Mike and I love creamed spinach. Although we can buy it frozen in a microwaveable bag, we both prefer it fresh. Here’s my microwave-friendly recipe.

Ingredients:

• 2 Tablespoons Butter (or margarine)
• 1/4 cup chopped onions or scallions
• 12 ounces fresh or frozen spinach (fresh is better, of course), prepared for cooking. When using fresh spinach, I usually use the bagged spinach. (I can’t be bothered washing, cutting, etc.)
• 2 Tablespoons flour
• 1 cup milk (skim is okay)
• salt and pepper to taste

Cooking Instructions:

1. In a saucepan or microwave-safe, covered bowl, melt the butter.
2. Add the onions or scallions and saute until done, stirring occasionally.
3. Meanwhile, lightly cook the spinach. I use the microwave, without added water, but you could steam it if you prefer. If you added water, drain when done. Keep warm.
4. Sprinkle the flour in the butter/onion mixture and stir in. Cook for about two minutes.
5. Add the milk slowly, stirring and cooking until thickened.
6. Add the cooked spinach and blend well.
7. Add salt and pepper to taste.
8. Serve hot.

If you use a microwave to prepare the sauce, cover until the flour has been added to prevent splattering. Zap the mixture for one minute at a time, stirring after each minute.

This recipe can be multiplied.

I find that the older I get, the more I look back with fond memories on certain aspects of my childhood. And since eating has always been high on my list of life priorities, it’s no wonder that I think back about food.

Last month, Mike and I went to the New York City area where I grew up to be tourists and spend Thanksgiving with our families. I took the opportunity to buy some of the foods I enjoyed as a kid that simply don’t seem to be available in Arizona.

One of these is Pastina. I bought two boxes of Barilla Pastina, which is the only one I could find. (I think we used to buy Ronzoni.) The Barilla Web site, where I found this nice box shot, has a good description:

There are few children in Italy who do not grow up eating Pastina, the classic tiny pasta stars that parents first serve as a child’s introduction to the delicious world of pasta. Here in America, parents choose Barilla Pastina for their young children because it is made from 100% highest quality durum wheat; is enriched with essential nutrients, such as thiamin, iron, riboflavin and niacin; and is easily digested. And grown-ups love the deliciously nutty flavor of Barilla Pastina, too, especially in soups and simple broths.

When they say “tiny,” they’re not kidding. Pastina makes rice look huge.

We ate Pastina for breakfast many times, usually at my grandmother’s house after a sleepover. My mother’s mother was second-generation Italian; her parents had come to New York with the wave of Italian immigrants in the early 1900s. My mother was born in the Bronx and lived in a true Italian neighborhood until she was 8, when my grandparents moved to northern New Jersey. The Italian influence was pretty heavy on that side of my family, although my mother was fully Americanized. Her brother, who was 16 when they made the move, stayed more Italian. He married a second-generation Italian woman who tried hard to keep the family as Italian as possible throughout the subsequent years.

I’m the product of a third generation Italian mother and second generation German father. I don’t consider myself either nationality; I’m American — whatever that really means.

Back to Pastina. When my grandparents made Pastina, they didn’t follow package directions, which called for the usual boiling and straining of the pasta. Instead, they used far less water and let the tiny pasta soak it all up in cooking. Then, before cooking was done, they dropped a raw egg into the pot and stirred the mixture until the egg was cooked. They served it in bowls with butter. I’m not sure if this is how everyone served Pastina to kids, but it’s the way we had it.

My grandparents are gone now, so I couldn’t call them for a recipe. Instead, I sort of winged it. What I came up with works and is very tasty. Here’s the recipe/instructions for one serving:

Ingredients:

• 1/3 cup Pastina
• 2/3 cup water
• 1 Tbsp butter
• 1 egg
• salt and pepper to taste

Cooking Instructions:

1. Combine Pastina and water in a large, deep bowl.
2. Cook on high in microwave for 2 minutes.
3. Stir, add butter.
4. Return to microwave and cook on high 1 minute.
5. Stir, break egg into mixture and stir again to scramble and mix it in.
6. Return to microwave and cook on high 1 minute.
7. Stir one more time.
8. Return to microwave and cook on high 1 more minute.
9. Add salt and pepper to taste and serve.

