We had been craving double chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies for the longest time, so a few days ago we broke open Veganomicon and found a recipe to work from. We added our chopped macadamia nuts, used our new “special dark” cocoa powder, and used both brown sugar and white sugar. The recipe called for ground flax seeds, most likely as an egg replacer, so we grabbed our bag of ground flax seeds and felt awesome that we had all the ingredients for these scrumptious cookies.
Here’s me crocheting in front of the oven while our deliciously chocolate little beauties were baking away (ps this is a secret tradition that Josh and I have, sitting in front of the oven while whatever it is inside is baking).
Our tummies were rumbling, the house smelled like a chocolate dream, when finally the timer went off. We pulled them out (they looked perfect!), lined them up onto the cooling rack, and waited patiently while they cooled. After 5 minutes, I broke one in half, the chocolate chips all melty and gorgeous, and took a bite. Normally the phrase I would say at this point in a blog would be “They were delicious!”…but no. They weren’t. They were awful. We couldn’t figure out what it was..how could you go wrong with double chocolate chip cookies? Our whole idea of us being the master cookie bakers that we thought we were was crumbling around us when finally I grabbed the bag of flax seeds and checked the expiration date. February 06. 06? 06!? Could it really have been that long since we bought that bag of flax seeds? Did we really not use them that often that the bag was still pretty much full? Haven’t we baked with these flax seeds recently?! We felt so lame. Especially since I had just given my dad a big speech about how healthy flax seeds are and how they’re a great source of those pesky omega-3’s that everyone gives us crap about, and I had this whole blog idea about flax seeds and how great they are and how “Look! You can even put them in cookies!”..but no.
But that wasn’t even the worst part. The WORST part was having to take the second batch of half cooked cookies out of the oven, scraping them off the cookie sheet and throwing them away along with the rest of the beautiful looking (not tasting) cookies. I felt like I was comitting a crime. Throwing away cookies? And double chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies?!? It was one of the worst baking disappointments we’ve ever had…besides the white cake Josh made a few weeks ago that was super dense and not even really that sweet (which we also had to throw away).
So our baking has been kind of horrid but our cooking has been amazing! Two nights ago we made meatball marinara subs on roasted garlic bread (which by the way I can’t eat spaghetti or any kind of Italian pasta without having this bread now. It’s just so ridiculously good), and last night I made ziti with roasted asparagus, sun-dried tomatoes, and pine nuts from Vegan Planet. It was a new recipe we were trying out and it’s so simple and delicious it’s probably going to become one of our weekly “go-to” meals (pardon the Rachel Ray catch phrase there..). And tonight we made wild mushroom risotto with fresh herbs, also from Vegan Planet. A lot of people say risotto is hard or too much of a hassle to make because of the pretty much constant stirring required, but I happen to like the whole process. I love stirring food while it’s cooking, but you’re not supposed to stir rice when it’s cooking. In fact if you go anywhere near my mom’s pot of her famous Arroz con Nada with a spoon you will probably be banished from the kitchen for all eternity. So being able to stir the risotto while it’s cooking makes me happy.
In crochet news, I finished the purse I was making in the picture above. Now all I have to do is line it with some fabric and it’s going to become my new make-up bag. It’s the perfect size and it’s just so adorable, I love it! I’m also working on a bikini using the same yarn and it’s coming along nicely as well. In fact I think I’ll go work on that now…
