Not Quite Nutter Butters

So honestly, I forgot I made these cookies a couple of weekends ago. I was getting over being sick and still in that weird fog. I remembered that I made some Ramen recipe that failed, but figured that was it and didn't have any new recipes to upload. Silly me.

Well, I made these knock off Nutter Butters. My throat was all sore so they went down pretty rough, and with all the struggles I had I concluded they weren't very good. But I think my problem was that I was eating them warm, hence expecting them to be soft and gooey. Generally I like my cookies that way, but once you've refrigerated these cookies they are excellent all crunchy-like.

Tom liked them despite his sore throat as well, and his mom even went back for seconds even though she barely eats sweets. So, hopefully you kept reading my rambling and realized I've concluded that this is a great recipe, because otherwise it would just seem silly for me to put up a bad recipe. (Don't worry, I delete those off my hard drive.)

I had to modify this recipe a bit, but I originally found it here.

Cookies:
1 stick butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup instant oats
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup peanut butter
1 1/4 all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

Filling:
1/2 stick butter
4 tbsp powdered sugar
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Melt a half stick of butter in a medium skillet. Reduce heat to medium-low and add the oats to the pan. Stir in the vanilla extract. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring constantly so the oats do not burn. Your oats should be slightly toasted. In a medium sized bowl, mix the flour, baking soda and salt together. Set aside. In a mixer, cream the other half stick of butter. Slowly mix in the sugars, and then the peanut butter. Add the flour mixture and set the mixer on slow until the batter becomes the consistency of dough. Add more flour if necessary. Roll the dough into 1 inch balls and place on a greased cookie sheet. Flatten each cookie with the back of a fork. Bake the cookies for 15-20 minutes. While the cookies are in the oven, prepare the filling. In a mixer combine   the butter and salt until the butter is creamy. Add the peanut butter and sugar and combine. Once the cookies have cooled, assemble two cookies with the filling in between. (Or if you in your sick haze make the cookies way too thick, you can just spread the filling on top of each cookie.)

Acorn Squash with Brown Sugar and Bacon

This autumn day is probably one of the final weekend days of the year where it was in the 60s, perfect in my mind for a final grilling. Today Tom and I decided to combine seasonal foods with summer-style cooking. First up was this incredible recipe I found here for acorn squash. I love acorn squash. I need to find more recipes using it. I guess I never really thought about it before, but I really do love fall produce.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. Here's the recipe. I wish I could have gotten a better picture; acorn squash is such an interesting vegetable to look at. But I forgot my camera. This is why I'm getting a little digital camera for Christmas, right? (hint hint)

I apologize for the quality of this photo, this is from a camera phone.

1 acorn squash

2 slices of bacon

1 1/2 tbsp butter

1/2 cup brown sugar

salt and pepper to taste

makes 2 servings

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with tin foil. Halve the acorn squash and scoop out the seeds. (You can salt and cook the seeds along with your squash, that's what we did!) Poke holes in the inside so that the flavor can soak in as much as possible. Melt some of the butter and paint the skin side with it. Add the rest of the butter to the scooped out part of the squash. Place the halves on the baking sheet, and add 1/4 cup of brown sugar and top with a slice of bacon on each side. Bake for 40 minutes. We then threw it on the grill to get the bacon crispy, but you can obviously skip this step. Just cook it until the yellow part is relatively soft. 

If you're health conscious you can always skip the bacon. Then you'd just have a sweet side. This also makes a great appetizer. Or, if you make a whole squash for yourself you can have it as a meal. 

My only problem with this recipe was how to eat it. I wish that recipe instructions also gave eating instructions sometimes. I wasn't sure if I should just chop it up and eat the bacon last, scoop out the inside, or what. I ended up just scooping out the yellow part and forgetting about the skin (though you can definitely eat that too!) and then eating the bacon by itself. The bacon had a nice sweet flavor to it, and the squash was very 

yummy! I totally suggest considering this if you are trying to plan Thanksgiving sides.