Please keep in mind that my microwave is 21 years old. I think it’s only 700 watts. So you might have to adjust the cooking times shown here.

After about 3 minutes of cooking, the Pastina should have soaked up most of the water and be tender. (Remember, this pasta is really tiny.) The last two minutes are primarily to cook the egg.

I really like this — it’s true comfort food. If you give it a try or have had it in the past, please share your comments about it here. Use the Comments link or form below. I’d love to hear from you — especially if you grew up in an Italian household and enjoyed this for breakfast, as I did.

I love chocolate chip cookies. I also love oatmeal cookies. So what could be better than two cookies in one?

• 1 cup (2 sticks) margarine or butter. (I admit I usually use margarine, but sometimes I use one stick of each.)
• 1-1/4 cups firmly packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 tablespoons milk
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt (optional; I include it)
• 2-1/2 cups uncooked oatmeal. You can use either quick or old fashioned, but I think it tastes better with old fashioned.
• 1 12-oz package semi-sweet chocolate morsels
• 1 cup coarsely chopped nuts (optional; I don’t include them)

Heat oven to 375°F. Beat together margarine and sugars until creamy. Add eggs, milk, and vanilla; beat well. Add combined flour, baking soda, and salt; mix well. Stir in oats, chocolate morsels, and nuts; mix well.

Baking instructions when you have time to spare:
Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 9 to 10 minutes for a chewy cookie or 12 to 13 minutes for a crisp cookie. Cool 1 minute on cookie sheet; remove to wire rack.

Baking instructions when you’re busy with other things:
Lay a sheet of wax paper or aluminum foil on the bottom of a standard-sized sheet pan. Spread the batter evenly over the paper, making sure you bring the batter right to the lip of the pan. Bake about 15 minutes or until batter starts to brown. Cool 5 minutes on pan, then lift paper out to flat surface such as a large cutting board. Using downward strokes with a large knife, cut into squares.

Baking instructions when you want to bake it another day:
Using floured hands on a floured surface batter into one or more log-shaped rolls about 1-1/2 to 2 inches in diameter. Wrap rolls tightly in aluminum foil. Refrigerate up to 2 days. (I’m not sure about freezing this; you might want to give it a try with a small quantity of batter.) When ready to bake, unwrap and slice rolls into 1/2-inch thick slices. Bake on ungreased baking sheet for 10 to 12 minutes.

Cool completely. Store in tightly covered container.

Yields: about 5 dozen cookies (or equivalent bars).

I spent most of the day cleaning out my closet, doing errands, and sending out take-down notices to file hosting companies illegally distributing my ebooks. It’s this last task that I found most depressing. There are hundreds of pirate sites out there and getting my book off one server is like stomping out a fire in hell. There’s always another fire to stomp out. Always. But I just can’t give up.

To cheer myself up, I thought I’d make myself a chocolate egg cream. But when I opened the fridge to pull out ingredients, my eyes fell upon the Jones Vanilla Cream soda. What would happen, I mused, if I mixed that with milk? Would I wind up with a vanilla egg cream?

I tried it. It worked.

The recipe:

• 8-10 ounces milk. I use 2% because that’s what we buy at home.
• 1 12-oz can vanilla cream soda. Jones works.

Put the milk in a very large glass. It should be only half full. Slowly pour in the pop, stirring constantly. Stirring is important; if you don’t stir, it will overflow. Pop in a straw and enjoy.

I think that if you used skim milk and diet soda, this might be low-calorie. But I don’t drink diet soda. I hate the taste of artificial sweeteners.

Everyone knows what it’s like to be at the right place at the right time. It’s when special things happen.

We were at the right place — Mike’s mom’s apartment — at the right time — when a neighbor came by with vacuum-sealed packages of freshly frozen salmon. The neighbor and her husband had just returned from a trip to Alaska, where her husband had gone salmon fishing. He’d had 50 pounds of salmon shipped home. Evidently, their freezer wasn’t big enough to accommodate it all.

The salmon looked beautiful and was frozen solid. She was gracious enough to give us three packages of it — enough to feed six people. We stopped off at the local supermarket for a cooler bag and stored the fish and some ice in it for the trip back to Arizona.

One piece remained pretty much frozen solid. The other two were defrosted, but very cold. We had one for dinner last night and will probably eat the other tomorrow.

