Recipe

This funny sounding cookie is believed to have originated in New England in the 1800’s. So not only did your grandma likely eat these cookies, but your great-great-great grandma may have had them too! Supposedly the older recipes used cream of tartar and to make the cookies rise, while the newer recipes just use baking powder. In keeping with tradition, these cookies use cream of tartar.

Typically snickerdoodles are made with cinnamon, but this recipe also has ginger and nutmeg for an additional kick of fall spices. They’re soft and cakelike with a slight, buttery tang. These are perfect with a glass of cold milk. They also taste amazing dunked in milk!

Three Spice Snickerdoodles

Yield

4-6 Servings

Cooking Time

30 Minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Ingredients

1 1/4 Cup Cane Sugar
1 Cup Butter
2 eggs
1/4 tsp Salt
1 tsp Ground Cinnamon
2 3/4 Cup Unbleached White Flour
1 tsp Cream of Tartar
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1 tsp Vanilla
3 Tbsp Cane Sugar
2 tsp Ground Cinnamon
1 tsp Ground Ginger
1/8 tsp Ground Nutmeg

Directions

Preheat oven to 325. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper if desired. This makes for a much easier clean up!
Combine sugar, butter and vanilla and mix until smooth, about 1 minute.
Add the rest of the ingredients, except the flour and mix until well incorporated.
Add the flour in two or three batches to prevent a huge flour cloud as you mix.
Combine the sugar and spices together in a small bowl for the coating.
Using your hands, roll the cookie dough into golf size balls, then roll in the coating mixture.
These cookies don’t spread very much, so they can be placed fairly close together on the cookie sheets.
Use a fork to flatten the tops of the cookies.
Bake for 7-9 minutes. The less time in the oven, the chewier they’ll be.
Remove from tray immediately and cool on a wire rack. These are delicious warm, but also after they’ve sat for a few days and dunked in a glass of milk.

Recipe courtesy of Jamie Larrison – Jamie teaches elementary art to the family she is nanny for. She has an adorable little boy and a wonderful husband. She attended Grace College for education and journalism and is currently working on a Master Herbalist certification. The Herbal Spoon

This set-it-and-forget-it crockpot meal is sure to please the guys in particular this fall. But then who doesn’t enjoy a hot steaming bowl of comforting chili on a cool night! In a nutshell all you do here is brown the meat on the stove, add the remaining ingredients and pour into your slow cooker. Then turn it on and when you get back home you’ll have a hot meal at the ready. Just make a buttered veggie and add rice or a good bread on side and you’re done!

Two Meat Crockpot Chili

Yield

4-6 Servings

Prep Time

20 Minutes

Cooking Time

5-6 Hours

Difficulty

Easy

Ingredients

1 lb Ground Beef
1 lb Ground Pork
2 tbsp Chili Powder
1 tbsp Paprika Powder (Hot Hungarian is best)
1 tbsp Garlic Powder
1 tsp Ground Ginger
1 tbsp Flax Seed Meal ((optional))
1 tbsp Chia Seeds ((optional))
1 tbsp Butter (Coconut Oil is fine too)
1 Large Onion (Chopped coarsely)
1 Medium Green Bell Pepper
1-2 Small Hot Red Peppers ((optional))
1 15oz Can Tomato Sauce
1 28oz Can Diced Tomatoes
2 Cups Chopped Carrots

Brown the ground meats in a large cast iron skillet, over medium heat, in the oil, butter or ghee.
Once browned, drain off any excess fat, and add in all of the spices and flax meal.
Mix together, and add in the diced tomatoes and fresh vegetables, thoroughly incorporate all ingredients.
Pour the contents of the cast iron skillet into your large crock pot.
Add in the tomato sauce and chia seeds, and thoroughly mix together.
Cook in the crock pot on low for 5-6 hours

Nothing says fall than the smell of apples and cinnamon. It makes the entire house smell warm and comforting.

These ‘baked’ apples are simple, throw it all in the crock pot and have a fresh warm dessert ready at dinnertime. Served with vanilla ice cream, it’s like apple pie with out the crust. This recipe from Jessica at Simply Healthy Home show how just how simple and easy real food can be!

