Posted by Emily Tags: baking, berries, blackberries

When I made my last trek to the grocery store, I was wandering aimlessly around the produce section (as you do) and saw they a large carton of blackberries on sale.  I love blackberries and this made me think back to when I was kid living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  My neighborhood was right across from the beach (I say was because it’s not there anymore due to Katrina) and there was house at the front of the street that had been ripped away by one hurricane or another and all that was left was the foundation.  Plants and weeds had grown up around the destruction over the years and it was CRAZY with blackberries.  I remember riding my bike over there in the summers and picking blackberries and then I brought them home and my mom made a yummy cobbler with them.

It felt like cheating to just buy blackberries, but still, I couldn’t pass up the chance for some Blackberry cobbler in the middle of August.  I looked through my mom’s recipes and couldn’t find the one she used, but I think it was just a fairly basic passed-down-from-your-grandmother type of recipe.  What I did find (on a handwritten card, so I have no clue where she got it) was a recipe that looked relatively easy but fun to make.  It’s different than I’ve ever seen cobbler made, but I think it worked out really well and it tasted great.

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Posted by Emily Tags: baking, cookies, spices, sugar

Pictured: Molasses Crinkles and Snickerdoodles

Have you ever seen two different recipes for the same thing and didn’t know which one to make? That happens to me all the time. Sometimes I don’t bother at all, thinking it’s too much pressure to pick the “right” recipe, but if it’s something that looks really good I might just make both and see what I like better. That is the case for these dueling snickerdoodle recipes that I found on two or my favorite sites: What Geeks Eat and Simply Recipes. The big difference between the recipes is the Shuna’s at Simply Recipes has cornstarch, while Vanessa’s has the more traditional cream of tartar. You can go read Shuna’s post about why cornstarch is special. Due to this different “secret” ingredient in the cookies, I found the outcome of both to be completely different tasting cookies.

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Posted by Emily Tags: beef, broth, easy, herbs, onions, potatoes, red wine, tomatoes

I just rediscovered pot roast and I really like it.  See what happened was, at some point in my childhood I decided I didn’t like beef.  I don’t know why.  There’s no rhyme or reason when you’re a kid, you just decide things like that.  I wasn’t a vegetarian and it’s not like I never ate beef (I’d never turn down a hamburger), but I just refused to eat most dishes made with beef.

Slowly, I’ve been adding more beef back into my life.  I like steak and I use ground beef for a lot of dishes. When I saw this recipe, it made me remember that my mom used to make Pot Roast all the time and I liked it.  So why did I stop eating it?  I guess maybe I thought it would be too complicated to make, but it’s really not.  It’s quite easy to put together and then you just let it cook for a few hours.  My mom made hers in a crockpot; I don’t have one, but it seems just as easy on the stove. I guess Pot Roast may sound really boring to some but I’m all for finding easy and satisfying dishes.

The only thing missing from this recipe was potatoes.  I remember my mom’s pot roast always had potatoes, but this recipe is from the WW cookbook, so I guess that’s why they omitted them?  So if you are on a low carb diet or whatever, they can be omitted, but in my opinion potatoes make everything better.

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