We need a chicken...the weekend of 2.5 dozen eggs.

What...a ridiculous amount of cooking this weekend.  It started with a suggestion from a friend at home to replicate the Girl Scout's Samoa/Caramel De Lite cookie.  Having made the Do-Si-Do before, I thought this was a fantastic idea but clearly too simple to just do one.  So Rebecca & I picked out 5 recipes to make our own Girl Scout cookies.  None of them were hard...but just a lot of steps.

The Do-Si-Dos are peanut butter oatmeal cookies with a creamy peanut filling in the middle.  And since peanut butter = joy, Tagalongs were also necessary.  Shortbread like cookie crust, peanut butter filling, and dipped in chocolate.  We learned that dipping things in chocolate meant that there is chocolate all over the house, in inexplicable locations.  Same goes for the Thin Mints - which these little jewels spread out more than so we had some larger thin mints and then a redo of smaller ones, then dipped in chocolate.  The Shortbread were pretty boring.  I saw Rebecca yawn when she was making them.  And the Samoas....wow.  SUCH a pain. Bake cookie.  Roll dough.  Cut out shapes.  Bake.  Cool.  Toast coconut.  Make sauce.  Spread coconut sauce on cookies (and try not to break them all).  Chill.  Dip bottoms in chocolate.  Chill.  Drizzle chocolate on top (this is Rebecca's job).  Eat broken chunks. So so so good.  Those little boxes of cookies are worth more than the $4 (for California) or $3.50 (Michigan).  Here's the whole collection - a three day project involving a really gross amount of butter, sugar, peanut butter, and chocolate.

And then we deep fried them all.   Pancake batter & some powdered sugar...

Now THAT was a great idea.  It actually started when Rebecca got the deep fryer out to make tots.  Tots are good.  Tots are good with ketchup.  Tots are good with cream cheese.  Tots are good with honey mustard.  Tots are goooooood.  Of course it also meant deep frying the skins from the potatoes, a spiral cut potato, and asparagus.  And the aforementioned Girl Scout cookies.  And some random candy in the house. :)

And then there was the Eggs Benedict.  Two challenges in one:  hollandaise sauce and homemade English Muffins.  This was pretty easy actually.  The muffins are AWESOME - and put my iron skillet to work for the first time in the 2+ years I've had it.  The hollandaise recipe was my mom's, which was from Betty Crocker, but that Betty knows what she's doing.  Add some seared ham and a poached egg, and some asparagus so we can get our greens (and justify another vehicle for the hollandaise)...and here's our Sunday dinner!

I even toasted one muffin and put peanut butter on it, just to make sure it was worthy.  It was.

There was numerous other random projects in the kitchen this weekend.  Crusty country bread made by Rebecca in her magic stand mixer and even put in the oven with a big wooden paddle.  And my white chicken chili, affectionately known as "Chickli".  I could try to write out the recipe but it's just in my head and I don't measure so if you made it, it wouldn't be as good.  Here's the bread & chili....very comfy food!

We are both sick of the kitchen right now, mainly because the dishwasher isn't big enough, there's chocolate crusted everywhere, and everything smells like the deep fryer.  Tomorrow we will both likely be eating cereal for dinner.  Deep fried.  With hollandaise.