No Bake Cookies with Bob's Red Mill Steel Cut Oats

Last week I told you all that baking cookies was a favorite thing about being home for the holidays. My second favorite thing is eating the batter while baking a cake. And maybe the THIRD thing is using up all my ingredients before I move out at the end of the month to our farm.

Luckily, these No Bakes are a great combination of all of these joys of December! They're a super simple cookie, requiring little prep and even less skill. They're gooey and remain soft for a very long time, while also melting in your mouth. And you can basically add anything to these without messing them up (I like to think of the coconut here as "intentional experimentation").

One ingredient you will notice on here is steel cut oats. Bob's Red Mill sent me steel cut oats a while back and I have been trying to find the perfect way to use them that wasn't, well, just a bowl of oatmeal. This oatmeal is almost pellet-like, but produced a toothsome effect to the cookies that make them gooey but firm in the most delicious way.  They were a huge hit at the party I threw this weekend for my boyfriend. (okay, my brother-in-law was the only one who ate them but he liked them a lot!) I had rented out a local theater and played his favorite movie, the Parent Trap and we will be doing that again very, very soon.

Follow me on instagram (@figandbleu) for more stories of my life that don't fit on my blog!

So if you have 15 minutes and 2 hours of patience, make these! If you don't have steel cut oats or can't find them, try a specialty foods store, online at bobsredmill.com, or you can substitute that cup for regular ol' quick cooking oats.

Steel Cut Oat No Bake Cookies

Ingredients:

• 2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup half 'n half or heavy cream (can use whole milk, but I'm going for decadence here)
• 2 tablespoon butter
• 1 cup steel cut oats
• 1/3 cup peanut butter chips
• 1/2 cup peanut butter
• 1/2 cup milk chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup shredded coconut
• 1 tablespoon vanilla
• 2 cup quick cooking oats
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt

Directions:

1. Prepare 2 cookie sheets with parchment or wax paper
2. In a medium saucepan, whisk sugar, half 'n half, butter, and steel cut oats and heat on medium-high
3. Allow to heat, stirring occasionally, and simmer until butter is melted and edges of the mixture are frothy
4. Remove from heat and stir in remaining ingredients with a wooden spoon
5. Allow to sit for 3 minutes to congeal a bit
6. Using a cookie scoop or spoons, drop your batter onto your prepared cookie sheets
7. Allow to rest in your fridge for at least two hours to firm up
8. Can be kept in a container for up to a week

Note: I am fortunate enough to be a Bob's Red Mill brand ambassador this year and will be partnering with them more and more throughout the year. While Bob's Red Mill supplied the ingredient, coconut flour, for this post, all opinions are my own. Check out their website for more information on all the amazing products they have to offer!

In the thick of summer and routine: S'mores Popovers

“Today I woke up to my mom knocking on the door with coffee, she wanted to watch an episode of I Love Lucy with me. The door was open and the cats watched squirrels through the screen door's mesh. Milo sat on my lap and I had some toast. It's been a good day so far.”

I wrote those words to my friends yesterday, in the morning before I worked outside for five hours. I wrote those words to have others share in my experience, to bear witness to the new life I’m living. How I’m not so scared anymore, not running away. I won’t be moving for a while, but I’m sure as hell happy about my decision to be here.

New rituals. That’s how I am living now. In between the concept and the creation, there is this part of me that remains languid, relaxed in this new routine. Wake up, drink coffee, kiss my mother good morning. Check emails, feed the outside cats, feed Milo, and take it a little slow. Get frustrated, take a nap, bake a cake. I go down on my lunch breaks to see my mother again. We talk about my sister’s pregnancy, we talk about how I would beg her to draw stick figures for me when I was little. We don’t ever talk about her mother, her childhood, when she lost her job, but the gaps in conversation do all the talking for us both.

