Making a House a Home

Oh dear. I was making syrup today to go with our pancakes and, sigh, the syrup boiled over a bit. I was able to clean most of it up, but there are still a few places that I CAN NOT get clean. I have one of those glass top stoves, too. PLEASE tell me there is something I can do to clean this off!!! Do you have any ideas?

I made a mistake. A big mistake. But, thankfully, I came up with a WONDERFULLY TASTY fix and a BETTER cookie!!!

Have y'all seen the website The Pioneer Woman Cooks? She's got some great recipes on her site with step-by-step photos of how to cook the recipe. YUM!! Anyway, I found a recipe on her site for Oatmeal Crispies that looked super good. My sister made them last week and told me how yummy they were, so I just had to make them.

The recipe for these cookies is not written out like a typical recipe. The Pioneer Woman has it written throughout her post so I couldn't just copy and paste the recipe. I read the post and wrote out the ingredients and directions as I came to them, carefully making sure that I did not leave out any ingredients.

I mixed everything together and decided that I didn't want to make them into a log and freeze them like she suggests. I just made drop cookies* and baked them all. I tasted the dough (of course!!!) and thought they didn't taste quite as sweet as regular cookie recipes. But, I kept going, thinking that was the way Pioneer Woman meant for them to be. When the cookies came out of the oven, I tasted one and thought that I must have left something out- they still weren't very sweet. I looked back at the website and, sure enough, I left out 1 cup of sugar!!!!! ACK!!!! The cookies didn't taste bad, they just tasted like they needed "something", you know?

So... I put peanut butter between two cookies and they were GOOD!! However, Joshua thought that the peanut butter was a bit too strong, so I added a bit of powdered sugar to the peanut butter and S-U-C-C-E-S-S!!!! We have a new cookie that our family LOVES!!! Peanut Butter Oatmeal Sandwich Cookies have been born in the "U" household and are here to stay!!

Here's my recipe...

Peanut Butter Oatmeal Sandwich Cookies
1 cup shortening
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
3 cups rolled oats (I used old fashioned oats)
1/2 cup very, very finely chopped pecans (I used my mini food chopper)

Mix shortening and brown sugar well and then mix in eggs and vanilla. Carefully stir in flour, salt and baking soda until all combined. Stir in pecans and oats. Drop onto prepared cookie sheet and bake in a 350 degrees for 10 minutes or until golden brown. Completely cool before making into sandwiches. Makes about 5 dozen cookies.

Peanut Butter Filling
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/4 cup powdered sugar

Combine both ingredients and mix well. Spread onto cookies and make yummy sandwich cookies!!!

You can see Pioneer Woman's original recipe here.


*Drop cookies are made from a relatively soft dough that is dropped by spoonfuls onto the baking sheet. During baking, the mounds of dough spread and flatten. Chocolate chip cookies (Tollhouse cookies), peanut butter cookies, and oatmeal cookies are popular examples of drop cookies. (from Wikipedia)

Just in case you've ever wondered, when a recipe for roasting chicken breasts says to "rinse and pat dry" each breast, please do so.

The recipe was simple.

"Rinse and pat dry" chicken breasts. Place them in a roasting pan and drizzle 2 teaspoons of olive oil over them. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast in a 400 degree oven 45-55 minutes until juices from chicken run clear.

I learned a hard and smelly lesson this morning. I thought "Why should I pat the chicken dry? It's going in the oven. The heat from the oven will make the water evaporate." WRONG!! Why? Because when you roast chicken in the oven, you always use some olive oil, too. The mixture of oil and water in the oven caused a whole lot of smoke!!!! There wasn't enough smoke to make the smoke alarms go off (thank the Lord!!!), but the oven is VERY dirty from the chicken popping all over the place!!!!

So, the chicken breasts are finally done. They don't smell nor do they look funny. All that's left for me to do is to do is to let the chicken cool down and shred it.

Oh, and clean the oven. Can't forget to do THAT today!!

Lesson learned.