During dinner last night, Mike said it might have been the best salmon he’d ever had in his life. I certainly can’t remember having any salmon that was better.

To go with it, I wanted to make some dill sauce. Dill goes really well with fish, especially salmon. A nice sauce would be a change in the way we usually eat salmon — just grilled with salt, pepper, and lemon. I asked Mike to pick up a packet of Knorr dill sauce mix at the local supermarket. As might be expected, they didn’t have any. They didn’t have any fresh dill, either. So Mike came home with a squeeze tube of “dill blend.” I read the ingredients. Dill was one of them. I couldn’t pronounce many of the others. But, in an effort to make the best of a not-perfect situation, I set about finding a dill sauce recipe that I could make with what I had in the house, which did not include cream, sour cream, yogurt, or anything resembling cream.

I tracked down a recipe that used mayonnaise. We had some of that. Although the recipe didn’t sound very enticing, we had plenty of dill blend to spare and I figured it was worth a shot.

Here’s the recipe as I modified it:

• 3/4 cup mayonnaise. The original recipe called for 1-1/2 cups, which was way too much for my taste. (Keep in mind that when I was a kid, I wouldn’t touch mayo. I was an adult before I started using it (sparingly) on sandwiches.)
• 3 tablespoons lemon juice. That seemed about right, even with less mayonnaise.
• 2 tablespoons dill weed. The original recipe called for 1/2 teaspoon, which wasn’t nearly enough. I assumed the recipe called for dried dill weed rather than fresh (my preferred type) or “blend.” I just squeezed in a bunch of the green stuff Mike had brought home and added more, after stirring, to get the right color. I wanted to be able to see and taste the dill.

Combine all ingredients, mix well, and refrigerate for an hour. I think the hour is very important if you’re using dry dill weed, as it will provide enough time for the oils in the mayo to hydrate the dill and release its flavors. If you’re using fresh, chop it up before adding it. And, of course, if you’re using tubed “dill blend,” the flavors have already been released in the factory, where some of them may have remained, along with that fresh dill aroma.

The resulting mix reminded me a bit of tartar sauce (which is another thing I only recently started eating). But it tasted very good with the salmon. I’ll make it again with the real deal dill sometime in the future.

Or maybe I’ll just make a proper dill sauce with the right ingredients next time.

Up until about 15 years ago, the only time in my life I’d ever had chutney was back in my college days. I was dating a guy with rich parents and they ate well. Sometimes, if we were lucky, we’d get to go with them. There was an Indian restaurant right off Second Avenue in the Sixties — my brain is saying 62nd Street, but I really can’t be sure. That was my introduction to Indian food, including curry, tandoori, poori, and mango chutney.

I liked what I ate. (That is the story of my life, isn’t it?)

Years ago, I ran across this recipe for mango chutney and figured I’d give it a try. It was easy enough to make and the pint yield held up remarkably well in my refrigerator. I mean really well. We were still eating it two years later with no sign of it going bad. I guess it’s the vinegar.

What’s this good on? My favorite is pork tenderloin. You grill up the tenderloins whole, then slice them into 3/4-inch medallions. Spoon on a little chutney and let the hot pork and cold tanginess of the chutney roll around in your mouth a bit before you swallow. Heaven. Good with a salad that has some kind of mildly sweet dressing, like a raspberry vinaigrette or honey mustard.

Here’s the mango chutney recipe:

Ingredients:

• 1 pound mango, coarsely chopped. I use the frozen cubed mango and chop each cube into 4 or 6 pieces. It sure beats peeling and slicing fresh mango and I bet no one can tell the difference when it’s done.
• 1 cup golden raisins. You can use the regular kind if you can’t find goldens.
• 1 cup packed brown sugar. This is an excellent recipe for using up brown sugar that has solidified in an improperly closed bag. But fresh brown sugar won’t hurt it.
• 3/4 cup vinegar. I use white vinegar.
• 1 jar (2-7/8 ounces) crystallized ginger, finely chopped. I don’t know what kind of jarred ginger they’re talking about. Here on the edge of nowhere, I can get crystallized ginger in a little 3-oz bag. Close enough.
• 1 clove garlic, chopped. I chop it really fine.
• 1 teaspoon salt. I probably put a little less than that.

