paleo mocha chocolate chip cookies

For the last few years, I’ve been participating in a cookie exchange with the same group of girls — past and present soccer teammates who have become good friends. And while I love catching up with them, I have to admit, it’s become a biz (yeah, that’s short for biznatch) coming up with a new recipe each year to top the previous year’s cookie.

This year, I went with the cookies I made for my fantasy football draft a few years back. In searching for an idea, though, I realized I don’t have all that many cookie recipes on here, so here’s a new one — paleo mocha chocolate chip cookies.

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tbt: Mike’s Pastry

Doing the Throwback Thursday thing to my visit to Mike’s Pastry in Boston.

I never go anywhere, so I pretend my business trips are vacations and hit every local famous food place I can in between work obligations. Obviously, I got some chowdah (I learned during my Fenway tour that “r” is a foreign concept there) and a lobstah roll, which was my favorite meal of the week, but a friend insisted I get a cannoli from Mike’s Pastry in the North End — a place known for its Italian food.

what a crock

Over my handful of years in the kitchen, I have accumulated a lot of appliances — some the greatest ever created (KitchenAid mixer <3), and some that collect dust in the back of my cabinet (I’m looking at you, quesadilla maker). The appliance I always wanted but never had? The Crock Pot. That one time I entered a chili cook off, I had to borrow one from my friend Christina down the street. (Carrying the slow cooker home was a lot less embarrassing than the time I noisily wheeled her vacuum up and down the sidewalk.) I said a Crock Pot would be my housewarming gift to myself, but all those stupid things you have to buy when you move to a new place because my “gift,” and the Crock Pot lust fell by the wayside.

ya make me wanna soup

The temperatures are starting to dip here in the northeast, and it’s only a matter of time before people start getting sick. Not Ebola sick (calm down, everyone), but, like, sniffles sick. The last time I was feeling under the weather, I happened to have some fresh ginger in my fridge and found a recipe for a paleo ginger carrot soup that also utilized the spare pound of baby carrots in my fridge. Didn’t even have to leave the house for ingredients, which was fortunate because I was looking scarier than Twisty the Clown.

I love it when a plan[tain] comes together

Sometimes I’m so excited about my food, I refuse to accept it is unphotogenic. That’s pretty much what happened with this creation: a chipotle turkey burger with bacon, caramelized onions and fresh guac on a plantain bun. It’s like when you’re defending a girl you’re dating to your friends who are judgingly flipping through her Facebook pictures — trust me when I say it was way better looking in person.

For such a seemingly complex dish, the most difficult part was not burning the shiz out of my onions like I always seem to do whilst caramelizing. Some people might say I’m not the most patient person… and that also applies to caramelizing onions. For the sake of the dish, I curbed my impatience best I could and focused on the other elements, like this newfound plantain bun.

on Sunday morning

This weekend, we held a surprise retirement party for my dad, who’s retiring early and moving to NC to play golf all day, erryday. In catching up with family friends whom I have not seen in years, I got a lot of questions about whether or not I’m still writing — for work (barely) or in my blog (embarrassingly little). It is one of those things I think about almost on a daily basis, but life has been flying by — more so this year than ever before — and so many things have been pushed aside if they are not of the utmost priority.