I mowed the lawn for two hours, long expansive lines that waver on the small inclines of the backyard. We cut down trees yesterday, piled them up and set them on fire. The pit my friends and I would roast marshmallows around is now a burn pile for old trash, dead wood, sick grapevines, and junk mail my dad wants rid of.  Melted bottles and pale, pale ash.

My parents moved on, took over the things that were once ours, made it their own. The house wasn’t kept how I left it when I moved out seven years ago. My old bedroom now houses a cat that is too old and sick from surgery. The quilt my great-aunt made me hangs like a tapestry in the stairway. And the pool we received from donations when my brother had cancer now has a wrap-around deck. Unfinished, only half painted, the wood a little rough and the towels snag.

This is my routine now, to be complacent with where I am. How I live. What I am doing. I’m raised in the meeting point of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and the Appalachian Mountains.  I smelled the apple trees’ smoke on my clothes and there was soot underneath my nails. And I didn’t know why my eyes were watering so bad, but I didn’t bother to wipe them right away.

S'Mores Popovers

While you do not need a specialty pan for these, they do make for a nice presentation and a more consistent baking. With a popover pan, this recipe yields 9. With a muffin pan, it yields 12-15.

Ingredients

• 1 ¼ cup AP flour
• ½ cup graham flour (I love Bob's Red Mill's for this recipe)
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 3 TB brown sugar, dark
• 2 TB molasses, dark
• 1 TB clover honey
• 1 TB pure vanilla extract
• 4 eggs, room temperature
• 1 ½ cup whole milk, room temperature
• 3 TB unsalted butter, melted
• ½ cup store-bought marshmallow fluff
• ½ cup milk chocolate chips
• 1 graham cracker, processed to dust for toppin

Directions

1. Sift flours, salt, and brown sugar in a small bowl
2. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together molasses, honey, vanilla, eggs, milk, and butter until yolks are broken and liquids are a pale yellow
3. Whisking slowly, add flour mixture to wet
4. Whisk rapidly until bubbles begin to form
5. Let rest at room temperature for 30 minutes
6. Preheat oven to 450*F, prepare popover pan (or muffin tin) with cooking spray
7. When resting is complete, spoon mixture into pans ¾ of the way full
8. Top with a spoonful of marshmallow fluff and a few chocolate chips
9. Bake for 20 minutes at 450*F
10. Reduce heat to 350*F and bake for an additional 15-17 minutes (do not open the door, but check through your window to see tall sides that are golden brown)
11. Remove from oven, cut a slit into the popovers immediately to allow steam to escape
12. Turn popovers out of pan, sprinkle with a little graham cracker crumb and a few more chips and serve warm

Have all that graham flour leftover? Try making these graham crackers and milk waffles

And have you nominated Fig+Bleu for the #Savblogawards? If not, would you please?

Corn and Cherry Blondies: in Partnership with Bob's Red Mill

The summer days I’ve slept through sit at the periphery of my mind. I like when the sheets are untucked. I like when a boy is curled up next to me. I like when the sunlight wakes me up. I drink some water, fall back to sleep. I don’t do it much anymore. I have too much on my plate, but not that hungry anymore.

I think of goosebumps as marginalia. I think they’re a secret language I haven’t learned to read yet, scribbled in the corners of someone else’s mind. I think about all the secrets I’ve kept—how I used to hide cigarettes underneath a bridge by my house, how I kept warm beer in my closet and threw the cans away at work, how I’ve forgotten my grandmother’s name and the last thing my grandfather said to me was when he called me the wrong name.

I’ve learned to be someone else while home in Pennsylvania. Cautious, careful. I’m alone more often than I should admit. I may eat chips for dinner one day; then barely rinse out my coffee cup. I don’t think much of my future right now, I just like the idea of being free.