Instructions:
Place all ingredients in a sauce pan and heat to boiling. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered for about 45 minutes or until slightly thickened. Remove from heat, cool. Place in a sealed container — a canning jar works well for this; I avoid plastic for anything I want to keep long term — and store in refrigerator. Serve with pork (as discussed above) or Indian curry dishes.

I should probably mention somewhere that this doesn’t really smell very good while it’s cooking. After all, you are cooking vinegar. Not worth leaving the house for, but certainly not something you’d cook up when you’re trying to fill the house with nice aromas.

If you try this recipe and like it, please do let me know. Also let me know what else it’s good with. The only reason it lasts so long here is that I only eat it with pork — and I’m the only one in the house who does!

I like cereal for breakfast. But I don’t like heavily processed cereals with a lot of mystery ingredients and sugar.

So when I was staying at the Westin in Vancouver last week, I decided to give the muesli item on their breakfast menu a try. One taste and I was hooked. I had it every morning of my stay. And on the last morning, the waitress offered the recipe.

Ingredients:
1 cup uncooked oatmeal (not instant)
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 cup raisins (they used golden raisins)
1/4 cup canned peaches, drained and cut into bite-sized pieces
1 cup (or more) half and half or milk
2 cups fresh fruit like bananas, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries

Instructions:
Mix the first five ingredients in a bowl. Cover and refrigerate overnight. In the morning, right around breakfast time, the oats should have absorbed all of the half and half or milk. In fact, if the resulting mixture is too dry, you can moisten it up a bit by adding more half and half or milk. The raisins will be plump, too. Dish out the mixture and top with the fresh fruit. Enjoy!

One note here: The recipe I got called for a mixture of cream and whole milk. That’s half and half, isn’t it? The waitress also said you can cut calories and fat by using just milk. If you do this, use whole milk — I don’t think lowfat milk would make the result as creamy and rich.

We were going to have steak for dinner. Mike had bought two “beautiful” (I haven’t seen them) rib eyes at Albertson’s on his way home on Wednesday. I needed to make something to go with them and I didn’t feel like a trip to the store.

One thing we always have a lot of these days is eggs. With 8 hens, we normally get 5 to 7 eggs a day. Alex eats an egg every morning and sometimes Mike will have 2 or 3 (they’re generally smaller than average). And I’ll have 1 or 2 once in a while. Otherwise, we wind up giving quite a few away. Basically, if you hand us an empty egg carton, you’ll get it back a short time later with a dozen eggs in it.

I thought about that Bisquick quiche I used to make and tracked down the recipe in my stack of clippings. The recipe called for only 3 eggs; I wanted to use more. And the recipe said nothing about vegetables; I had a bunch in the freezer that I wanted to use up. So I improvised. The following is my approximate recipe; it actually turned out quite good. And when Mike got home with a headache, we had the quiche for dinner so he didn’t have to go out in the heat to grill the steaks.

Ingredients

• 5 eggs. Remember, mine are small; if you buy large or jumbo eggs, 4 would probably be enough.
• 1/2 cup Bisquick
• 1/4 cup melted butter. The recipe called for 1/2 cup, but I think that’s too way much. It makes the final product greasy.
• 1/2 cup milk. The recipe called for 1-1/2 cups, but I wanted to get rid of eggs, not milk.
• 2-3 cups frozen (or fresh) chopped vegetables. I used asparagus, chopped spinach, and a potato/onion/pepper blend. I let them defrost for about a half hour on the countertop before I mixed them in.
• 1/2 cup shredded cheese. The recipe calls for a full cup, but I thought that was too much. Also the recipe calls for cheddar, but I didn’t have cheddar so I used Havarti with dill.

The recipe also called for bacon, but since we were going to eat it with steak, I left that out.

Directions

1. In a large bowl, beat eggs.
2. Mix in the Bisquick, melted butter, and milk. Stir until blended.
3. Add the vegetables and stir well.
4. Pour the mixture into a lightly greased pie pan. (I used olive oil spray to spray the bottom of the pan before I poured the mixture in.)
5. Sprinkle the cheese over the top of the mixture.
6. Bake for 30 to 45 minutes at 350°F. Quiche is done when it begins to brown and crack along the top.
7. Eat while hot.

