I found a really good recipe for fortune cookies on line at “About.com:Chinese Food” .  It is an easy recipe to follow and makes really good tasting fortune cookies.

Why would a mountain man want to make fortune cookies?  I’m glad you asked.  Because I (and my group of hunting buddies) like to cut up and this is a good way to put in fortunes that are pertinent to the hunt we are on.  Especially special hunts like we have coming up this week.  Dry Dogs Dream Hunt.

So, when you know the characters that are going to be at the hunt, you can tailor the fortunes to those folks and hope they draw out the cookie that most applies to them.  But if they don’t that is ok too.  The main thing is to have fun and doing different things on each hunt makes that hunt stand out from all the others.

So, let’s say you too are going on a dream deer hunt and a bunch of buddies are going along for the ride and to help you out.  You are going to want to have at least one fortune cookie for each one of them and inside the cookie will be some special note.  You have to make up the notes ahead of doing the cookie recipe, cuz the note has to be put inside the cookie.  So let’s make us some notes.

One of mine says:  Quote of the year 2010, “Now that’s what I’m talkin about right there!”—Hunter

He made that quote as he was looking at an extremely large mule deer buck that was being shown to us at our camp from a very happy hunter.

One of my favorite sayings and I say it a lot during the hunts,

Don’t shoot at the antlers.

So, you make up yours accordingly.

Ok, so here is the recipe and how I have changed it up some.  On line, this recipe says it will do about 10 cookies, I’m here to tell you it will make a whole lot more than that if you follow my lead on this.

Recipe:  2 Large egg whites, ½ teaspoon vanilla extract (they say “pure” vanilla extract…what’s that?), ½ teaspoon almond extract (I’m going to try some of this stuff when I trap muskrats next spring, it smells like it would attract them), 3 tablespoons vegetable oil (I used olive oil), 8 tablespoons all purpose flour, 1 ½ teaspoons cornstarch, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 8 tablespoons granulated sugar and lastly 3 teaspoons water.

Grab up two bowls to mix in.

In one put the egg whites, vanilla, almond and oil…using a fork, beat the pee-jeasus out of it until it froths but doesn’t go beyond that point, you are not making meringue.

Now in the other bowl sift together the dry ingredients: flour, cornstarch, salt and sugar, when you are satisfied they are all mixed pretty consistently, add the water and stir that around some.  Now, dump all of this into the egg bowl of stuff.  Mix this up until it is smooth as silk and no lumps are seen.

OK, so the recipe I found on line says to use a cookie sheet and put a full tablespoon of the mix in spaces apart from each other and twirl the pan around until the piles of mix spread out and are about 4 inches across blah, blah, blah.  I guess if you were in a hurry or had some help you could do this, but take it from me, if you are working alone you won’t have time to deal with more than two at a time.  Here is what I do.

I got two pie pans out, with smooth bottoms, not the bumpy bottom ones.  Then I dip out some mix with a tablespoon and I spread around a thin layer of the mix until it’s about 4 inches across.  It’s really thin and you will see why in a minute.  Once you have that spread out in the pan, put it in the preheated oven of 300 degrees.  I forgot to tell you that earlier.  300 degrees.

This next part was hard for me to understand at first, but it makes sense now.  These babies are going to take upwards of 15 minutes to brown up.  In my neck of the woods, at 4200 ft. above sea level it takes 11 minutes.

I hope you have your messages all folded up and ready to be put into the cookies, cuz if you don’t you just have 11 minutes to get two of them ready.  Fold them up pretty small.  Now, get out a small spatchula and an empty cup with thin walls.  Get a hotpad out too.  When the timer goes off and you can see the cookie has brown around the edge maybe even ½ in into the cookie they are done.

Work really fast now!  Spatchula up that cookie and flip it over onto the hotpad.  Grab up a fortune note and place it off center on the cookie.  Fold the cookie over the note and then pick the hot little devil up and push the folded edge down over the edge of the cup.  Hot ain’t it ?  Set it down, but keep track of the edges so they don’t come apart.  The burning pain will be gone soon as it cools!  I hope your buddies are worth all of this pain and trouble.

A trick to be noted here, if you have a muffin pan handy, instead of bearing the burning pain, you can put the folded cookie inside one of the pan spaces and it will hold its shape and you won’t get burned so much.

Can you see why putting a bunch of the mix on a cookie sheet just would not allow you enough time to process all of those hot little guys fast enough before they cooled to the point you could not bend them?

Well you should have yourself two fortune cookies made by now.  Sort of fun huh?  And the very best part is you made them and they have personal fortunes in them.

By doing it my way and making thinner cookies you will get about 26 cookies out of this mix.

Some other stuff you might want to know.  You can color the mix by adding food coloring at the stage where you mixed it to smooth as silk.  Green, red, blue, yellow, black…whatever!  How about making black ones for someones wedding?  Blue ones for the boy baby shower or pink for the girl baby shower?

Bears Butt

Nov. 2011