pool party goodies

So just like i said i would i am making a post about the potato chip cookies i baked for the pool party tomorrow.  I also made my own red, white, and blue bars, some golden graham smores bars, and some dark chocolate honey nut chex bars and  i will also include recipes and pictures for that stuff.

I thought martha stewart was going to be totally inventive but it turns out she is just like me. as in, she takes the recipe for nestle tollhouse cookies and then (probably) uses it for everything which is why i thought i'd never make it as a food blogger but if martha can do it so can i. Basically today i made that recipe twice with two different variations and entirely different results as you will see.

I followed the potato chip recipe pretty exactly except for the salt and the pecans. i used 1 tsp regular salt instead of the coarse salt because i don't know what she meant by coarse salt since i have about three different kinds of it and the tollhouse recipe just uses 1 tsp regular.  Also i omitted the pecans because eating pecans usually makes my gums feel like i've been chewing shards of glass (except for trader joes sweet and spicy pecans. i seem to be able to handle those just fine, of all the healthy nut products available i can only ingest the worst, oil-fried ones.) and because the pecans i had on hand apparently were "best by" april 2011, and i only noticed because when i pulled them out of the pantry i thought to myself, "these pecans smell like they have been expired for a year." You're welcome, party guests, for catching that. I think they taste great sans pecans at any rate, though i limited myself to only one since potato chips also have a way of feeling like a cheese grater to my gums.  This is probably not a recipe i'd make for myself as you can see and i am pretty sure the only reason i chose it was for the novelty.

the expired nuts, as proof

They came out crunchy, chewy, sweet, and salty just like martha said they would. and they were potato-y.

Well i waited too long to press publish and now today is the day after the party.  I have been spending most of the day nursing my sore, sun heated-pebble burned feet and trying to rehydrate myself unsuccessfully. If i can't really hobble anywhere i might as well finish the post.

I made these golden graham smores bars, and a gluten-freer was meant to attend so i made a dark chocolate honey nut chex version as well.  I am not used to making rice krispie treats with corn syrup in the recipe but i am no expert in cereal bar making so i figured it was probably for the chocolate's sake. Or maybe it helped keep the marshmallow gooey?  For the honey nut chex ones i subbed some honey for the corn syrup but i couldn't tell by taste, maybe i would have noticed better with milk chocolate.

The eggs are just there because that is where i keep them.

This is the dark chocolate one.  I got a real arm workout trying to stir everything up. I think the corn syrup made it extra tough to combine.

smores ones

honey nut chex ones. i think they were missing something extra oomphy, like peanut butter maybe.

gooooey

My red, white, and blue bars come out muffiny because of all the fruit moisture despite using a cookie recipe.  The first batch i made last year i am pretty sure i used fresh raspberries and blueberries and hand stirred them but because of the less than stellar selection of raspberries at sprouts this year i decided just to go with frozen.  However, i also used the mega mixer and not realizing the brute strength of it turned my bars into purpley mush in the few seconds i stepped away from it.  But i still liked them and that is really what matters most since i am the one usually stuck with leftovers that i end up eating for every meal until it is all gone.  And i have done exactly that today because of my current crippled situation, it was pretty much the only thing within reach.

I don't have a proper recipe for this at all, as an intuitive cook i like to just dump stuff in until it looks right.  In this case it was a whole bag of nestle white chips, a couple of cups of rinsed frozen wild maine blueberries, and almost a whole bag of frozen raspberries i got at trader joes.

a picture of my pinterest trollfeet, pre party. It is probably just the way i am holding my foot but i think living in flipflops has permanently made my toes space that way.