February 2012 - Mostly Balanced

So often, when I think about what I want to make for dinner, I crave creamy pasta. Obviously, loading up a plate of pasta with heavy cream and cheese isn’t going to work out in the long term, so a lot of my experiments over the fall and winter months have been playing around with different ways to turn vegetables into a healthy pasta dish that’s still creamy and cheesy. And, after watching a few episodes of Chopped, you start to realize you can puree just about anything into a sauce. I made this dish a couple of times, and I’ve found that the key to this combination is the Parmesan. It’s saltiness is the perfect bridge between the sweetness of the roasted peppers and the tang of the goat cheese. Without the Parm, the goat cheese + red pepper combination falls a bit flat, and the end result is a lackluster, too-sweet red mess.

I developed these chewy oatmeal cookies for February’s Recipe Redux, the monthly cooking challenge I joined last year. The challenge this month was to develop a recipe that highlights chocolate, and sweets, I have to say, aren’t my strong suit. When it comes to sweet versus salty, I’d pick salty every day. Baking is typically less forgiving than cooking, so it was a bit challenging to come up with a chocolate-focused dessert. Instead, I thought about what kinds of sweets I actually like to eat, which lead me to oatmeal cookies. Rather than experiment with the chemistry behind cakes and batters, I went with adapting a plain and simple oatmeal cookie recipe and spicing it up.

I incorporated chocolate chips into the recipe, which was a pretty obvious adaptation, and I’m certainly not the first to pair chocolate and oatmeal in a cookie. So, to take the whole thing a step up from obvious, I wanted to incorporate something more complex in place of cinnamon. I went for a Chinese 5 spice, a blend of cinnamon, star anise, fennel, cloves, ginger, and peppercorn. It works because the cinnamon element hints at the traditional flavor profile of an oatmeal cookie, but the peppercorn and ginger lend a subtle, almost smoky spiciness. Chocolate and spices go very well together, so if you don’t have a super sweet tooth, this is a fantastic cookie. It’s chewy and tender and incredibly flavorful.

Pasta with a creamy roasted red pepper & goat cheese sauce

Chewy Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies