Once upon a time there was.. French Butter Cookies

So.

We could make up some reasons we haven't been sharing our cute faces lately... like bluepigface disease or the whooping oink syndrome.... or we could pretend like our absence didn't happen and we have been blogging all of 2011.

We're going to go with the second choice.

Today, we present the fourth installment of our cookie extravaganza! French butter cookies.

For some reason, it never occurs to me that certain foods can be homemade.  Like circus peanuts.  

I only eat these wonderful cookies once a year, at Christmas time.  They come in a round tin and that is just how it is.  

So when I saw their recipe on Annie's Eats, my first reaction was confusion - it had really never occurred to me they could be made in a kitchen.  My second reaction, was, of course, I NEED TO MAKE THESE AND EAT THEM NOW.

If you are having the same train of thought, I recommend going with the second option. 

Cookie Extravaganza! Peanut Butter Surprise Cookies

You didn't really think our cookie extravaganza was only two kinds of cookies did you?  After I posted that picture of us sitting on top of a giant mountain of ingredients but then only followed up with two blog posts, did you wonder if we just posed like that for fun? And to tease you with the possibility of cookies?  Well fear not, castle farm cookbook blog readers, we have more cookies up our sleeves (if we had sleeves there would ALWAYS be cookies in them). 

We found this recipe in Taste of Home Best Loved Cookies magazine.  They are a peanut butter cookie with a surprise inside as you might have guessed by the name "peanut butter surprise cookies".  Although we like to keep surprises secret, it would be difficult to tell you how to bake these without telling you the surprise.  We would have to come up with some sort of elaborate plan where you tell us you are baking them and we sneak to your kitchen and add in the surprise ourselves.  

But since we are but two small farm animals, it seems much easier to just give away the surprise.  As long as you promise not to tell other people before they eat it.  Then, wait for them to take a bite, and yell "surprise!".  

So, do you promise to do this?

Chicken Piccata Recipe from the Castle Farm Cookbook

Oh, chicken piccata, how I love you. Before there was the castle farm cookbook, or even the castle farm, there was just a cow and a pig learning to cook. And one of the first things we learned to make was this delicious chicken piccata.

If you've never had chicken piccata before, you should know that chicken piccata is what cows dreams are made of (along with grass, grassy hills, grazing on grassy hills, mooing, and cute pigs).

Luckily, it's quite simple to make.

ingredients 

• 2 4-oz flat chicken breast peices
• some flour
• some salt, lemon pepper, and lemon peel
• 2 Tbsp butter
• 1/3 c. lemon juice
• 1/3 c. white wine
• pasta

* this gives us enough sauce to dip baguette in the leftover. If you want to make more or less of this easy recipe, just keep the proportion of lemon juice/wine even.

instructions

1. Put some flour in a shallow dish, sprinkle with seasonings. we never measure and are pretty liberal with the seasonings.
2. Dip chickens in the flour.
3. Melt butter in a skillet. cook chicken over medium-low heat until no longer pink.  See how pretty it is now?
4. Remove chicken from the skillet. add wine and lemon juice. stir, scraping up the bits, and bring to a simmer. let it simmer a minute or two.
5. Serve, by pouring sauce over chicken and pasta. garnish with parsley.

Yields: 2 servings

Perhaps now you can see this is why I dream about chicken piccata. It's really beautiful, isn't it?

Moo!

Cookie Extravaganza! White Chocolate Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies

I was trying to come up with a creative name for this cookie that wasn't such a mouthful. I did not come up with one. So these cookies with a long name will stay long-named.

We usually make just plain oatmeal cookies. (Although last year we added chocolate chips). The pig likes his oatmeal cookies to be slightly overbaked, hard, and crunchy, but no one else does. That means the pig ends up eating most of the oatmeal cookies. So we needed a new plan for our oatmeal cookies...

Cookie Extravaganza! S'mores Cookies

Wow.

There are two events worthy of a wow today:
1) These cookies.
2) This is also our 100th blog post!

Quick celebration for #2: yay!!!!

Back to #1: S'mores are one of the best treats ever created.  I really don't think you can go wrong when you combine marmallow, graham cracker, and chocolate.   Unless you combine them with like, asparagus. 

That would definitely be wrong.  Please don't defile chocolate like that. 

Anyway, when you combine s'mores ingredients with cookie ingredients, do you know what happens?  Magic.  It's like cookie-campfire-chocolate-childhood-gooey-delicious-magic.   

Let the 2nd Annual Cookie Extravaganza begin...

Yes, I know it's 10:45 PM.

Once upon a time there was... Crockpot Chicken Enchiladas

We have one more recipe left to share from our October Greek Week, but it's going to take a while to finish. Rather than leave you hanging again, we have a great simple recipe for crockpot chicken enchiladas.

We first discovered these at Samster Mommy - her recipe looked so delicious and easy that it inspired us to give it a try. We combined hers with the one on the enchilada can and some new ideas of our own to create this Castle Farm version. This is a really great weeknight recipe and it makes fantastic leftovers for lunch all week!