Guilty Pleasure

Peanut butter cookie dough ice cream.

Be still my heart.

Where can you get this? Well, you have to go to an Oberweis Dairy store. It's not available from home delivery. I went to Oberweis to get a gift card for some friends who were going through a spate of bad luck. You can get it in quarts. They have to hand pack it in the store. It's not in the ice cream cooler. They also offer chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, but one taste of this and it's just...oh my. They quit making my all-time favorite, banana chocolate fudge walnut, so I've been forced; forced, I tell you; to figure out what my new all-time favorite is. That's incredibly hard because there are so many good flavors. If I could get this home delivered, this would be it, hands down.

I know peanut butter is an acquired taste. I've met a number of people who don't like peanut butter. To each his own. It just means there's more for me.

Two spoons way up for this flavor.

Beverage:  Coca-Cola

Deb

So You Don't Have To

It's time for another post in the long-running series where I eat what looks appealing and report on it, advising you if it's something you'll want to add to your grocery cart or, "Holy, what were they thinking, Batman?", avoid and never look back. 

Today's selection is...

I've seen these around for awhile. I could have sworn I'd tried them and blogged about it, but it appears I have not. 

I'm going to dive right in. These are Oreos, after all, almost a staple of family life. It's peanut butter. Unless you hate pb or can't eat it, what could be wrong with a combination of chocolate cookie and peanut butter. The verdict? Don't waste your money. I was disappointed. 

Maybe it's me. Maybe it's a reconfiguring of the formula to make the cookie, but I found the chocolate cookie portion of this bag to be bland. Maybe it's selective memory and I'm remembering a time when chocolate flavor was important. It just seemed as if I was eating chocolate-infused cardboard, which an emphasis on the cardboard. The cookies were hard and overly crunchy. Maybe this bag had been sitting longer than it should have and so the cookie part had grown stale. I'm not sure. I had a tough time getting the "Lift flap" to actually lift. 

And the peanut butter part? Well, I can be blamed for thinking it would be peanut butter in between the chocolate cookie. It is the familiar texture of the white Oreo with a hint of peanut butter flavor. Again, it's just a hint. It was bland and the innards were slightly mealy, almost sandy, in texture. The center crumbled much easier than I think it's supposed to. 

I tried dunking them in milk, which is how you can justify eating a whole row. You're getting your calcium with each cookie. There was no appreciable change to the cookie. The chocolate wafer stayed hard, whereas I remember in the past you had to watch the length of time the cookie was in milk, lest it dissolve. I took them apart and dunked just the cookie. Three minutes on and I still had a crunchy cookie with no sign of softening. When dunked in milk, the peanut butter flavor all but disappeared. It was a wholly unsatisfactory experience. 

There's a berry center Oreo that I have not tried. I liked their lemon center from last summer. I won't eat the mint center as I don't like mint, unless it's wintergreen, so there won't be an appraisal of that version. I'm kind of on the fence about trying the berry flavor. I should but I have concerns there's been a change with the cookie. I think that's kind of why one buys Oreos; the cookie texture and flavor can make or break them. I'm remembering the chocolate wafer cookies Nabisco used to make. I'd buy them and crumble them to use for cheesecake crusts. If I really wanted a chocolate peanut butter cookie, I could find a package of those and get a jar of peanut butter. I'd have way more of each flavor than is contained in this mash-up. Keep your money. They aren't worth it. 

Beverage:  Scottish Breakfast Tea

Deb

Christmas Dinner Party

The office Christmas "party", which is really just a grand dinner out, was last night. We went to the location on the right. I've heard a lot about it but I'd never been there.

This is the first party where I couldn't drink. I looked at Janine's martini and the wine the guys ordered to go with their steaks with just a bit of envy. I can have alcohol in food because it's usually cooked off. I just can't drink it straight anymore. It's all part of adapting to a new way of living. But I kept thinking that this was the one party where I usually had a couple of chocolate martinis and I certainly missed it this year.