So that’s how I’m spending my weekend—independent. Cautious. Lazy. Alone. Secretive. Curled up. Smoking. I’ll spend a day at a lake and a day at a river. I’ll spend it eating what I want and hardly rinsing the dishes off. And I’ll be grateful for the three-day weekend. Grateful for who I am today. Grateful to be more myself than ever before. And grateful to make food that represents who I’ve always been: cornfed and Appalachian. Born in the Rust Belt, a little freer than I thought I would be this time last year. 

And below is a recipe for a corn and cherry blondie. But first, a couple reminders...

•  I will be taking over the feed feed snapchat on Sunday at 10:00 am EST. Make sure to watch me tour the JQ Dickinson Salt Works in West Virginia! Snapchat username: @thefeedfeed. Make sure to follow along and see this amazing company in action. And if you are interested in learning about the JQ Dickinson Salt Works, I suggest the Southern Foodways Alliance's Gravy podcast they did, found here.
• Secondly, have you all nominated this blog for the Saveur Blog Awards? If not, please do so! It would mean so much to me!

Corn and Cherry Blondies

These are cakey, crumbly, and a cross between a cornbread and a brownie and perfect for the 4th of July. Makes 9 in an 8x8 inch pan.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup AP flour
• ½ cup Bob’s Red Mill corn flour
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• ¾ cup light brown sugar, packed + more for sprinkling
• ¼ cup white sugar
• 8 TB unsalted butter, softened
• 2 eggs
• ½ TB clear imitation vanilla (can use pure vanilla extract, but I like the palatable kitsch this brings to the blondies)
• 1 ear of corn, grated with pulp and liquid reserved
• 2 TB whole milk
• ¼ cup dried cherries (I do not recommend fresh cherries for this recipe solely due to the amount of liquid the cherries bleed)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350*F and prep an 8x8 cake pan with butter and parchment paper
2. Sift together flours, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl
3. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream together sugars and butter until light
4. Add eggs, one at a time, then vanilla
5. Add the pulp and liquid of one ear of grated corn. Some kernels may get into this mixture and that is expected and even welcomed for this dish
6. Your mixture may look a little curdled, but it will come together when you add your dry ingredients
7. With mixer on low, slowly add your flour mixture, a little at a time
8. Dough will form, but may be a little dry; add your milk
9. Turn mixer off and use a rubber spatula to scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl to ensure everything is fully mixed, but make sure not to over mix or your dough may get tough
10. Fold in dried cherries
11. Turn dough out into your prepared pan and smooth out with spatula. You may want to pat it into the pan with floured fingers
12. Sprinkle a little more brown sugar on top and bake for 25-30 minutes
13. Blondies are done when golden brown, the brown sugar is slightly caramelized, and the middle is puffed but set
14. Serve immediately or store for up to 3 days

Note: I am fortunate enough to be a Bob's Red Mill brand ambassador this year and will be partnering with them more and more throughout the year. While Bob's Red Mill supplied the ingredient, corn flour for this post, all opinions are my own. Check out their website for more information on all the amazing products they have to offer! You can also find them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!

Bookends: A Macaron Cake

I danced on a lamppost and smoked a joint on a statue of a snake. I kissed a boy on a stone curb and crammed into the back of a Fiat with four other students. I ate nothing but bread for a week. I thought I was in love with a one-night stand, so I made him tea and milk and lost his number in the morning.  My professor invited me to a roof top party and I got so drunk I sat in a corner, silent, and thought about my uncle’s funeral the next day.

And when fall break hit, I bought a train ticket to Paris. 11 hours, through Lyon. I packed a bag with black t-shirts and a carton of cigarettes. I never made it to Paris, though. There were terror threats in the city that day, so I went to Florence instead. I smoked all the cigarettes in twelve days. I fell in love with every person I saw on the subway home. I got so drunk at the only gay bar I knew about that I ordered two crepes for me and one for my friend who tagged along. I took a shot of vodka from a sweating bottle in the backseat of a cab. I never made it to Paris, but I felt like I was writing a poem during my time in Rome: disconnected, unplanned, high on bummed weed and pills when they were offered. It was a narrative I crafted, harbored in the crawl space of my self-esteem.

