Chocolate Cheesecake Coconut Thumbprint Cookies

You know the feeling. An image on a magazine cover that you pass by at a newsstand. A scrap of conversation overheard on the train. A piece of song lyric you didn't quite process as you changed the channels on the radio. These things can haunt us until we track them down and find out what they truly meant.

For me, it was a picture on Pinterest, that most useless and time-wasting of all social networking sites, little more than a random collage of images, really. We can never hope to sift through ALL of that information and still get anything done, but we try anyway. A lot of us food bloggers do it under the guise of "but this is productive! I have to see what all the other food bloggers are posting! Oh look, those shoes sure are sparkly."

Usually I don't give much thought to images I see on Pinterest. If there's something I find particularly interesting, I'll save it and make a mental note to try the recipe sometime, but I usually forget.

Not with the cheesecake thumbprint cookies though. I just couldn't. My co-workers can vouch for the fact that I haven't been able to shut up about them all week. Cheesecake! In thumbprint cookies! It's brilliant! Why didn't I think of it before?

It was when I found myself actually looking forward to Christmas so that I could make dozens of them and force-feed them to everyone I know that I realized something had to be done. Another glance at the original picture that started it all, though still tantalizing, was actually a little bit boring. The cheesecake was pretty much the same color as the cookie part, and whoever had made these, culinary genius though they clearly are, had foregone the best part of the traditional thumbprint cookie: the coconut coating! These problems had to be solved before any more time was lost. Add "color contrast" to the list of chocolate's many, many uses.

My recipe just lumps the chocolate right in with the cheesecake filling, but if you've got the patience and the steady hands, I'd recommend adding the chocolate separately to each individual cookie for an even prettier and just as tasty finished product.

The idea was to have a marble pattern, but I gave up after this one.

Cookie ingredients:

3 sticks grass-fed butter
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract (beware of the fake stuff they try to pass off!)
7 ounces organic unsweetened coconut flakes
3 1/2 cups unbleached flour
1 free range egg

Cheesecake Ingredients:

1 free range egg white
4 ounces grass-fed cream cheese
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup organic chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Cream butter and sugar together in the largest bowl, then add the vanilla.
3. Slowly stir flour into the butter and sugar mixture.
4. Roll the dough into a flat disk, wrap in plastic, and chill for 30 minutes.
5. Roll dough into 1/4 inch balls, dip in egg wash, and roll in coconut.
6. Place balls on an ungreased cookie sheet, pressing the center with your thumb to make a well.
7. Place in the oven for 10 minutes.
8. While dough is cooking, make your cream cheese filling. Heat chocolate chips in the microwave for about     a minute and a half, until well melted.
9. Mix together cream cheese, sugar, and egg white until well blended and about the consistency of cake batter, then stir in chocolate.
10. Pull cookies out of the oven and with a small spoon, carefully add cheesecake mix the center. Bake for an additional 10-15 minutes, until coconut is golden brown, and fork stuck in the cheesecake comes out clean.

Pork Roast With Cabbage

I finally stopped putting off the inevitable, and moved one of my hard-won cuts of pork from freezer to oven, with help from The Book Lover's Cookbook by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen.

Serving tip: if your dish lacks color, put it on a funky colored  plate!

Ingredients:

1 2-pound boneless pork loin, center roast (Don't forget to thaw it overnight.  The quickie thaw-it-in-water-in-an-hour method will do in a pinch, but the texture is just not the same.)

6 small red potatoes, rinsed

1 onion, chopped fine

1/2 head green cabbage, leaves peeled apart, rinsed and drained

Spices to taste:

   black pepper, garlic powder, paprika, dried rosemary

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375.

2. Rinse the pork loin and pat dry with paper towel.  Place the meat in the center of a large casserole dish.  Arrange the potatoes around the meat.  Add 1/8 inch of water to the bottom of the pan.  Sprinkle the meat with pepper, garlic powder, paprkia, rosemary, and onion.

3. Cover and bake for about 1 hour.

4. Arrange cabbage over meat and potatoes, recover and cook for another 30 minutes until internal meat temperature reaches 170.

serves 4-6

Vietnamese Spring Rolls

As a happy coincidence, just before I started my forty days of vegetarianism, my mother got me a copy of "Welcome to Claire's", the latest cookbook from Claire Criscuolo, whose organic, vegetarian restaurant Claire's Corner Copia is a New Haven, CT landmark (and the place where I once saw Kirsten Dunst eating a bowl of soup).

The first recipe experiment of Lent 2012 is inspired by one from this cookbook, and turned out pretty delicious. (Although I need a lot more practice in getting the finished product to roll up a little tighter.)

Vietnamese Spring Rolls


Ingredients:
3 small organic carrots, cut into thin julienne sticks, 4 inches long (or just a bag of pre-shredded carrot sticks if you want to save some time)
1/2 large organic red bell pepper, seeded and cut into thin strips
1/2 small head organic cabbage, cut into thin strips
16 large organic basil leave, cut in half
16 small organic mint leaves
1 2-inch piece of ginger, peeled and finely minced
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 jalapeno pepper, seeded and finely chopped

Dressing:
1 1/2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
juuice from 1 lime
1 tablespoon brown rice vinegar
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar
salt and pepper to taste

8 spring roll wrappers (I had to track these down at an Asian market where the ingredients weren't even in alphabet I understand, let alone language, so I'm not 100% sure what was in them, but this recipe I later found is definitely corn-free if you want to make them yourself, or can't find them at the store.)

Directions:


1. Place the carrots and pepper strips into a bowl.
2. In a separate bowl, place cabbage, basil, mint, ginger, garlic, and jalapeno.  Toss to combine.
3. Whisk dressing ingredients together, and pour evenly over cabbage mixture, tossing to coat the vegetables well.
4. Spread out a clean dish towel near your bowls of vegetables.  Take one spring roll skin out of the wrapper and run under warm water for 12-15 seconds, rubbing with your thumbs, until it begins to soften. (If you never done this before, it's definitely weird at first.)
5. Place softened roll wrapper on the towel.  Place 2-3 carrot and pepper strips into a row horizontally down the center of the softened skin, leaving about 1 1/2 inches around the filling to roll up.
6. Arrange a generous handfull of the cabbage mixture over carrots and peppers, horizontally down the center of the skin.

Can you see the skin under there?  It's really see-through.

7. Now comes the tricky part.  Lift the side of the skin closest to you over the filling, bring the two sides in to meet the filling, then roll up the spring roll as tightly as you can without tearing the skin.  Turn seam side down.   Transfer to a cutting board and repeat for all eight.

8. Cut rolls in half on the diagonal, and carefully transfer to a serving platter.  Serve with your favorite dipping sauce.