Oatmeal Snickerdoodles

Here we combine three excellent cookies into one: oatmeal, snickerdoodle, chocolate chip. How can you go wrong with that? These are crunchy, not chewy cookies, with a bit of chocolate and cinnamon. I think they are what happens when you cross Mexico chocolate* with New England home-style.

If you have an electric mixer, these are very easy cookies to make.

Oatmeal Snickerdoodles
(makes about 50 cookies)

1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon baking soda (½ teaspoon at sea level)
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon cinnamon
1 stick butter, at room temperature
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
⅓ cup sugar (⅜ cup at sea level)
⅓ cup light brown sugar, firmly packed (⅜ cup at sea level)
1 egg, at room temperature
¾ cup old-fashioned rolled oats
⅓ cup chocolate chips

Adjust the racks in your oven to ⅓ and ⅔. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Line 2 cookie sheets with aluminum foil.

Combine the flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon in a medium bowl. Set aside. Using an electric mixer, mix together butter and the sugars in a large bowl and beat until light and fluffy. Add the egg and beat until well combined. On low speed, gradually mix in the dry ingredients, scraping down the sides of the bowl, then mixing slowly again just to combine. Stir in the oatmeal and chocolate chips. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto the foil, leaving 2" between cookies - they will spread. You will only be able to fit ½ the dough on 2 sheets, so you'll be baking these in 2 rounds. Place the cookie sheets in the oven and bake for 11-12 minutes until just lightly browned. Do not overbake. When done, slide off the foil and cookies onto 2 racks and let them cool for 5 minutes before trying to remove them. Let the cookie sheets cool to room temperature. Line with foil again and repeat portioning and baking with remaining dough. Store cookies in an airtight container to keep them crispy.

Adapted from Maida Heatter's Book of Great Cookies by Maida Heatter, Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

*Mexican chocolate is often flavored with cinnamon.

Turkey Meatloaf - a place to use those frozen diced peppers

Last week, we told you how to save some money by buying bell peppers when they are on sale and freezing them. This week, a recipe for using those frozen peppers. This is also a great recipe for stretching a fairly expensive meat: ground turkey. It runs about $5 a pound (more if you get the really lean version). This recipe utilizes some "filler" ingredients: kernel corn and rolled oats. Filler has a bad connotation but neither of these fillers are bad. Kernel corn adds texture. Rolled oats help keep the loaf moist. Both ingredients add fiber. I'd rather call them "stretchers" because they are inexpensive wholesome ingredients that stretch the number of servings you get from a given quantity of an expensive ingredient. If you look back at our Pasta with Mushroom-Tomato Sauce, the fresh mushrooms are also a stretcher. They carried the flavor of the very expensive dried porcini mushrooms and added bulk to the dish. Nothing wrong with that!

Dallas Turkey Meatloaf
(serves 6, costs $12)

1 12 oz. bottle chili sauce
¼ cup water
¾ cup rolled oats (not instant)
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1 Tablespoon chili powder (hot or mild, according to your tastes)
1 Tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon salt
1 ½ pounds ground turkey
1 cup diced bell peppers, frozen if you have them and whatever color you like
½ medium onion, chopped (about ½ cup)
1 cup corn kernels, fresh or frozen

If using frozen peppers and/or corn, thaw them before mixing up the meatloaf.

Preheat the oven to 350 F°. In a large bowl, combine ½ cup chili sauce with water. Mix in oats, egg, chili powder, Worcestershire sauce, and salt. Mush in ground turkey, bell peppers, onion, and corn kernels. Grease a 9x5x3" loaf pan. Put meatloaf mixture into loaf pan.

Place in the oven and bake for 45 minutes. Spread the remaining chili sauce over the top of the loaf and continue baking until the internal temperature of the loaf reaches 165 F°. If you don't have a cooking thermometer, this takes another 30 minutes. Cover with foil and let loaf stand 10 minutes before trying to cut it.

Adapted from The Turkey Cookbook, Rick Rodgers, John Boswell Associates, 1990.

The SNAP Challenge

I have been following the Cory Booker/SNAP Challenge with great interest. Cory Booker is the mayor of Newark, NJ. SNAP is Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. Someone following Booker on Twitter challenged him to live on SNAP for a week. He'll be starting his challenge on today, December 4. You can see how it's going at #SNAPChallenge on Twitter, and UB SNAP Food Challenge on Facebook (you can see the rules for the challenge there too). The short story is you need to spend no more than $5/day/person for all your food and drink. This is not an easy challenge.

I'm going to offer some hints on how to eat on a mere $5/day on this blog going forward. Though School of Eating Good does not set a upper limit on the cost of meals, we do bring you delicious real food on a budget. This challenge is a great way to focus on eating decent food on a very strict budget, and I love a challenge!

First, forget about processed food. You pay a premium for food that someone else has prepared for you. Processed food that looks really cheap isn't. That's because the ingredients used in cheap processed foods are absolutely the lowest cost/lowest quality foods they can find. If you are on a budget, provide your own labor, cook it yourself and select real ingredients that are naturally cheaper: grains, beans, potatoes, frozen vegetables (often reliably cheaper than fresh but still nutritious), and sticking to sales for more expensive things like fruit, fresh veggies, and meat. I don't want to minimize the effort required for this. If you have a family and a job, cooking feels like another job, and that is the last thing you need.

So, in these posts, we will focus on recipes that make good food with the minimum of effort and cost. I will give prices, based on local food prices where I live, which is Boulder, Colorado. To further complicate it, I will shop at the supermarket closest to my house. It's a Safeway and within walking distance. I will also compare the made-from-scratch  version with the processed equivalent.

Let's start with some breakfast. A cup of dry rolled oats (either quick or old-fashioned) costs 30¢. That's 300 calories of oats. 300 calories of instant oatmeal costs 75¢. Many store-brand cold cereals are also very cost-effective. Corn flakes cost 47¢ for 300 calories of cereal.

Oatmeal with Raisins
(serves 2-4, costs $1.26)

2 cups milk
2 cups water
2 cups rolled old-fashioned or quick-cooking oats
¼ cup raisins
a large pinch of salt
2 Tablespoons sugar (optional)

Place the milk, water, oats, raisins, and salt in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil. Stir, scraping the bottom so the oatmeal doesn't stick. Reduce heat to medium-low and cover. Cook for 3 minutes for quick oats and 5 minutes for old-fashioned oats. Make sure to stir a couple of times while it's cooking to keep it from sticking. Stir in sugar, if desired, and serve.

The raisins and the milk add some sweetness to the oats. If you think it isn't sweet enough, add the optional sugar. This isn't supposed to be terribly sweet. It's breakfast, not dessert.

If you boil the milk and water before adding the oats, the oats will be a bit chewier and less creamy. Try it both ways and see which you prefer.