We're-Out-of-Food Soup and Pillsbury Got Something Right.

So, in the week preceding the move to a different state (where there are hopefully more jobs, especially given the fact that something like 400 people were rendered jobless in this area because of tropical storm Irene), I've been lamenting my food situation. For the last time, I hope.
Having been without power for a few days, I got a chance to do a lot of stove-top cooking. There were some seriously messed up fajitas (I went crazy with the rooster sauce), some aaaawesome applesauce (best eaten warm), and this:
Carolyn and I had been talking about making a chicken soup for a long time, but couldn't agree whether to have noodles or not, and whether or not potatoes should be included. Ultimately we decided to use penne (which, as it turns out, are the perfect noodles for soup), and no potatoes. The potatoes were lamentably mushy. As experimental as this was, I feel that it turned out wonderfully.

Power Outage Chicken Soup
Serves ~8 (we managed to get three meals each out of this, but they were big bowls)

2 chicken breasts, thawed (in the brief time that you DO have power) and cut into small pieces
2 onions, diced
4 stalks celery, halved and diced
4 carrots, sliced into disks
1 box chicken broth (its SUPPOSED to smell like dragon farts, I've been told)
1 cup water
1 1/2 cups dry penne
oregano
basil
black pepper
butter

Directions:
1. Stomp around angrily wondering what the hell to eat.
2. Decide you're going to make chicken soup. With noodles. And utter kickassness (shut up, it's a word). Dice veggies and chicken!
3. Melt butter in the bottom of a sauce pan, adding chicken bits and stirring occasionally to cook about 3/4 of the way through.
4. Add onions and allow it to sweat for a few minutes before adding broth and water.
5. Add carrots and celery and herbify as desired. (I opted for 2 parts basil, 1 part oregano, and 1/3 part black pepper.)
6. As carrots soften slightly (I don't mean mushy here. I just mean not raw), add noodles.
7. Stir occasionally until noodles are fully cooked and remove from heat immediately.

As odd as this may seem (and I'm sure others have noticed this too), this soup is waaaay more awesome when it's been refrigerated for a few hours. It's sweet, and subtle, and mild. It isn't at all pretentious or overly bold (like beef stew, which I feel should ALWAYS punch you in the face like an angry Irishman), it's just right for a quiet day when the whole world seems like its about to drown. And don't worry about having extra broth, the noodles will drink it up and then you'll worry about having too little liquid.

Okay, so. Power comes back on after that, doing the infamous on and off thing, just as I become confident that it will stay on. Eventually it does actually stay on, so we opt to bake (because we made mom buy butter... because we wanted to bake).
This recipe is from an old Pillsbury cookbook that belong to my grandmother. As much as I hate Pillsbury's products CURRENTLY, I adore this cookbook, and it gets a lot of action in general baking in this house. I'm pretty sure my mom has made these cookies before, but we hadn't had them since, and I wanted cookies.
They're pretty damn glorious, by the way.
By this point, things seemed fine at home, and I had no idea what the rest of the state looked like aside from rumors from mom, and videos she showed us on her iPhone (via Facebook). So cookies felt like a big victory dance. Yeah. Victory didn't last long.

Pillsbury Drop Butter Cookies (pg. 157)
Makes 45-48 cookies

1 cup sugar or firmly packed brown sugar
3/4 cup butter, softened (Ignore them when they say margarine.)
1/4 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla (I did almost double this, and it was AWESOME)
1 egg
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt

Directions: (verbatim)
Heat oven to 375°F. In large bowl, combine first 5 ingredients; blend well. Stir in remaining ingredients; blend well. Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls, 1 inch apart onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 375°F for 9 to 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Immediately remove from cookie sheet.