The magic of this recipe is that the Bisquick automatically creates its own crust. And, between the olive oil spray and the butter in the mix, it did not stick to my glass pie pan. It made a nice meal.

Mike and I got on the cold soup kick the other day when I made gazpacho. We decided to try a few different cold soups for dinner, leaving the big meal of the day to lunch time (when it really should be eaten).

So I got online and did a Google search for cold soup recipes. I wound up on a page at allrecipes.com with a list of cold soups. I printed off a few recipes that sounded good. But the one I decided to try first was for vichyssoise, a leek and potato soup. The recipe was submitted to the site by Derek Parker and had a rating of 5 out of 5 stars.

The soup was quick and easy to make. I followed the recipe quite closely and was rewarded with an extremely tasty soup. We had it for dinner last night and I just had a little post-lunch snack of some more.

If you try this recipe, serve it with a crusty bread, like a loaf of French bread. That’s the only thing it needed to make a perfect summer meal.

Mike is a huge fan of gazpacho, a tomato-based, chilled vegetable soup. We’ve tried a bunch of recipes and, as usual, have come up with our own variation. I just made a batch today; we’ll have it for dinner tonight.

Ingredients:

• 4 large ripe tomatoes
• 2 medium cucumber
• 1 medium pepper. Most people use green peppers, but I prefer yellow or orange, which have a milder flavor and don’t make me burp peppers for the next six hours. Today we had 1/2 of each leftover from another meal, so that’s what I used.
• 4 green onions. If you like a sharper onion flavor, use 1 small onion or 1 medium sweet onion.
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/3 cup red wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar. Mike really likes b-vinegar.
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/8 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
• Tabasco (if desired) to taste. We don’t use this; we prefer a mello gazpacho.

Preparation Instructions:

1. Chop the first 4 ingredients. Put half of each in a blender or food processor (we use a blender) and the other half in a mixing bowl.
2. Add remaining ingredients to the blender or food processor.
3. Puree until very smooth. The mixture should have a pinkish color.
4. Add pureed mixture to mixing bowl with chopped ingredients. Mix well.
5. Cover and refrigerate for at least two hours but not more than 3 days.
6. Enjoy cold.

And if you see a gazpacho recipe that looks good to you but includes bread and water, just omit the bread and water. (The idea of including soaked bread in a soup really grosses me out.) As you’ll see, you don’t need bread to make the soup hearty and delicious.

When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, my grandparents had a bakery in our home town of Cresskill. Across the street was a soda fountain named Dave’s — a place where you could go in for a soda or ice cream or ice cream soda or a variety other things. The counter was formica — I seem to recall it being yellow — and there were swivel stools in front of it. We’d go in with some loose change and walk out with whatever we could afford.

One of my favorite soda fountain drinks was something Dave called a “Gizmo.” It was a mixture of chocolate milk and seltzer. Many years later, I learned the real name for this beverage: an egg cream.

Egg creams are hard to get outside the New York area. They’re probably hard to get inside the New York area these days, too. After all, soda fountains are disappearing, replaced with fast food joints or vending machines. You can’t get an egg cream in a vending machine.

The recipe is easy:

• 1 part milk
• 1 part seltzer
• generous helping of chocolate syrup

Take the milk and the chocolate syrup and mix it together to make a very dark chocolate milk. While still stirring (and this is important) slowly add the seltzer. If you stir just right, it won’t overflow the glass. Drink with a a straw.

A real New York egg cream calls for U-Bet chocolate syrup. I don’t think that’s available around here and, even if it was, I wouldn’t buy it. I never did like U-Bet. I prefer Hershey’s syrup, in the plastic squeeze bottle. Don’t get the “light” version — it’s terrible.

I actually keep straws on hand at home just for drinking egg creams.

I’m having one now. Quite refreshing.

I’m not sure where the name egg cream comes from. Someone told me that they used to put eggs in this drink. I can’t imagine that. I think it might have something to do with the creamy top that appears when you make it just right.

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Ingredients

• 3 oz premium vodka - don’t use junk liquor; you’ll be drinking this almost straight
• splash of plum wine - for an extra dry version of this drink, use a teaspoon; if you’re the kind who likes white zinfandel wine, make that a generous splash
• ice - I use cubes, but that’s because I don’t have patience to wait for the icemaker to crush the ice

Mixing Instructions

1. Add all ingredients to a martini shaker (with strainer).
2. Shake for 60 seconds.
3. Pour through strainer into chilled martini glass.