Jessica’s family also loves these apples mixed into a bowl of oatmeal for a warm breakfast.

Crockpot Baked Apples

Yield

4-6 Servings

Prep Time

5 minutes

Cooking Time

4 Hours

Difficulty

Easy

Ingredients

6 Apples (Peeled, cored and cut in half)
1 tbsp Lemon Juice
3 tbsp butter
4 tbsp Sugar
2 tsp Cinnamon

Directions

Add all ingredients in the crock pot and cook on low for four hours. Serve warm.

Is this the stuff of nightmares for you? You spot a mouth watering recipe on Pinterest. It’s from scratch, a real, real-food recipe so you’re pretty excited! Your gonna make this one yourself! You go to the store, get the stuff, come back and start working but that beautiful recipe turns out like this:

Pretty discouraging, huh? We’ve all done it! In fact I shared one of my recipe fails in this post with the successful healthy white cake post coming one week later 🙂 . (Sorry ladies, but I lost those posts!)

The question is, if you’re new to cooking from scratch just how do you minimize these kinds of epic failures?

If you don’t know what it is you don’t know, then how can you pick a good recipe to follow that you’re likely to be successful with? Step 2 in The Granny Plan has you picking a recipe to make for dinner … but how do you do that when you don’t know a hard recipe from an easy one?

Let’s go over a few guiding principles that can help ensure success!

Stick with recipes with Common Ingredients

Choose recipes with simple ordinary common ingredients for the most part. It’s much tougher to start making real foods with substitute ingredients like coconut flour for instance. The properties of these substitute ingredients can be very different from the item they are replacing and are often tricky to deal with. Stick with the basics. Stuff Granny would have had on hand and leave the more difficult substitutions for later, if you want to do them at all. If it contains ingredients that wouldn’t have been available in a 1930 general store skip it for now.

Choose Recipes with Minimal Ingredients

Some recipes have an ingredient list as long as your arm! Avoid these for the most part. While I’m sure many are delicious it’s trickier to remember if you added the ginger or the cinnamon yet when you have a loooonnnggg list of ingredients. This leads to forgetting ingredients entirely or doubling them up. This is how you end up with stuffing that positively reaks of sage … confession, guilty ;-). Plus, you need to have a fuller pantry to be ready for these recipes making keeping the kitchen ready for cooking tougher.

Stick to the Recipe!

I know it’s hard to imagine now but the ultimate goal of Granny cooking is to get to an experience level where you no longer need a recipe to manage in the kitchen. Until then though stick to the recipe! You can think of recipes as a sort of kitchen training wheels designed to help ensure your success. After you repeated the recipe many times and mastered it you can start to make adjustments.

So in choosing a recipe pick one you don’t need to make any adjustments to. Don’t pick something with eggs in it if you know little Johnny can’t eat eggs. Pick something without any eggs instead. Leave learning how to do substitutions for later.

Choose Recipes with Minimal Monitoring

Avoid recipes that have you standing over the stove stirring for 20 minutes straight. Avoid recipes that require you do something critical at just the right moment, say when the onions look just a certain way, or the top of the dish feels spongy, or, well you get the picture 😉 . Ideally pick things that can be made quickly or can be left to cook slowly on their own for a set amount of time.

Some things are Much Harder Than Others – Save Them for When You Have Experience

Many of the things we’re avoiding here aren’t a problem for more experienced cooks. Still, they often avoid these kinds of recipes because they require a greater degree of attention than the average household cook can give on any average day. So maybe they’re saved for the holidays or slow cozy days at home where the extra cooking can feel relaxing.

Basically, avoid making things that are viewed as moderately difficult to really hard. Avoid cakes, souffles, aspics, croussants, sourdough or bread in general and pastry too. Absolutely avoid baked alaska, paella, and beef wellington, as if you had thought about making them 😉 .

You’ll find the ideas in this post helpful when working thru the steps in the book The Granny Plan. In it Granny will walk you thru 12 babysteps to building a strong kitchen routine that makes everyday home cooking possible.

Three Spice Snickerdoodles

Three Spice Snickerdoodles

Ingredients

Directions

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