Yesterday, it was really cold – like every other day around here, really – so I decided to make soup. While I was at home over Christmas, Mom made this great Mexican Chicken Stew for me, and she told me that she’d first heard the recipe on KRLD-AM, the Dallas all-news station where I worked for awhile as a news anchor. She used to make this in her Crock-Pot on Wednesdays, which is when she and Daddy had the day off from the drilling and filling of small-town dentistry, and he’d make the hour and a half drive to Ardmore, Oklahoma to check on our farm (ie make sure the cattle hadn’t jumped over the barbed wire fence and wreaked havoc on the wildflowers). When he’d come back home at the end of the day, she told me, the soup would be ready.

I was planning to make this recipe exactly like she did, in my new, still gleaming Crock-Pot, but I had leftover chicken from the day before, so I made the soup the old school way – right on the stove. It took just 30 minutes.

I tweaked this just a little bit – I added three cloves of garlic and one chipotle pepper and omitted the cayenne – but otherwise, the recipe is the same. If you choose to make it on the stove, just cook the onions and garlic first in some olive oil, then add the rest and cook for 30 minutes.

Be sure to squeeze a bit of lime on top before you eat this – it makes the soup incredibly bright, and gives this rustic stew a bit of elegance.

And see how cute it looks in my new French bowl?

KRLD Chicken Stew 
3 to 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 yellow onion, chopped
3 squash or zucchini, sliced thick
2 cups corn (roasted or canned)
1 large can tomatoes, diced
⅓ red bell pepper, chopped in 1/4 inch dice
⅓ yellow bell pepper
⅓ green bell pepper
1 teaspoon cumin
¼ teaspoon cayenne
sea salt and cracked pepper (to taste)
Layer chicken, onion, squash, corn, and tomatoes, adding spices between each layer.

Cook in your slow cooker for 5 to 6 hours on the low setting. 

Add can of diced tomatoes about half hour before end of cooking. Serve with tortillas and lime.

This time last year, I was relaxing near my own personal infinity pool, just outside of my little private villa, surrounded by lush palms and other tropical greenery, on the side of a steep hill overlooking the Andaman Sea in Phuket, Thailand, at Trisara, the dreamiest resort I’ve ever come across.

I didn’t see Kate Moss, who apparently also loves it there, mainly because I couldn’t pull myself away from what was so relaxing, and so perfectly isolating, and also, delicious…

Besides the fantastic Thai cuisine I ordered via room service every day, next to my minibar and fridge that was constantly stocked with fresh smoothies, was a little jar that was refilled time and again with these lovely shortbread cookies, which I’d nibble on throughout the day, next to the pool, crossword puzzle nearby, or a magazine…or nothing at all.

I loved them so much that I asked for the recipe, and the manager there happily gave it to me, telling me that it was one that her Australian grandmother used to make. Well, of course, I thought to myself. No wonder they were so good.

The other day, I made them here in Paris, and tried – not too successfully, as you can see – to make these shortbread cookies into cowgirly horses. The result – a yummy cookie in a sort of cartoony horsie shape.

Trisara’s Nutsable Cookies

1 ¼ cup butter
2/3 cup powdered sugar
1 egg
1 2/3 cup flour
1/3 cup ground cashews

Mix the flour and ground cashews together in a bowl and set aside for a sec.

In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar. Add egg, then flour and cashew mixture. (I didn’t have ground cashews, so I substituted a mixture of ground almonds and hazlenuts.)

Cover and chill dough overnight, or for 8 hours.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees f.

Roll out dough, and cut into whatever shape you’d like – or simply make one large sheet and cut into sticks, which is what they did at Trisara – and place on cookie sheet.

I dusted mine with cinnamon and sugar, too.

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until lightly colored. Transfer to wire rack to cool.

Like any shortbread cookie, these taste best after they’ve been allowed to cool (not that I didn’t try them warm, anyway, with leftover morning coffee).

My little Texas-shaped, piment d’Esplette-spiked cookies are available to you (and everyone you know!) for just 10 euros a bag for a dozen. They’re perfect for oh-so-many occasions – best enjoyed with margaritas, beer, naturally, and champagne, too – and make great hostess gifts, stocking stuffers, or car snacks, if you’re taking a road trip somewhere. (Who says that you have to munch on those awful Tuc crackers and Haribo worms that you find at the roadside stops in France?) To order, just go to my website, click on “contact me,” and I’ll deliver, baby!

Talk about falling off the post-yoga healthy eating wagon. I was in the mood for cookies yesterday, so I made Snickerdoodles, one of my all-time favorites. Yeah, but who’s that woman in the blue-green photo, you say? What does she have to do with all of this?

That woman with the pearls and perfect hair is Betty Crocker, and I’ve been cooking out of Betty’s red book – this one, just for cookies — as long as I can remember.

I’m also happy to say that these Snickerdoodles work with the Francine flour here in France, and no scavenger hunt for the often more bake-friendly #65 flour is necessary. I’ve tweaked Betty’s recipe a bit and substituted butter for Crisco, and I put as much cinnamon into my sugar-cinnamon mixture as I like (and I like a lot of cinnamon), but it’s otherwise a Betty recipe. Well, actually, it’s a recipe from Mrs. Ronald Anfinson from Benson, Minnesota, and it was printed in the Betty’s 1963 cookbook.

Here’s my version.

SNICKERDOODLES

Preheat oven to 205c or 400f.

1 cup (two sticks) butter
1 ½ cups sugar
2 eggs
2 ¾ cups flour
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoons soda
¼ teaspoon salt

½ cup sugar
2-3 teaspoons cinnamon

Mix butter, sugar, and eggs until fluffy. Add flour, cream of tartar, soda and salt and blend well.

Shape dough into one-inch balls., roll into cinnamon-sugar and place on ungreased baking sheet, leaving two inches between them. Bake 8-10 minutes.

Et voila! This batch makes a lot of cookies – around six dozen – so be ready to share.

See this baguette? This is how it arrived home from the boulangerie, with its cute little crunchy end, the crouton, bitten right off. (Quel horreur! Now who would do something like that?)

Alll right…maybe I know who, but it was nearly eight at night, see, and way past a normal person’s dinnertime, and the bread was HOT, I mean, you could feel the crusty warmth right through the little paper bag that held it for that long, thirty second walk from the bakery to the apartment.

What was I supposed to do, not eat it?

So, out of great respect for the gastronomic traditions here in France, after I paid the 1.20 for my baguette, I walked out the door, then immediately chomped the end right off. Crunch crunch crunch as I went through the first set of doors into the foyer of my building. I tore off another bit to even it out. I crunched some more.

Then I realized that I might want to save some for dinner, which, as you can see, was of the pasta and tomato-sauce genre, which would definitely require bread for sopping.

The vodka, by the way, was for the sauce (really), from fellow expat/longtime Paris resident Patricia Wells’ great Italian cookbook, Trattoria.

This was my last completely indulgent carb-load prior to my trip to Parrot Cay, which I’ll be leaving for tomorrow. There, I’ll be studying yoga with one of the world’s most well-known and respected Ashtanga yogis, David Swenson.

Between walks with Rose the puppy and launching Cowgirl Tacos, I’ve hardly found time to get on the mat these last few months. I’m looking forward to some time away to reflect, and reconnect with my practice. I figure there’ll be plenty of baguettes waiting for me when I return.