Okay, so there are just a few problems with this. Firstly, these are delicate cookies, and there is a very fine line between perfect and overdone. My recommendation is to cook these cookies for about 10 minutes on a rack placed in the center of the oven. Also, don't worry too much about the size of the drops you put on the cookie sheet (or in my case, parchment paper), they don't spread out much. If you make them too big they won't cook nicely.
Anyway, here is what I got:Light, fluffy, golden brown bundles of buttery joy. My little sister described them as "sugar cookies, just better." I disagree, as they are distinctly buttery (though I'd say not buttery enough to be called a butter cookie. Shortbread is buttery enough to be called a butter cookie.) with lovely hints of vanilla.
This recipe has a lot of potential for modification. For instance, I adore rosemary shortbread cookies, but I'm not fond of hard cookies. I do like my cookies to be fluffy and slightly moist. As this cookie does have a lot in common with shortbread, I am inclined to say that it would welcome the addition of rosemary, lavender, or any other herb you chose to pair with it.
These cookies didn't even survive 12 hours in this house. Carolyn and I went crazy and ate 2/3 of the batch (and that's a conservative estimate), leaving the rest for mom and dad.

Two Recipes: I was hungry.

So, unfortunately there are no pictures this time around. I was hungry, and in focusing on the food I was planning to eat, I forgot to take pictures for you. Bummer, right?
Technically, one of those food items isn't actually food. It's a drink, because I'm hormonal and was having cravings that couldn't be denied. (That's a lie, they could be, I just didn't feel like it.) I was craving a chocolate peanut butter milkshake. However, as usual, we lack ice cream. So, I made chocolate peanut butter MILK.
(I would like to take this moment to state that blenders are AWESOME.)

Chocolate Peanut Butter Milk (because people can't figure this out on their own)
Serves 1.5

a lot of peanut butter
a lot of chocolate syrup
a lot of milk

Directions:
1. Combine and blend!

Don't you love one-step beverages? Unfortunately, now that I've discovered this, we're going to go through peanut butter reeeeeeally fast and I will no longer be on a HFCS-free diet (Hershey's Chocolate Syrup has HFCS, unfortunately. This is among the many things I love to hate about it). Add a banana and swap out the milk for soy milk and you can KIND OF pretend that it's healthy. Kind of. Not really. But we can dream, right?
Okay, so, onto something healthier.
We all know that I am a devout lover of mozzarella, yes? Well, I am. I've been drooling over this recipe for months (minus the capers, not big on capers), and decided today that I was going to roast some leftover peppers that were about to go iffy. So, in an act of bad judgment, I decided I was going to roast them over a stove burner. Like a marshmallow. (I can hear family members laughing already.) Well, let me just say that is the wrong technique and we're not going to try that again. So instead I took a different approach and ended up with something completely different from what I was aiming for.

Mixed Pepper Saute, Without Capers
Serves 2

1/2 red bell pepper, diced
1/2 green bell pepper, diced
1/2 yellow bell pepper, diced
1/4 yellow onion
2 cloves garlic, smashed and minced
black pepper
1/2 cup mozzarella, shredded
grapeseed oil

Directions:
1. Dice all peppers and toss into a lightly oiled pan on medium-high heat.
2. After about two minutes of occasional mixing, added diced onion, and sprinkle liberally with black pepper. Stir gently and then ignore it for a minute or two.
3. Smash two cloves of garlic, dicing as fine as possible. Add to the pan and stir, lowering heat to medium-low.
4. Continue moving veggies around until the garlic is aromatic and slightly cooked and golden yellow, but not brown. Brown means your garlic is burnt, and therefore terribly bitter.
5. Remove from heat, serve on two plates, and top with mozzarella as desired (you know I'm a little heavy-handed with the mozzarella), or eat plain.

Now, this is very different from Smitten Kitchen's dish in a lot of way. No vinegar, more garlic, different oil (no big deal there), no capers, and no parsley. If you don't like your food to be very garlicky, one clove of garlic is fine, but I'm a total garlic junkie. Parsley would have been a good idea, but I was winging it and didn't think of that. If I have fresh parsley to work with next time, I will definitely consider the addition. For now, I'm happy with it.
My audience (Carolyn) rated this as a "cook again" dish.
Considering that she isn't big on peppers or onions, that's a high compliment.