Friday, May 16, 2014

Friday Night's Sausage & Sprouts and Chocolate Chip Cookies

Today was an absolutely gorgeous day. It was bright, sunny, breezy and it only got up to 68 degrees! It's going down to 48 degrees tonight! What a nice change from the unseasonably warm, humid and rainy days we've had recently. This evening I kept dinner super simple because we wanted to make our Costco run tonight since we are taking my car in for service in the morning. The first thing I did when I got home was make a batch of my Chocolate Chip Cookie dough. It's been a while since I've made them and I wanted to have them on hand for the weekend. I usually use Green & Black's 70% or 85% chocolate bar that I chop up with a knife to use as the chocolate chips. Recently though, I've been on a major "Endangered Species" 88% chocolate bar jag. Well, does having 42 bars in my stock count as a jag...or an obsession? I'll let you be the judge! LOL For any of you that might have a Kroger in your area, they are currently on sale there for half price. I've never seen that kind of sale on these before...so I just HAD to stock up. They are significantly lower in sugar than many other dark chocolate bars. One half of one of these 3-ounce bars only has 5 grams of sugar (10 grams for the entire bar). I used one of these as the chips for making 24 cookies...only 10 grams of sugar for the chocolate in 24 cookies! I scooped these with a 1 tablespoon-sized retractable scoop (slightly mounded). If you like more smooth "perfect" looking cookies, you can gently roll them into smoother balls by hand. This link will take you to the recipe and let you see what the smooth rolled cookies look like: Chocolate Chip Cookies.

After making the dough, I placed 1 dozen cookies in the oven to bake and refrigerated the remaining half of dough to make later this weekend. While the cookies were baking, I made my quick Sausage & Sprouts by grilling the Aidells Chicken & Apple Sausage links and steaming fresh Brussels sprouts that I had trimmed and halved. Since I had some red cabbage in the fridge, I sliced up some of that too. I sliced the grilled sausages, then lightly steamed and sauteed the sprouts in some butter and olive oil and tossed in the very lightly steamed shredded red cabbage. It was a super quick dinner that I put together while the cookies baked. Shortly after hubby got home I had a delicious dinner and home made cookies on the table. After dinner we ran to Costco and did our shopping. I snapped a few photos of our dinner below. Enjoy!




Ready for the oven...
Dough is ready to be baked...
Well stocked or obsessed?

Fresh out of the oven...
Now I'm ready for the weekend!  :-)
Here's a peek at my little herb garden outside my backdoor...oregano, thyme, rosemary and flat leaf parsley

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Made the cookies and they are awesome. My husband and son loved them, couldn't stop eating them. Thank you for cooking and sharing. Your recipes are making this way of life possible for me.

Gourmet Girl Cooks said...

Hi Elizabeth,

Thanks so much for the kind words and happy if my recipes help you out along the way! That's awesome that both your son and husband liked them, too! I actually just had a cookie with my lunch this afternoon! I baked half of the batch a few days ago and will bake the remaining half of the dough again this evening! Glad you are enjoying them. :-)