Random Cookbook of the Week - Mariners Cookie Book

For a couple of years at the turn of this century, back when the Mariners were a good baseball team, the Mariners Wives put together an annual cookbook to raise money for worthy local causes. 2002's entry was The Cookie Book.

Each player and his family and a good chunk of the coaches, front office, and broadcast team provided a recipe. The result is like any other community collection cookbook, just with better photography and production values than most of the ilk. Most of the recipes were familiar to me from my lifetime of bake sales and potlucks, and I chose to try one my mom used to make all the time:

Chocolate "No Bake" Cookies
(Submitted by RH pitcher James Baldwin, now retired from the MLB and serving as pitching coach at a North Carolina high school. His son, who looks maybe 10 in the photo in the cookbook, was drafted by the Dodgers in 2010.)

1/4 cup margarine (I used butter)
2 c. granulated sugar
1/2 c. milk
3 T cocoa
1 t vanilla extract
1/2 c. peanut butter
3 c. quick oats

In a medium saucepan mix margarine, sugar, milk, and cocoa and bring to a boil. Stir constantly. Boil for one minute. Remove from heat. Add vanilla and peanut butter. Mix well. Add oatmeal and mix well. Drop by the spoonful onto waxed paper. Cool. Makes 3 dozen.

Simple, tasty, and nostalgic, at least for me. And my coworkers mowed through them in a hurry when I brought them in to the office Tuesday. 

52 Cookbooks - Week 8 & 9

Just a quick post to catch up on the last two weeks of 52 Cookbooks:

The week before last I drew The New Covent Garden Soup Company's Book of Soups, a cookbook Mr. Fraser bought the year we lived in England (we met there, started dating within a month or two, and got married a year after returning to the States and nearly two years to the day after we met). To get into the proper spirit of the thing, I made their vegetable stock despite certain oddities of ingredient. (Lettuce? Cooked? In a stock? Really?) And I'm glad I did. It gave the resulting soups a freshness and lightness you just don't get with canned stock.

I first made Cheese Soup with Crispy Bacon, which was every bit as yummy as it sounds, but nowhere near as heavy:



Since I had plenty of stock left over, I made their herbed cream of chicken soup and served it alongside a pesto bread recipe (bruschetta, basically) from my Week 9 cookbook, Starters and Closers, the Mariners' wives charity fundraiser cookbook from the 2001 season--i.e. back when we had a really good team. (Though that 116-win season is a lot less glorious in retrospect, since we weren't able to follow it up with a championship and have been wallowing in futility since 2004. But I digress.) Anyway, I decided to make one "starter"--the appetizer pesto bread--and one "closer"--Mike Cameron's contribution to the dessert section, cinnamon-dipped marshmallows baked inside crescent rolls. I thought they were kinda gross, but my husband and daughter ate them all.