We were remembering how the former boss loved his steaks and that's usually where we went, some steak house. We were also remembering the $750 food bill for Capital Grill. We never spent more than that. Even going to Morton's, which bills itself as "the place for steak", we didn't spend that much. Now that he's retired, we are much less likely to ever have a food bill that big again. We just don't like those kinds of restaurants.

The food at Wildfire was very good. The menu is 4 pages, heavy on steak. The steaks Mike and Jon got were over an inch thick. I don't think I've seen steaks that tall at any other place we went. The service was spotty. The waiter took everyone else's drink order and then turned and walked away before getting me. He came back with the bottle of wine Mike and Jon ordered and brought 3 glasses. He seemed offended when I said, "I did not order the wine. You walked away before taking my drink order." He got the wrong dressing on one of the side salads and the water glasses were never refilled, even when we asked if they could be refilled. Perhaps that's not his fault, but we asked him to refill them and he never did.

I had a difficult time choosing something to eat. I'm not a steak person. I really have never been. The chicken offerings were very small as was the seafood offering. There was no pasta on the menu, something that surprised me. Most restaurants, even if they don't specialize in pasta, have 3-4 items on the menu. There were none here. It was a menu heavy on steak and accompaniments.

After hemming and hawing, I got their "Wildorf Salad". It was huge. I have half of it for lunch today. It's two kinds of lettuce, neither one iceberg, spinach, apples, dried cranberries, pecans, sunflower seeds and raisins with or without slices of herb roasted chicken breast. I got the chicken with it. It was really good. Usually, I get seafood when I go to these things and I know I should eat more fish. I was close to getting the cedar planked chicken, but the salad just seemed too good to pass up. I'm glad I made that choice.

It also meant I had room for dessert. Last year, we went to Claim Jumper. After a wonderful meal there, I ordered a slice of their chocolate 7 layer cake. This is what came.

It took me 3 DAYS to eat it. It was quite the novelty but that is way too much.

This year, dessert was perfectly proportioned and just the right size to finish the meal and not leave you feeling as if your pants would burst.

It's a chocolate peanut butter tart with whipped cream topping, dusted with cocoa and chopped peanuts. The plate it was on was huge but this is about the width of a baseball. It was creamy and delicious and I finished it all there. The only box in my fridge was the other half of my salad.

It was a nice place to go. I'd go there again. I can usually find, even on a menu heavy with steaks, something appealing. I bought myself a new sweater to wear and I thought I'd be under dressed but there were people in jeans and tee shirts. The former boss wanted us to dress up for dinner but we're not a "dress-up" crew. A place like Wildfire and last year's Claim Jumper restaurants fits us just fine.

Is it lunch yet?

Beverage:  Wild Berry tea

Deb

Muffin Fail

I like to think of myself as a good or even better than average cook. It was my mother's desire that we all be able to cook when we left the nest and I think her devotion to that task has made me able to cook most anything. It is rare that I have a complete and utter failure but I did on Saturday. It was downright awful.

I used to collect cookbooks. If it struck my fancy, it came home. I never bought a cookbook full price, however, They were always found in the remainder bins, the 60-90% off tables, or even better, used book stores and sales. During the week, I tend to fall back on  the recipes I know and can whip up without too much trouble. It's on weekends that I try something new. I hauled out one of my chocolate cookbooks, leafed through it and found a recipe for Peanut Butter Surprise Muffins. The "surprise" was a chocolate kiss in the center. That sounded wonderful.

The dough was very dry, almost crumbly. It bore little resemblance to what I know as muffin batter. Instead of pouring or even dropping the batter into the cups, I had to make balls and press the mixture into the cups. It tasted great, but it resembled cookie dough more than muffin batter.

I pressed the kiss into the center of each and then covered each with another layer of dough. Finally, you add a topping of chopped peanuts and brown sugar. I really had my doubts about this. I slid the whole thing into the oven, set the timer and reread the recipe two more times to see what I missed.

Butter? Check. Peanut butter? Check. Egg? Check. Flour, soda, powder? Check, check, check. That was it. No oil. No milk. Nothing else liquid. That's the full list of ingredients.