Enjoy.

BTW, in some Japanese restaurants a 50-50 mix of vodka and plum wine served over ice is known as a Samarai. It’s a killer drink and not intended for the designated driver.

I’m tired of being overweight. I’m tired of having only one pair of jeans that fit comfortably. And I refuse to buy new clothes in a bigger size.

So I’ll either have to continue to suffer, wear my Chefware pants all the time, or lose weight.

That said, I went back on Atkins today. While you’re free to use the Comments feature to tell me how bad Atkins is for me, I’ll probably ignore what you have to say. I lost 15 pounds on Atkins in a month two years ago and I’d like to see if I can do that again.

So here’s my very easy recipe for what I call Atkins Eggs.

• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup Atkins-friendly veggies, chopped. I usually use spinach, asparagus, or broccoli. To make it really easy, I buy frozen veggies.
• 1/4 cup grated or shredded cheese. I usually use a “4-cheese Mexican blend,” which is pre-shredded and packaged in a zip-close bag.
• Spray oil. I use Olive oil, but you can use any oil you like.

Use the spray oil to coat the inside of a large glass custard cup. Break the eggs into the cup and scramble them. Then add the veggies and cheese and mix well. Microwave the mixture on high for about a minute (to get it going) followed by about 5 minutes on medium. (My microwave is programmable, so I can get the whole 6-minute program in and make my coffee while I’m waiting.)

Of course microwave times vary, so you want to keep an eye on it the first time you do this. My microwave is about 20 years old now (really!) and I think it’s low powered. The idea is to cook the mixture through without drying out the edges.

When it’s done, let it sit for a minute or two in the microwave. That’ll help finish off the veggie cooking, which is especially important if you didn’t chop finely. Then use a potholder to pull out the cup, loosen the contents with a fork, and pop it onto a plate. A little salt and pepper won’t hurt a thing. You can also top it with salsa, if it’s a low-carb mixture. I don’t go for that, but some folks like it.

The good thing about this recipe is you can really alter the flavor of the finished product by varying the vegetables and types of cheeses. I’m going to try some Saga Blue tomorrow morning. You can also add cooked or smoked meat — like ham or Canadian bacon to the mixture before cooking it.

If you try this, let me know how you do. Use the comments link below.

I’m home from Howard Mesa, at least for a while. Although our camper (where I was living at HM) doesn’t have an oven, my house does. And today, with a craving for something chocolate, I’m making brownies.

Unlike other people, I usually bake from scratch. That means I measure out all the ingredients, mix them the way they need to be mixed, and pop them in the oven to do their thing.

Today, I made brownies based on the instructions on the Baker’s Unsweetened Chocolate Squares package. I say “based on” because I’ve modified it for my own tastes. Here’s my version.

Ingredients:

4 squares Bakers Unsweetened Chocolate. Now if each square is 1 ounce, that’s 4 ounces. So if you don’t use Baker’s brand, you can figure out how many squares it is for your brand. I’ve successfully made this recipe with semi-sweet chocolate from Trader Joe’s — you know, the kind in the big bar. If you do that, just cut back on the amount of sugar you add.

3/4 cup (or 1-1/2 sticks) of butter or margarine. I used a stick of butter and a half stick of margarine.

1 cup sugar. The recipe calls for 2 cups of sugar, but I think that’s too darn much. Last time I made it with 1-1/2 cups and it was still too sweet for me. So I cut it back to a cup this time around. (Note: After tasting these, I decided that a cup wasn’t enough, even with the chocolate chips. Next time I’ll try 1-1/4 cups.)

3 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

1 cup flour

1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate pieces. Yes, I mean chocolate chips. The recipe calls for 1 cup of nuts, but I don’t like nuts in my brownies, so I never put them in. I added the chocolate this time to make up for the reduced amount of sugar.

Preparation Instructions:

The recipe is really easy and only takes one bowl and one spoon. Since the baking pan is foil covered, cleanup is very easy.

1. Preheat oven to 350°F (or 325°F for a glass pan).

2. Line a baking dish with foil. The recipe calls for a 13 x 9 inch pan, but since I don’t have one, I used a 10 x 7 inch pan. Grease the foil. I use spray oil because it’s easier.

