Outrageous Chocolate Cookies and Potato Soup



Smiley: my ever-present
kitchen helper

It's week 2 of my 52 Weeks of cookies!  This past Friday, I made Outrageous Chocolate Cookies to share with our friends at co-op.  I followed a pin to this blog post, which had a recipe link to here, for these deliciously rich cookies.  They were good, and gone fast!  I made them and hurried out the door, so I didn't get a picture of the finished product.  I didn't have chocolate chunks, so I used 2 cups of chocolate chips instead, and I used 1 1/3 cups of chocolate chips for the semi-sweet chocolate.  I buy them in bulk from Sam's Club.  Also, it turned out, that I was out of brown sugar, so I used 3/4 cup of regular sugar and a tablespoon of molasses.  Smiley helped me make them.  She scooped the dough, which was more like brownie batter onto the pans to put in the oven. 

Smiley was tickled at the shapes of her cookies.
It took a lot of self control for her not to lick her
fingers until she was finished!

Last night, soccer was cancelled due to a torrential rain, so, I stayed home and made potato soup.  It was the perfect weather for it!  Sadly, it is a crock pot recipe, but my crock pot died, and has not been replaced yet.  Thankfully, she gave suggestions for cooking it without one.  I made adaptations, of course, because I always do.  The last time I asked Bru Crew Dad to get potatoes at the store, he bought a 5 lb. bag of yellow potatoes.  (Isn't he a gem to go shopping for me?  I just have to remember to be more specific!)  Since the meal I needed them for required baking potatoes, I wondered what to do with these.  Soup was the perfect thing!  I peeled most of the 5 lb. of potatoes.  We have discovered that we like the skin in our potato stuff, so I left a couple with skin that I just scrubbed well.  I also used 3 qt. of stock, 2 cans of cream of chicken and a can of cream of mushroom.  I was out of onions, so I used a Tbs. of dehydrated onion, and a tsp. of onion powder.  I doubled the pepper and garlic powder.  I cooked my diced potatoes for about 30 minutes, added my cans of soup in, then divided it in half.  We had half for dinner and froze half for another night.  I returned it to the stove to warm the cream soups through and melt the cream cheese.  (Shh!  Don't tell Little Man that I put cream cheese in it!)  Each of the kids ate thirds!  Yum!