Markee's Cream Cheese Cookies

My dear friend Markee passed along her cream cheese cookie dough recipe and I tried it recently with cinnamon, pecans & raisins. Markee's cookie dough recipe is simple & delicious, and she recommends adding various ingredients based on the season.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup real butter, room temp
• 1 8 oz. pkg. cream cheese, room temp
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 pinch of salt (*added by me)
• splash of vanilla (*added by me)
  
• 2 cups flour
• 2 cups of whatever suits you! (cinnamon, raisins & pecans pictured above)
  

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 325. Cream butter and cream cheese. Add a pinch of salt. Add the sugar and beat for at least 3 minutes (that is key). Stir in flour by hand. Add 2 cups of "whatever" (for example, white chocolate chips, cranberries and macadamia nuts). Drop by teaspoons onto cookie sheet and bake for 15 min. Cool on wire racks.

Markee's suggestions:

For Fall: add cinnamon, 1 cup raisins, 1 cup pecans
For Christmas: add 1/2 cup macadamia nuts, 1/2 cup cranberries, 1 cup white choc. chips

For Summer: add lemon juice & lemon zest to the batter (not 2 cups of anything exactly) just some lemon juice and zest to taste. Then, drizzle with powdered sugar and lemon juice mixture.

*I just made these a second time with chopped up kitkats (1 cup, about 6 packages of mini-halloween sized) and 1 cup of milk chocolate chips... really yummy!

Hatch Chile Everything!

it's central market's hatch chile festival again! i look forward to this every summer, and this year we've enjoyed green chile everything! troy brought home some green chile salsa and a hatch pepper apple pie! the green chile apple pie was awesome - the chiles' heat was such a nice compliment with warm baked apples, cinnamon and bluebell vanilla ice cream... we love texas-based central market... they even have chocolate hatch pepper gelato right now, check it out :)