Russian Tea Cakes

Little balls made of sugar and covered in sugar – what could be better? These are melt-in-your-mouth delicious!

Ingredients:
1 cup softened butter/margarine
½ cup powdered sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
2 ¼ cups flour
¼ tsp. salt
Powdered sugar for rolling

Instructions:
1. Preheat oven to 375°F.
2. Mix butter/margarine, ½ cup powdered sugar, and vanilla with an electric mixer until fluffy. Add flour and salt and mix until the dough comes together. If dough is too soft, chill it until you can work it easily with your hands.
3. Scoop 1-tbsp. balls of dough and place on prepared cookie sheet.
4. Bake cookies for 7-8 minutes until bottoms are just slightly brown. Remove from oven and cool for just a minute, until you can handle them. Fill a small bowl with powdered sugar and roll each cookie in the sugar until coated. Place on a rack to cool. (Once cookies are cooled, re-roll them in more powdered sugar.)

The heat melts the sugar, so licking your fingers is clearly the only option. 😉

Instant Pot Pork Chops

My mom bought us an Instant Pot and I’ve been trying it out. I’ve only used it to cook meat so far (because I’m lazy af) but I’m sure I’ll try some other stuff eventually. I think it’s black magic, but it’s really just the ~science~ of a pressure cooker. The texture is slightly different than meat cooked in the oven, but the chicken and pork I’ve tried has still been really good! (And I’ve already stopped noticing the tiny difference a few times after eating it.) I had pork chops ready to eat in about 15 minutes! For me, nothing beats convenience and simplicity. My pork chops “recipe” = salt & pepper, garlic powder, and some Diana sauce. Easy.

Mémère’s Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

This recipe was my given to my mother by her grandmother.  It has been made in my house more times than we could ever count.  Do you want to know why? Because these cookies are DELICIOUS!  They are also quite easy to make.

The original recipe – so old that’s it typed by a typewriter.

Ingredients:

1 cup margarine

3 cups oats

2 eggs

1 cup sugar

1 cup flour

1 cup brown sugar

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp vanilla

salt (a couple pinches will do just fine)

1 cup raisins

1 cup coconut (if that’s your thing – we don’t use it)

Makes about 4 and a 1/2 dozen.

Bake time:

11-12 minutes, give or take a few depending on whether you like chewy or crunchy

Time to get baking!

Pre-heat your oven to 325° and make sure your rack is in the middle.

Boil some water and pour it over your 1 cup raisins in a soup bowl to make them nice and puffy.

Melt the 1 cup of margarine in a large bowl.

Mix in the 3 cups oats.

Beat the 2 eggs.

Add the rest of the ingredients.  I started with the small things (baking powder, baking soda, vanilla, salt, and eggs), but it can all go in at any order.

Then I added the sugar, flour, and brown sugar.  If you’re using coconut, make sure you have added it by this point.

Now spoon it! Or if you’re like me, get your hands right into that stickiness.

It should be nice and stuck together.

Deal with the raisins now.  Strain out the water as much as you can.  (DO NOT be like me and attempt to shake the water out with a paper towel, it’ll rip.)  Add them to the dough and mix them in – get right in there again.  (You’ll get to lick off the dough from your hands again, and I suggest using a spoon to scrape off as much as possible for maximum yumminess.)

 

It should look like this:

Get your pan ready and take a small spoon and start scooping.  The blobs of dough shouldn’t be too big, just over an inch across is about right.

I put 8 blobs on at first to see how much they spread out, and then moved to 12 on the second pan, so I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that you should be good with 12, as long as you don’t make them too big.  If they stick together it’s really not the end of the world.

In the oven they go!

My first pan came out a little crispy so I lowered the time.  11-12 minutes should do you just fine.  Leave them on the pan for a few minutes so they don’t fall apart when you pick them up.  I judged this time by waiting until I could touch the pan, so just a few minutes will suffice.

 

The last pan was perfect and I ended up with 53 cookies on the cooling racks. (I ate 3 right after they came out of the oven – I was testing to see how done each pan was, OK?)

Taste great right out of the oven, dipped in a glass of milk, or just by themselves at any time of the day.  Enjoy!