Peanutty Cookies

More often than I would expect I am faced with this question: when invited to Sunday brunch, what should I bring?

Lucky for me that Betty's Green Box has the answer in the form of a "Family Breakfast Brightener" (it said so, right on the card). Peanut Butter Chews. There were two attractions for me. The first is that the main ingredient was four cups of Wheaties. That's right, the main ingredient in a cookie is a cereal, and not even rice krispies or cookie crisps or something. Nope. The main ingredient for this cookie would be flakes of vitamin fortified wheat. Well played General Mills, getting me to buy another one of your breakfast cereals

The second is that the recipe called for using four egg whites- and I love taking any excuse I can get to use my neon green egg separator.


This recipe was the easiest yet, and only required four ingredients, of which I had 3 on hand. Sugar (done), peanut butter (also done), eggs (yup), and Wheaties (no way no how do I eat these for breakfast, although as far as I can tell, if I did I would now be an Olympic athlete. Bygones).


All that was required for this was beating the egg whites, adding the sugar, mixing more, then folding in the Wheaties and the peanut butter. All done in about 10 minutes, maybe even less.


The hardest part was trying to get the peanut butter and the Wheaties to mix without pulverizing the Wheaties.


Then I just dropped the egg coated Wheaties mixture onto baking sheets and baked them at 375 for 14 minutes, and viola. Vitamin fortified peanut buttery cookies. Weird.


So, they cookies actually tasted pretty good. Not great, but good. They were very peanut buttery and incredibly chewy. I thought too chewy, but other people disagreed. Which reminds me- this was the first time I've subjected anyone but Nicole (who cooked all of the other recipes with me) to the end product of a Green Box creation. People were eating the cookies and gave them generally positive reviews.

So, would I make these again? Not really. For a brunch I'll stick to bringing a carton of orange juice and some champagne. For cookies I'll stick to chocolate chip or just a regular peanut butter cookie, but for a lark, these were pretty good. And vitamin infused.

Beef With Chinese Vegitables

This time Nicole and I decided to try out the Beef With Chinese Vegetables recipe from the Green Box. The key attraction for making this recipe is that it involved using Hamburger Helper. Right there on the card- "1 package Hamburger Helper beef noodle dinner." Yup. Apparently buying noodles and beef broth would have been too complicated. Also too complicated, would be making the noodles separate and mixing in the beef. Personally, I have never had Hamburger Helper before, so this was all new territory for me.

This whole deal was really simple. It involved a pound of beef, a can of Chinese vegetables, a can of water chestnuts, and some onion. Really, this was gussied up Hamburger Helper for when you have gotten bored of just eating the Hamburger Helper straight up.

Unlike the tuna ring, this was fairly simple. Chop up some onions, brown the beef, dump everything else together, throw in some water and let it boil for 10-15 minutes. Easy enough, right?







Here's everything mixed together. The only issue was that the water just did not seem to be boiling. In fact nothing was really hot at all.











Because I turned off the burner.


I am a genius.


Here it is back on.


Within a minute of turning the burner back on things were boiling. The directions said to boil for 10-15 minutes, but it was still really watery, so we let it go for twenty. Even though it was still watery we decided it was time to serve it. As on the card, I had snap peas on the side. The card also showed it being served with melon balls, but I substituted dark chocolate Easter M&M's with peanuts. Delicious.

So how was it? First of all, the color was kind of disturbing. It was just very brown and boring. There was no color whatsoever.

That is exactly how it tasted. There was almost no taste. The texture was also pretty unpleasant. It was like eating bland dog food. Strangely enough, we were eating a processed food that actually needed a little bit more salt. Very disturbing. Then, it just tasted like dog food with salt. Yum. I feel bad for the early 1970's family that was served this. I think that if I had tried to feed this to my family for dinner the night it would have been a pizza night.

So, I rate this recipe a big fat FAIL.

This will most likely be the end of my time with Hamburger Helper. Sorry, Betty.