Weekday Menu 2

Yesterday was another sick day that I took cooking and tea-ing it. There is my wonderful assistant keeping an eye on my holiday Peeps. ( I love peeps!)

If you look really closely, you'll see that the peeps and my assistant are the same color :)

I got the idea from a dear friend of mine to combine cookies and brownies. The results? Stupendous, LML said! Victorious I was as he's NEVER liked my brownies before. He always tells me that I shouldn't be cooking or baking anything, and that I should get used to not doing so. Sometimes, I have no idea what the man would rather have me do if I am not at least preparing treats. I'd feel helpless. In any event, on to the masterpiece! I'll take you through it step by step! (Now that the NKOTB song is playing in my head...)

Step 1:

Stir the brownie mix together well. I used EVOO instead of butter, but whatever you use is fine. (My EVOO comes from a farm I have been to in Greece, so I cannot guarantee your results will be the same as mine were! You can also mix butter and evoo to make it yummy!)

Step 2:

I stirred chocolate chips into the brownie mixture :) It's a little whisper I had in my head to do, and it worked fabulously!

Step 3:

Prepare the cookies! I got these cookies, but if you want to make it from scratch, that would work, too. Sugar cookies are out of the question. Chocolate chip or peanut butter cookies do the trick just fine!

Step 4:

Empty the contents of the brownie mix...

Step 5:

Into a bake pan.

Step 6:

Are you sure you  mixed the cookies well enough? When you KNOW you have, form your cookie balls onto a bakesheet!

Step 7:

Plop said PB cookie balls on top of brownie mix in bake pan. Make sure your oven has been preset to whatever the BROWNIE mix box temperature is. I put mine on 360 and checked on them periodically.

Step 8:

Stick a clean butter knife or fork into the brownie mix. If only a little stuff comes out of the brownie pan, close the oven door, turn off the oven, and leave the brownies in there for another 10 minutes or so.

The end result looks like this:

ENJOY! We did!

Love,

MG

Gamine-esque Brownies

Lately, the days have been looking like the picture looking above. Don't mind the curtains that LML custom made for us, but it was THAT gray outside. Of course, I use these magic-inducing days for baking! So...

I trekked over to my parent's little cottage on the hill, and prepared brownies just in time for my nephew to come home from school & decorate them with Halloween sprinkles I purchased.

Now, I'm not an expert at baking...at all. I can cook up a storm and have people salivating from the aroma of my dishes...but baking? I've been working hard on perfecting my technique for the last two years. A trick a friend taught me? Use pure extra virgin olive oil when you're baking!

I gather that the olive oil is the reason why my brownies came out shiny and moist. We're in luck because we get our olive oil shipped directly from a farm in Greece, which we got to see when we were living there. The saddest story: it's so beautiful on that farm that catering halls harass the owner to use it for events and weddings. And of course, when we go to it...luck would have it that my camera would die a horrible death.

Results of brownies? LML, who is my greatest critic,  said they were good (yay!) but he likes them more fudgy. Any ideas as to how to make them fudgy?? My family enjoyed them, but we'll eat anything :)

That last brownie there is the one I allowed myself to eat. Why frosting? My nephew will eat anything when there is frosting on it, and it just looks pretty :)

I took my pup into the backyard to look around today. I look upon my backyard with pride. When LML and I purchased this house, the yard was as much as a hot mess as the house was. But we finally got the yard to look like this:

taken from our bathroom window.

Also: 2 of my favorite shots from my yard:

More to post in a little while...it's going to be a long day!