It wasn’t so bad, but I wish I had made it to Paris.

Three years later I was unemployed in California. Still hadn’t made it to Paris, though I had promised myself I would when I became a lawyer. I promised myself that every day until I quit law school and couldn’t get a job. I still smoked cigarettes then, and wore a lot of black, but I spent my days on a hammock, thinking about how all my potential was prematurely ejaculated once I graduated high school.

So I fought with my boyfriend about money. About cereal that went stale and if I really needed a lamp next to my bed. About how to raise the dog we bought together in Los Angeles and if love was enough to stay awake in this sleeping relationship much longer.

And in between pretending to learn a language and lying on my resume, I learned to bake. Slowly at first, then gradually I got better.  I watched cooking shows in the morning and stretched a dollar any way I knew how. Egg whites for a meringue cake and then the yolks for a custard. Flour from the dollar store and I’d skip my car payment for a month to buy quality chocolate. I only cooked French food early on, to challenge myself. To prove to myself something. I fucked up a bundt cake pretty bad once and cried about it for an afternoon. When my confidence was so fragile, even that was too much to bear. I didn’t bake for a month after that and I remember I always avoided one recipe in particular: the French sandwich cookie, the macaron.

Since then, I’ve made scones, bundt cakes, and galettes. Cakes, cookies, and ice cream. But never a macaron. Until this week, when I realized how far I’ve come and a thousand of miles in between who I was and who I am now. I don’t wear so much black anymore. I’m writing a new narrative. I use an old Coors Light bottle as an ashtray on my parents’ front porch. I made a macaron cake, pink and tart and nutty because I figured, “Why not?” Because that’s who I am now—someone who isn’t creating identity but poetry. Physical, tangible poetry set between the bookends of an uncle’s death in Rome and a crumbling relationship in California. And who I am now doesn’t say, “No” often, especially when I get the chance to bake or bum a cigarette. 

Macaron Cake with Cherry Buttercream

I am fully aware that this isn't a proper technique and is a more whimsical approach to the French confection. Makes one 6-inch cake.

Ingredients for cake base

• 1 ½ cup almond meal
• 1/3 cup AP flour
• 1 ½ cup confectioner’s sugar
• 4 egg whites
• 1/3 cup sugar
• ½ teaspoon white vinega

Directions for cake base

1. Prep your parchment by drawing your 6-inch circles as your guide for piping. Put parchment on a half sheet
2. Sift together almond meal, flour, and confectioner’s sugar in a large bowl and set aside
3. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, beat the egg whites until they are beyond frothy but not quite solid
4. Begin to add your sugar in a stream with motor still running
5. As you continue to beat, the egg whites should solidify and be a little shiny
6. Add your white vinegar to stabilize the meringue
7. Turn mixer off and add about a half cup of the flour mixture to the meringue mixture. Fold it into the egg whites. When mixed, add remainder of the flour mixture gradually, continuing to fold as you go
8. When fully mixed, put into your piping bag and pipe into your pre-drawn rounds
9. Set out for 30 minutes at room temperature
10. Preheat oven to 300*F
11. Bake for one hour, checking at the 40-minute mark and every ten minutes after until you notice a hard shell that is set
12. While baking, move onto the cherry buttercream
13. Remove from oven and allow to cool completel

Ingredients for the cherry buttercream

• 2 cups cherries, pitted
• Juice and zest of a half lemon
• ½ cup white sugar
• 2 TB unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar
• 1 TB vanilla
• Pinch of sal

Directions for cherry buttercream

1. In a small saucepan, stir together your lemon zest and juice, cherries, and sugar
2. Boil on medium until juices of the cherry are released and it is reduced by half. You will have a syrupy product
3. Cool completely
4. In a bowl, using either your stand mixer or a hand mixer, beat your butter and confectioner’s sugar together, it will create a thick and dry paste
5. With your mixer still on low, pour a thin stream of syrup into your confectioner’s sugar mixture and beat until it is whipped and a light pink
6. Add vanilla and a pinch of sal

To Assemble: Turn one of your macaron discs over so the flat surface is facing upward. Spread as much of the buttercream as you’d like on top, place second disc on top of first and dust with confectioner’s sugar. Saves for up to two days, even at room temperature.

