A Very Big "HIT"....oh yum!

Saltines, butter, brown sugar, chocolate...I've seen this recipe before many times in the past. It's a mock English Toffee type of thing. It always sounded good but I've resisted making it for some reason...perhaps it's the saltines that made me question whether or not it was worth the time.




The other day in a Facebook "comment" conversation I was having with my friend Michele and her friend Sandy, Michele was making these fantastic sounding neopolitan type cookies and had some concerns about how to go about cutting the dough. Sandy suggested that Michele take a look at an entry on the blog "Smitten Kitchen". I took a look at the blog and fell in love with it.


I clicked on the "candy" category and the first recipe I looked at was a recipe called "chocolate caramel crack(ers)". Check it out, I dare you. Okay....are you back now? How does it look? Great, right? Yeah, I thought so too.


You guessed it....I made it. I loved, loved, loved that it was made with Matzo Crackers and I actually had a box of them here on hand so I thought to myself, "what the heck". I had bought the Matzo for another recipe and only used a few sheets of it so what better way to use more of these?


This is the final product, all ready to be sealed up in an airtight container so not one little, precious bit of it becomes stale!

I pretty much followed the recipe to a T. The pan size it calls for does not correspond with what I ended up using and what the pictures in the blog appear to be using. I used a typical jelly roll/cookie sheet type of pan and with how many Matzo sheets (should "Matzo" be capitalized...hmmm...I don't know so I will keep doing it) it appeared the pan held in the blog pictures, it appears she used the same size pan as me. I was a bit worried there would not be enough toffee to go over it but it was all good...plenty of it.  I strongly recommend that you skip all oiling and buttering of pans and use her suggestion of lining the sheet with foil and then lining it with parchment paper.  Once these were ready to be pulled out of the pan and cut up they were 100% trouble free.


I used salted Matzo and salted butter so I skipped the sea salt step...good thing I did. The salt from the Matzo was just enough to give it that subtle saltiness that goes well with this kind of stuff. The toffee mixture boiled up nicely and smelled soooooo very good in the house. I had no problems at all with the baking part of it...however, I did forget to set the timer so I probably did not have it in there as long as 15 minutes fearing that I would overcook it. My end result does indicate that it could have probably cooked just a few more minutes....there's just a bit of chewiness where the toffee is thicker...it's still good, mind you...it's just not the completely crunchy, melt in your mouth toffee like you get where it's a little thinner. I used toasted pecans for the top because it's what I had. I was able to toast them in a frying pan while I was waiting for the toffee mixture to boil so it was no problem at all to take that extra step...I think it's always worth it to give your nuts a toasting....the flavor is so much more for that few minutes work.


I am happy I made this but on the other hand, it's just one more of those very easy to do type of recipes that you can whip up in a small amount of time and that you can seriously overindulge with in about the same time it takes to pull it together. It's dangerous stuff, I tell ya, but definitely one of those things to make if you need to bring a dessert/baked good somewhere...you can have your few pieces and get it OUT of the house!!

 

Yummy Chicken Burgers

I've been eating ground chicken for a very long time. I never got used to ground turkey....something about it always weirded me out. Always seemed to be a bit of gristle or bone in it...blech. I had the same fears about the chicken but found it to be, in my opinion of course, 100% better than ground turkey. Now, my husband does not feel the same way at all. He will eat it but does not love it. I know he'd much rather NOT be having it. So, when my son broke the news to him last nite we were having chicken burgers, he suggested I do something "good" with them. I think they are "good" on their own but I was in the mood to be creative so I set out to look for a recipe.


I ended up taking a few ideas and mixing them together. I saw a recipe for a garlic rosemary chicken burger and a recipe for a Cordon Bleu chicken burger that both sounded good. I decided to mix it up and do both on my own.


Here's what I used:

~1 pound Perdue ground chicken (not the ground chicken breast but I am sure that would have been great as well)
~dried rosemary
~crushed garlic (I used Trader Joe's jarred....love this stuff)
~sea salt
~pepper
~deli ham
~Swiss cheese (I used Finlandia light Swiss)

As you may have noticed, I have no measurements for anything. I don't measure too much when I cook. Rather, I tend to just put what looks good in. This is hard to retell as a recipe of course, and hard to remember what I did if it turns out great and I want to do it again but I just can't bring myself to do it when I cook. When I bake, I do it faithfully for fear that the recipe will not turn out properly...but cooking, nah...I wing it!

So...on to what I did.

I made 3 burgers out of the pound because there were 3 of us eating. I am guessing it would work for 4 burgers, you'd just have to be aware of the thickness and size as you shape the burgers. 

I put the chicken in a bowl and put in the salt (about 1 tsp), pepper (about 1/2 tsp), garlic (about 1.5-2 tsps) and the rosemary (about 1 tbsp). I mixed this all together and let it sit while I got the ham and cheese ready.

I was afraid of cheese seepage if I was going to stuff these burgers with the ham and cheese as I had wanted to. What I did to lessen the chance of seepage was this....I cut each cheese slice into quarters. I laid the each piece of ham out on the counter and in the middle of each piece I put the cheese...all 4 quarters stacked on top of each other. I then folded the top of the ham down over the cheese, folded the left side over, folded the right hand side over and then the bottom up. Now the cheese was all wrapped up in the ham like a little package.

The chicken had gotten quite sticky as I mixed it with the other ingredients. I was trying to figure out how on earth I was going to make 6 thin patties and assemble them without a disaster on my hands. This is what I ended up doing and it worked out wonderfully....I divided up the chicken in 3 equal portions. I tend to get a bit obsessive about things being even so I did this with a scale. I then took each third and divided it in half, again with the scale...now that I type this I realize I could have just used the scale the first time to divide it into 6 portions but it was a process and I wasn't quite sure where I was going with it all at the time!!! Okay...so, take 1/6 of the chicken and pat it out onto the frying pan into a thin, burger sized layer. Next, take your lovely ham/Swiss cheese package and put it in the middle of the patty. Take another 1/6 of the chicken and put it on top of the package and pat it out and around the package to meet up with the patty underneath and press a bit to seal then push in the flattened edges a bit so it's all one uniform thickness...make sense? I hope so. I hadn't intended on blogging about this so I didn't take any picture to demonstrate. It should not be taller in the middle than it is on the edges where you sealed it...I wanted it an even thickness for more even cooking. Repeat with the rest and cook over a fairly high heat, medium high maybe, until all is done.

Like I said, hadn't intended on blogging at all about these but I keep thinking of them today, the day after I made them, and really want to make them again so I figured it was worth sharing.