Justin & Meredith Winokur's Kitchen Cooking Notebook

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Armadillo Eggs -- back to top

Meredith and I made Armadillo Eggs, one of her favorite christmas foods from home. We made them for a potluck later in the week.

It is basically stuffed pickled jalapeños surrounded by maple sausage.

Meredith's Mom wrote up some instructions HERE (but we're not sure about the times and temp).

We followed that pretty closely. It was kind of hard to do and took a two pounds of sausage to cover the jalapeños from the one can. I think we did it pretty well and close to the recipe though we had to cook it for much longer.

We did the 250°F for the hour and then turned it up to 300°F and had to do another 40 minutes for it to look done (all on convection).

Some of them seemed to explode a bit. We may have not done a good job with cutting them and/or sealing them. Or, it may have to do with trying neufchatel instead of cream cheese.

Divinity -- back to top

Meredith and I decided at the last minute to make Divinity. Ok, so last year I said I didn't want to use this recipe again, but since it was so last minute and a lot of the other recipes seemed similar or were "cheater" recipes (e.g. uses marshmallow fluff), so we went with it.

But, I did listen to my last-year self and used silpats. That made all the difference! They were sticky and annoying but they also easy enough for us to take them off the tray.

Other changes were:

• Added a scant 1/2 tsp of salt to the sugar mixture
• Forgot the vanilla
• Added some maldon salt to the top
• unsalted pecans and walnuts (not enough just to use pecans)

While, we haven't tried them after sitting (I'll come back and update if I have to) but we liked them a lot. The vanilla flavor was missed but I still thought these were (a) the easiest and (b) still pretty good.

Note that we let it go a full five minutes from the time we finished adding the sugar. The mixer seemed to really struggle but it made it through.

By the way, we had tried some store-bought Divinity and it had the texture of some of our other batches that we thought was bad. Maybe that is the correct texture?

Again, we will see how they hold up over time.

Armadillo Eggs -- back to top

I made a double batch (four packs of sausage) of Armadillo Eggs. I devised some notes/tips/tricks that I will include on the page but also include here:

• Wear gloves
• Divide the sausage into 6 servings/roll from the start.
• Use the liquid from the jalapenos to moisten your hands when working with the sausage
• Assembly line it by the sausage roll. Keep the unused one cold.

I also made bacon wrapped ones with the remaining peppers.

Making

Biscotti -- back to top

Best Biscotti By Far...

I cooked it a bit longer and let it sit a bit more. This helped with cutting!