Blue Cornmeal and Smoked Cheddar Popovers: In Partnership with Bob's Red Mill

It’s now been sixty-eight days sine I last heard a coyote in the backyard. Three years since they were so close you could hear their breath on the windowpane. The coyote tricked me once, hunched and hungry, but I won’t be in California again for a long, long time.

My people aren’t like those on the West Coast; or, at the very least, those I met. There are burn marks on my mother’s arm, cat scratches on the edges of her knuckles. She makes a dollar stretch and my dad drinks his Diet Pepsi on the couch for hours at night. Nursing it, letting the ice melt to a more toothsome bite. The dogs play in the backyard and bark at nothing but the dried grapevines that appear to have died from a disease and not the harsh Northeastern winter that we’re still shaking off. I keep my window open some nights, and the frogs act like a Greek chorus, explaining things in a language I do not know yet, a dialect so deep-rooted in creekbeds and unemployment checks, I’m still getting an ear for it.

I come from families sustained on peasant food. Meat, potatoes, fats when we could get them. I am the apex of generations of farmers and truck drivers, stay-at-home moms and divorcees who never quite got their bearings. My dad said he’s never tried cauliflower, my mother bought produce at the dollar store when we lived in Kentucky. My sister slept in the laundry room then. I shared a room with my brother.

These popovers are a product of my heritage. Where the leavening is from the earth and a little elbow grease to boot. Where the grit of the cornmeal, unbleached and rugged, grinds on the tooth while you daydream of a beach in your land-locked state. Where the fat is light and the oven is hot and the days are shorter than when you were a child. It’s everything and nothing, an illusion of a simple life because I never realized how tough it must have been to feed a family of five while working night shifts at the Walmart in town. I’ll never hear a coyote again out here in Pennsylvania, but I surround myself with like me now. Family, in every sense of the word.

Blue Cornmeal and Smoked Cheddar Popovers

Yields six popovers using proper pan, or roughly 10-14 popovers made with a muffin tin

Ingredients:

• ½ cup Bob's Red Mill blue cornmeal (or yellow, if not available)
• 1 cup AP flour
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 4 eggs, room temperature
• 1 ½ cup whole milk, room temperature
• 3 tablespoons butter, melted
• ½ cup grated smoked chedda

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 450*F and prepare your pan by spraying with oil (I used a traditional non-stick popover pan, but a muffin pan will work, but will not yield the same height)
2. Sift together cornmeal, flour, and salt
3. In a large bowl, whisk eggs and milk together vigorously until yolks are broken up and mixture is foaming
4. Continue whisking slowly, adding your cornmeal mixture slowly into the milk mixture
5. When mixture has the consistency of a thick (albeit lumpy) cream, stir in the butter
6. Allow to rest for 30 minutes
7. When resting is complete, spoon batter into prepared tins, about three-quarters full
8. Top with cheese
9. Bake for 20 minutes on 450*F, then reduce oven to 350*F and bake for an additional 17-20 minutes. During this time do not open the oven door until you have hit the 17-minute mark
10. When popovers have a solid center and the edges are crisp, remove from oven and allow to cool slightly before removing from pan
11. Immediately pierce sides with a knife to allow for steam to escape (this will prevent popovers from deflating)
12. Serve immediately for best tast

Note: I am fortunate enough to be a Bob's Red Mill brand ambassador this year and will be partnering with them more and more throughout the year. While Bob's Red Mill supplied the ingredient, coconut flour, for this post, all opinions are my own. Check out their website for more information on all the amazing products they have to offer!