Laura, Cowboys, and Me

Not long ago I was looking for a good snack to take on a trip. I spent about an hour roaming around Whole Foods and came up empty handed. Nothing looked good enough. The truth was I wanted something that I make and I wanted it to last and not be packaged and so forth. But I didn’t want to show up in NYC and have to roam around for an hour if I really needed something to eat and was feeling as picky as I was that night.

So I went home and complained to my roommate that nobody does it like me and I was leaving the next day and had no idea what to do. Listening to my sorry tale, she said, "Sounds like you should make Cowboy Cookies." She gave me her Laura Bush's Cowboy Cookies recipe and I concurred. That’s just what I should make. It had chocolate, a variety of nuts, oats, and seemed like it would last.

But then I looked at the recipe again and saw there was cinnamon (yuck), tons of sugar (yikes), heaps of additions (huh, back to the store?) and balked. Not to mention that the only other time I’d been in the presence of cowboy cookies was at a Christmas event years before and they were sweet, tiny lumps of brick – I remember these things. Then I set in and made it my way. If you’ve read my spinach dip blog you’ve got to know this is the way it would be.

I took out: all cinnamon, ½ the salt (because I use salted butter), a cup of sugar, a cup of coconut, a cup of chocolate chips, and a cup of oats. I substituted the pecans with walnuts. I added a bit of nutmeg, and rolled each cookie in slivered almonds.

Let’s put it this way, all throughout my trip to NYC I kept wishing I would just get hungry enough to eat a cookie. Of course the city was far too exciting and there was plenty of food everywhere and, lo, and behold, they were gone!

Savory Recipes

When I decide to make something that I haven’t made before, or at least not recently, I pull out three different cookbooks and start comparing recipes. That sounds normal, right? But then, what if I look in the fridge and see a lot of spinach? Well, I take down my favorite cookbook and search for spinach in the index. Boy, do I love indexes.

Say I see spinach dip and decide that’s what I want; next I branch out finding multiple recipes for spinach dip. Here’s the catch. I never choose one. Usually I’m combining two recipes and adding the bell pepper I found behind the spinach which wasn’t even put with spinach on the spinach side dish recipes.

So, I use approximately 30% of a recipe at any given time and am always amazed at how well those crazy vegetables go together, which, according to my books, have never been combined before! When I am wildly successful I admit to wishing I’d measured more closely, remembered each spice and written it immediately. But I suppose my current system leaves me space to stumble once again into marvelous spinach dip my own way. Plus, we know I’d only use 30% of what I wrote, anyhow!