teens I made these with a friend and we added them in slowly to the still hot sugar/butter mixture and ended up with cooked egg pieces before the brownies entered the oven. gross. Haha, we still cooked the brownies, hoping that somehow the cooked eggs would go away!  They didn’t.  Sorry to gross you out.  Just wanted to protect you from making the same mistake.

Nutella

Nutella: beside its weaknesses, it is one of the tastiest, most sublime forms of everyday chocolate out there. If it weren’t for it’s high content of sugar + palm oil and low concentration of cocoa, it would be true food for the gods.  Especially succulent is Nutella on crepes, graham crackers, and fruit.  Some of it’s deficiencies work to its benefit – like it’s inability to harden at room temperature, thus making it like a no-cook thick fondue. One must become accustomed to the distinct taste of Nutella, which is at the same time nutty and chocolatey. But once that taste is acquired, it is never lost.  Some people think of it as French peanut-butter, but it’s more like world peanut butter except it is hazelnuts and contains a trace amount of cocoa.

My half-empty jar.

The label is one of the most interesting parts of this delicious oddity!  My large jar (which I purchased from Costco) contains 97 hazelnuts, which I’d think would only be about 1/2 cup of hazelnut butter.  Why they would they not add 5 more and label it as containing “more than 100 hazelnuts”? Also interesting is the picture on the front of the label. It could very well be the same one they have used since it was developed in 1964.

And on the back:

 

 

“Turn a balanced breakfast into a tasty one…” This first clause makes me laugh because the less healthy the breakfast before the addition of this smooth chocolatey spread, the more delicious it is! I like the thought of trading my healthy all-whole-grain breakfast for a nutella-covered no-nutrition breakfast treat. Because despite what my insides are thinking, my heart would stay happy for hours after. At 200 calories per serving, how can you go wrong? A few years back a mother sued Nutella-maker Ferrero for falsely claiming Nutella is “part of a healthy breakfast.” I wonder how many people tried similar suits for other products.

Two days ago it was announced by Grub Street that New York will soon be opening an all-Nutella restaurant, owned by “self-described Nutella enthusiasts” How awesome!  The Brooklyn restaurant’s website is very visually appealing. But how will they survive, when the restaurant hinges on a proprietary product owned by another company?

“The menu for the soon-to-open aptly-named restaurant Nutelleria is filled with chocolate-nut spread-filled delights, including breakfast pizzas, crepes, croissants and a bacon-banana-Nutella waffle sandwich…”

If I find myself in Brooklyn I will definitely go (provided that Ferrero cease-and-desist letters don’t force them out of business)! And leave a detailed review here on my blog.

Questions? Call 1-800-nutella

 

Chocolate Legos?!

I saw today that a Japanese Designer named Akihiro Mizuuchi came up with chocolate legos.  I think this is pretty ingenius, of course, and lots of fun – but why hasn’t it been done before?  Maybe people thought they would just get mushy and fingerprinted from being handled and played with.  Which of course, they would, and as the article addresses, this is not so much a problem if you like to eat chocolate.  And lick your fingers.  Wash your hands before you get going!

So, how much do these cost? Are they like monogrammed M&M’s, or perhaps more expensive? I would guess they are about 5x more expensive than the M&M’s.  But I can’t find them for sale anywhere.  Did LEGO Corp pay Mr. Mizuuchi to design these? If so, how much did they pay him?  I think that would be my dream job, coming up with mold ideas and designing different shapes of chocolates.  How awesome.

S’mores Galore

As we near the end of summer camping season, I’d like to call out my thoughts on one of America’s most beloved camping traditions: s’mores.

These are basically made from graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate.  Translated this is sugar/flour, sugar/sugar, and sugar/cocoa! For me, this is too much processed sugar for one treat.  It’s like those deep-fried and heavily frosted cherry-goop-filled deserts they used to serve at elementary schools.  I would only eat the ends because the cherry filling was just too much for me.

The fireside method of cooking s’mores is difficult.  If you are patient, and have your own roasting stick to yourself for a while, you can sit and stick your marshmallow right next to some white hot ash for ~8 min.  All the while hoping that no one else’s roasting stick and marshmallow pushes itself, ash, wood, fire, or anything else in the pit onto your marshmallow in this vulnerable position.  If your marshmallow survives this unscathed, then you hope that it is melted in the middle region when you make your s’more, otherwise it will be hard to bite down on this 3 inch tall, slimy, crunchy square.  I don’t know any other food that can be both sticky and dry at the same time!  I guess s’mores are unique in that way.

Here are some other ideas I found from chow.com.  Pretty good ideas to me except for the bacon one – what’s with the big hype over bacon??

If I went camping a lot (right now it is maybe 1 time a year), I would experiment with lots of different dinners and desserts!  For dinner, I’m very interested in kabobs, crock pot lasagna and stews.  For desserts, my favorite has always been pineapple upside-down cake, but here are some other ideas I would like to try:

• Baked apple slices with brown sugar and cinnamon
• Pineapple cakes baked inside zuccini
• Cherry chocolate cake baked in crock pot
• Bread pudding in crock pot (made with sweetened condensed milk, cinnamon and eggs – like baked french toast)
• Tres leches cake in a crock pot
• S’mores using coconut (maybe dip cooked, wet marshmallow into coconut?) and chocolate with almonds

I tried making a ‘smoregasbord’ (to broil in tin foil in the oven) this morning but it didn’t work out well.  It turns out that marshmallows don’t melt well when they are covered with tin foil, but they broil VERY quickly!  Here are some pictures.

Lookin’ good and ready.

Yeah… the only good thing that happened was the melted chocolate softened the graham crackers so they were tasty.

My Secret

Some people have asked me – “How do you write so well?”  They say, ” We are awed at your writing ability and intuitive insight.”  Well, I will now take a moment to explain.  I won’t get too much into my secrets because then people would copy me, but I will outline the basics.

1. I eat chocolate.

2. It feeds my soul and my creativity.

So, that’s about it!  I’m sorry I have to be so secretive about it, but there are lots of details that I cannot include here, like pages and pages worth, for all the public to see.