Cherry Spice Cookies

I have a few dried cherries left from a bag of dried Michigan cherries we bought.  I wanted to make some sort of cookies with them, and this recipe is what I ended up with.  I found a recipe online that sounded about right and then altered it to suit what I was going for, which included adding rum-soaked cherries.  Below is the final recipe.  These cookies are lightly spiced, and if you want lots of spice, you can double the amounts of cinnamon and ginger.  Another option is to use some other type of dried fruit, such as cranberries, or even some chopped up dried apricots.

Cherry Spice Cookies

2 T rum (or other liquor)
1/4 c dried cherries, roughly chopped (or other dried fruit)
2/3 c canola oil (or other neutral veggie oil)
1/2 c sugar, plus extra
1/2 c brown sugar
2 T honey
1 egg
2 c flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp salt

Pour rum over dried cherries in small bowl and allow to soak at least 10 minutes (up to a few hours for stronger flavor).  In large bowl, beat oil, sugars, honey, and egg until well mixed.  In separate bowl, stir together flour, baking powder, and seasonings.  Sift flour mixture ove wet ingredients.  Add cherries.  Stir batter until just combined.

Add extra sugar to shallow bowl or plate.  Make balls of batter about an inch to inch and a half wide, and roll balls in sugar.  Place on baking sheet (sprayed with nonstick spray) about 2 inches apart.  Bake at 375 for 14-16 minutes or until edges just barely start to get golden.  Allow to cool a few minutes on the baking sheet before transferring to a cooling rack.

I hope you like my cookie recipe.  Happy holiday baking!

Blue Cheese Fritters And Stoplights

My sister might remember this, I don't know.  Long, long ago, she took me out to the tapas restaurant in Grand Rapids and then out to a few bars for my b-day.  My TWENTY-FIRST b-day.  Oh yeah.  Par-tay.  We had a few drinks.  I remember few things from that night, partially because it was quite a long time ago .  I remember having a shot called a stoplight at one point.  I vaguely remember running into some old high school classmates (that I wasn't even really friends with in hs) and to their astonishment, suddenly asking them for a cigarette for some reason (we'll blame that one on the stoplight).  Yeah, it was an interesting night.  But despite all that silliness, after a decade and a half, I clearly remember the blue cheese fritters we had at the tapas restaurant for dinner.

I love cheese. I love blue cheese.  And I've certainly had blue cheese in various forms in my possession many times over the last 15 years.  But for some reason I've never gotten around to trying my hand at making homemade blue cheese fritters, despite intending to all that time.  I really don't know why I never tried to make them.  Well, last night I finally did.  I had a little blue cheese in the house, and I was cooking, and I thought, 'hey, I could try to make those fritters I once had'.

I didn't use all blue cheese for the filling.  I used about half blue cheese crumbles and half shredded mozzarella.  I grated a little bit of onion into the batter.  I used a tiny bit of flour - a mixutre of chickpea flour and regular flour - with a tiny bit of egg to bind it.  Salt and pepper too, of course.  I added just enough egg until it seemed wet enough to hold together.  I formed little balls and then rolled the balls out to make oblong shapes, and refrigerated them until they were nice and firm so that I could coat and fry them without them melting everywhere.

I wanted the coating to be crisp, so I used panko.  I coated the fritters in more chickpea flour first, then egg, then the panko.  When they were fried, a few did actually melt a little out of the coating, but mostly they held together fine. 

I surprised Dan with my creation, and he and I both enjoyed the fritters while we watched a rerun of Big Bang Theory.  I had a spicy cherry sauce that I'd made to go with something else that also went fine with the fritters, but what really went well with them was a little balsamic glaze that I happened to have.  The vinegary tang really offset the richness and earthiness of the blue cheese. 

I can't believe it's been so long since I turned twenty-one.  I'm an old geezer.  But I'm an old geezer with lefttover blue cheese fritters in the fridge!!  Yum!

Happy eating!