Welcome to the What's Your Food Story contest! Here is story #4 of our five entries. Enjoy!
If you'd like to submit your own food story/recipe, see all the details here: http://mystiparker.blogspot.com/2013/08/new-contest-for-september-whats-your.html DEADLINE: CLOSED
Winners and prizes TBA soon!
COOKING FOOD = HAPPINESS
First off, my family is BIG on food. The equation above is
one I grew up with, with all kinds of homemade special treats at the holidays
and birthdays. I’ve got a lot of stories involving food, from an aunt that
would always “forget” to include one ingredient when she passed on favorite
recipes to others—so the resulting dish would not surpass her own creations—to
my own many mishaps in the kitchen over the years.
You might
think I was born to bake, that with a family so into food I would have been
cooking when my age was in the single digits. Not so. My learning to cook was a
long process that didn’t begin until I was in college.
It was bio
lab, and to explain a concept of chemical reaction, we had to bake a loaf of
bread ourselves and bring it in. I’d never baked or cooked anything at that
point in my life, not counting the plaster ornament mix I had tried to make
once that hardened in the bowl as I was mixing and trapped two wooden spoons
permanently. So my A average was in trouble, to put it mildly. And since I
cared very much about excelling in my classes, I got my mom to help me. The
result was I had the best bread in the class. But I felt a
To be
clear, I wasn’t cooking at this point yet (I got ridiculed for years by a friend
that loved to remind me about the time I had called him asking him how to cook
bacon—“Um, you put it in the pan, Tara, and turn on the stove”). But after
excelling at baking—and gaining a husband who loved home cooking—I learned to
cook various soups (tomato remains the Hall house favorite), other breads (I
make pumpkin bread or apple-raisin bread for a neighbor almost every other week
now), entrees (meatloaf and chili-sans-beans
are fall favorites), and all kinds of desserts, several of which I’m famous for
locally.
You’ll see
a lot of cooking in the Promise Me Series I write. Most anything Sar is making
is something I’ve done at one time or another. So if you read about anything
that sounds mouthwatering in one of my stories, shoot me an email and I’ll send
it to you. And I promise I won’t leave any ingredients out!
Recipe for Tara’s Infamous chocolate chip cookies (the same
ones that Sar makes in multiple books):
5 and 3/4 cups flour (get this EXACT – the success of the
cookies depends on this)
1 and ½ cups granulated white sugar
1 and ½ cups brown sugar
4 sticks of butter (no margarine)
2 tsp vanilla
2 tsp baking soda
One large bag choc chips or 2 small bags – you need 24oz
4 eggs
Parchment paper
Preheat oven to 375 deg. F
Melt butter in saucepan on stove, and pour over sugars and vanilla—do
NOT cut in or scorch butter. Beat well. Mix in eggs. Beat well until no lumps. Mix
flour, and baking soda, then add to wet mixture. Beat well until no lumps. Then
add in choc chips.
*Refrigerate if it’s a very hot day for one hour. You’ll
want one tablespoon to be able to make an 1” sticky ball without being goopy
when you set it down on the parchment paper lined cookie sheets.
Roll into 1” balls and put in a 3-2-3-etc pattern on cookie
sheet, leaving space for cookies to spread. Cook for 10 min at 375 deg. until
just golden. Cook another 2-5 minutes if you like your cookies crispy. Remove
via spatula onto a wire tray or papertowel-lined counter. Let cool before
storing. Can be frozen very well for microwaving when needed in a chocolate
emergency!
Modifications: Substituting in all white sugar for the brown
sugar will give you a lighter cookie, substituting in a partial cup of honey
for white sugar will give the cookies a honey taste, and this can also be done
with maple sugar also. Any kind of chip can be used (lemony chocolate is nice),
or a mix of chips to make a peanut butter/chocolate or a caramel/chocolate mix.
You can also spread these thickly in a 8 x 10 pan to make a kind of bar cookie,
if you like. Variations on chip shape and size are fun, just remember to use
enough chips!
****
Tara Fox Hall’s writing credits include
nonfiction, horror, suspense, action-adventure, erotica, and contemporary and
historical paranormal romance. She is the author of the paranormal
action-adventure Lash series and the
vampire romantic suspense Promise Me series.
Tara divides her free time unequally between writing novels and short stories,
chainsawing firewood, caring for stray animals, sewing cat and dog beds for
donation to animal shelters, and target practice.