The house smelled lovely, I'll grant the recipe that. In 20 minutes, they were done. While they looked good and smelled heavenly, they were hard as a brick. The recipe needs more liquid, maybe milk. They weren't even a cake or cookie like consistency. They were hard. They tasted fine, but the texture was akin to sand, once you broke them open. I'm adding them to the compost heap. To answer your question, without the kiss. I spent 30 minutes last night breaking each one apart to rescue the kiss. I'll be darned if I'm going to compost perfectly good chocolate kisses.

So, not everything I make comes out really good. One of my guild mates suggested I drizzle chocolate over these but that would be a waste of good chocolate. The top to the compost pile is somewhere in the yard so the squirrels will have fun jumping into the container and fishing out the peanuts. At least someone will like these.

Beverage:  English Breakfast tea

Deb

I Am in Love

Love, noun, verb 

1. a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.

2. a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.

I remember, many, many years ago, a commercial where a young woman sat at the feet of an older woman who was in a rocking chair. The young woman looked at the camera and said something to the effect that the older woman said you cannot love a thing. Grammatically, "love" was only to be used between humans. Then the younger woman espoused the "love" she had for a brand of ice cream. The older woman scowled. The younger woman handed the older woman a spoonful of ice cream. After eating it, the older woman allowed that perhaps she had been wrong, snatched the ice cream from the younger woman and happily dug into it. 

 

This flickering image of an old commercial rose to my mind when I had this spread on toasted English muffins for breakfast on Sunday. I found this stuff at Target last weekend. I vaguely remember there used to be something like this years ago but it disappeared. This is soooo good. It spreads like peanut butter. The tastes of peanut butter AND chocolate are evident. And when spread on hot English muffins, it's heaven. 

 

I found a recipe for "Banana Chocolate French Toast" which has you put a chocolate spread, like Nutella, with bananas between whole wheat bread. I almost bought some Nutella but then I saw this. I'm going to make this french toast recipe and use this. Yes, there will be a post on how that turns out. 

 

If you like peanut butter and chocolate, I strongly recommend you try to find this. Check Target first, in the peanut butter section. This won't be replacing peanut butter in my cupboard, but it has almost replaced it in my sandwiches. You can bet I'm always going to have a jar of this on the shelf.

 

Beverage:  Huckleberry tea 

 

Deb 

Not Worth It

It's time for another in my series of "I eat it so you don't have to" posts.

When I saw that Cheerios had come out with a peanut butter flavor, I was thrilled. Peanut butter is my second favorite flavor, after chocolate, so this is going to be exceptional. I'm of the age where I remember the hullabaloo over Honey Nut Cheerios. What did General Mills think they were doing to the best cereal ever? Honey Nut Cheerios took off and possibly opened the floodgates for other iconic cereals to experiment with flavors.

Looking at the Cheerios web site, there are 13 different flavors of the cereal. Thirteen. Their marketing plan involves pitching Cheerios as a flavor for everyone. They have multi grain, apple cinnamon, banana nut, chocolate, dulce de leche, cinnamon burst, frosted, fruity, oat cluster and yogurt cluster in addition to the regular, honey nut and peanut butter flavors. If I want something a bit different in Cheerios, I get the fruity ones. Now those are good.

I was disappointed, very disappointed, in peanut butter Cheerios. When I opened the box, there was strong whiff of peanut butter. But once you add milk, the flavor is merely hinted at. The predominant taste is the multi grain. The smell of peanut butter is there but the taste, not at all. I really wanted peanut butter. This is a suggestion of flavor. These weren't even good for snacking during World of Warcraft raids. 

I won't be buying these again. Chocolate Cheerios don't really appeal to me, but I'm thinking I should check all these flavors out, for science, you know. What I recommend is buy a yellow box of the real thing and make yourself some peanut butter toast to go with it. A bite of Cheerios, a bite of toast and viola. You have the peanut butter taste they should have created.

Beverage:  English Breakfast tea.

Deb