3. Melt the chocolate and butter in the microwave in a large microwaveable bowl. 2 minutes should do it. When it’s melted, stir it until it’s well blended.

4. Add the sugar and stir until blended.

5. Add the eggs and vanilla and stir until blended.

6. Add the flour and stir until blended.

7. Add the chips (or nuts or both) and stir until blended.

8. Spread the chocolate batter into the prepared pan.

9. Bake until done. I figure about 40 minutes, but you want to keep an eye on it after 30 minutes. Overbaked brownies suck. You can use a toothpick or knife inserted into the center to check for doneness; it should have fudgy crumbs when it’s done.

10. Cool in pan.

11. Lift out of pan onto a cutting board. Cut into squares or whatever shape your heart desires. (I’m doing triangles this time.)

I find that some of the best recipes are the ones that come on the packaging for an ingredient. I once found an excellent recipe for oatmeal chocolate chip cookies on a chocolate chip package; that’s my favorite type of cookie.

And no, I don’t make recipes off Cool-Whip packages or cakes with pudding in them.

If you try this recipe, let me know what you think.

In the meantime, I’m going to put a glass of milk in the freezer so it’ll be all ready when my brownies emerge from the oven.

A while back, I surfed the ‘Net and found a bunch of recipes for bird treats. I wanted healthy, homemade treats for my parrot, Alex the Bird.

I followed one of the recipes, called “Bird Biscotti,” to make cookies for Alex. I had to substitute a bit, using Avian Essentials in place of wheat grass and egg shells. And the batter turned out too thin, so I added more cornmeal and flour to get the right consistency. The resulting creation was very green. Alex, however, liked them quite a bit.

That one batch of cookies lasted about two months. I stored them in the freezer to keep them fresh. When it was time to make another batch, I decided to experiment, adding ingredients that another recipe suggested. Here’s my concoction:

1 cup granola cereal
1/4 cup 7-grain hot cereal, uncooked
1/2 cup cornmeal
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon Avian Essentials
4 eggs
4 eggshells, washed and ground
2 large carrots, cooked and finely chopped
1/4 cup sesame seeds
1/4 cup flax seeds

A few notes about all this.

The 7-grain cereal is a hot cereal mix I bought at Safeway supermarket. It’s something I happened to have in the house and figured I’d throw in. If you can’t find that, skip it or use oatmeal.

Avian Essentials is an off-the-shelf bird supplement you should be able to buy in a good bird or pet store. It contains spirulina (which is why it’s green), cuttlebone powder, and wheat grass.

These provide beta carotene (vitamin A), essential amino acids, and calcium.

Ground eggshells also provide calcium. Frankly, I could have skipped this, since I used Avian Essentials — I actually did skip it in the first recipe. But I wanted to see how hard it was to prepare the eggshells. So I washed them, let them air dry, and used my mortar and pestle to grind them up. It took about 10 minutes total. The resulting powder didn’t look anything like eggshells.

The carrots were easy to prepare. I cooked them up in the microwave, drained off the water, and ran the carrots through my food processor. If I’d added other ingredients with them (or had used the smaller food processor bowl), I could have turned them into a paste. But that didn’t really matter. The original recipe called for carrot baby food, but I didn’t feel like running to the store to buy it.

I’d bought the sesame and flax seeds at my local health food store. (Yes, there is one in Wickenburg: Ginny’s Vitamin Village.) According to another bird treat recipe I’d found online, these two ingredients provide nutrients that help prevent feather plucking. So why not throw them in, too?

If you mix this all up, it should result in a green, dough-like mass with orange flecks. (Sounds good, huh?) If it’s too runny to work with your hands, add more whole wheat flour to thicken it up. If it’s too thick (unlikely but possible), add unsweetened fruit juice or water.

I split the dough into about 5 pieces and used my hands to make long cylinders. I put these on a lightly greased cookie sheet and baked them for 30 minutes at 325°F. Then I pulled them out, cut them into 1/4 to 1/3 inch pieces, and laid the pieces flat on the cookie tray for another 10 minutes of baking. Alex likes his cookies crunchy.

When the cookies cooled, I gave one to Alex to sample. He loved it!