Yes.

Its ready.

Got it all prepared.

Its finish.

It's stunning.

Yes.

It's great.

It's all so ready.

So just let it all begin.

Hi, I'm Chris Fennimore, and today in the kitchen we're going to be catering to your sweet tooth.

When I was growing up, my grandmother made most of the Italian traditional dishes like meatballs and sauce and eggplant and so on.

And my mother made all the desserts, the cakes, the cookies, and the best brownies on the face of the earth.

I'm actually reluctan to try and recreate her recipe because the memories are still so strong, and I'm bound to be disappointed in whatever I make.

But this recipe is enoug of a variation that it doesn't have to be compared with a few minor variations.

This recipe creates a very different, but still delicious brownie experience.

Let it all begin.

One of the things that everybody loves about going to a picnic is dessert.

You know, you can have just a great dessert by getting a watermelon and cutting it up.

And I think that's the the dessert of choice many times at a picnic.

But, I decided to come u with a recipe for some brownies, and I and I love the flavor of, mole sauce.

When you have Mexican food, it's got, it's a very spicy, peppery, chili flavored sauce.

But then it has chocolate in it.

So I said, well, wait a minute, what if we had chocolate brownies with a little bit of chili flavor in it?

And so I came up with somethin that I call Wholly Mole Brownies And that's wha we're going to make right now.

I have, it's a pretty standard, brownie recipe.

It's about a stick and a half of butter.

They don't call me stick o butter around here for nothing.

And into that, I'm going to melt some Mexican chocolate, which is chocolate that has a little bit of sugar in it, but it also has, cinnamon.

And there are two brands that I know of.

One is called abuelita, which means grandma.

And the other one is called Ibarra.

And Ibarra is a, well, it's just the name of their brand, but they're both basically the same thing.

They are chocolat that has cinnamon and, and, and, and a little bit of sugar in it.

And I'm going to put two of thes and just going to let that melt a little bit.

Just put that in there.

And then I have four ounces of really good chocolate, dark chocolate, which is what I like for this recipe.

And I'm going to cut this up into, little shreds and shards with my knife so that it melts more quickly.

Just be careful as you're chopping it that you don't cut yourself and it doesn't have to be fancy, just has to be pieces small enough that it melts more quickly.

And I'm going to put tha all into the melted butter and.

And stir that around until it starts to melt.

I'm going to use a whisk.

Just get it all melte and it looks like you know, it's sometimes it looks like it's never going to melt, especially those big discs.

But they will melt.

And then into this mixture.

I'm going to add a little bit more sugar.

Some brown sugar.

And I'm going to add some regular sugar.

So yeah these are sweet.

They're really sweet.

I'm going to mix this all around.

And then I'm going to.

While that's melting and I want I want the sugar to melt as well as the chocolate.

Get that nice and smoot I'm going to get my pans ready.

Now, you can make this in a standard brownie pan, but what I like to do especially for a picnic, is to, use these mini muffin tins, and then everybody gets their own little brownie bite and, I just make sure that I get a good coating of anti-stick spray.

This one is a canola oil spray and that I'm going to put that into each one.

Great job for a kid in the kitchen.

These are these are actually my mother's trays.

She got into making those pecan tassels.

You remembe when that was a really big fad?

You know, you had to make the pecan and she had to have them, an she made them by the hundreds.

So I actually have about a dozen of these little trays and they're just, they're the right tool for the job.

And they also remind me of my mom while I'm cooking.

So not a bad thing.

All right, I want to get this melted.

Just stir that around till it gets nice and smooth.

It's not going to get as smooth as if you just had the chocolate in it because the sugars are in there, but you don' want it to get too hot either.

Usually what I do is at this point, when it's almost melted I take it off the heat entirely and just whisk it around real good.

The other thing you could do i to put this in a double boiler and more delicately melt the chocolate.

You know me, I'm always trying to save a step on a pan and a pot, and I' going to take this off the heat.

And you see that the residual heat will melt the rest of that chocolate.

So there we go.

Just going to put my finger.

Ooh that's pretty good.

And now I want to beat in four eggs.

And I want to do them one at a time.

First time I made these I beat the eggs too vigorously.

You want to have them completely incorporated, but you don't want to put too much air into this because you like a nice, thick, chewy, fudgy brownie.

There you go.

That's two eggs.

That's the third egg.

One more egg.

Oh, there you go.

So now, up until now, this is a pretty traditional brownie, except for the Mexican chocolate.

But, secret ingredient to make.

Wholly Mole Brownies.

You need some chipotle powder.

This is the chipotle peppers, which have been ground down into a fine powder.

And the chipotle pepper is a as a smoked pepper.

So it has a, a rich, smoky flavor in addition to just a little bit of heat.

And the real trick to this is follow the recipe.

You only wan a teaspoon for the whole batch if you put more than that, even though you're a chili lover, that's all you'll taste.

But when you put just a teaspoon, an exact teaspoon, into, into the recipe, the, what will happen is that people will eat the brownie.

They'll go oh, that's a delicious brownie.

And then they'll go, what was that?

And it'll be the flavor of the chipotle pepper.

Now, boy, you can smell ho that smoky kind of flavor to it.

I think this is going to be the hit of any barbecue that you bring it to.

Or picnic.

All right.

So now I have a cup and a half of flour, and I'm going to go.

From the melted chocolate sugar mix into the flour.

I know everybody's trigger.

Who gets to lift that bowl?

Who gets to lick that bowl.

We're going to get well tossed.

We'll toss for it later on.

Okay.

Now again, you don't want to overmix this.

You don't want to put it into a big blender and and you just want to fold it over until all of the dry ingredients are incorporated.

Because if you put too much air into it, you get fluffy brownies, which is not a bad thing, but it's they don't have that nice dense chew to them.

So I'm just going to keep turning it over and folding it in.

Anothe nice thing about these brownies is you make them the night before, put them into a nice plastic bag and bring them with you to the picnic, and the you can just put them out there.

You have no work on picnic day for dessert.

All right, so there you go.

You could see the consistency of it's sort of like a thick, sort of like a thick cake batter.

There's stil a little bit of flour in there.

I'm gonna make sure I ge all of that flour incorporated.

And actually, if you le this sit, it gets even thicker.

But now you want to start putting it into your tins, and I'm just going to use a tablespoon to do this.

Or if you had a, ice cream scoop, you could use tha to measure them more precisely.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and just put a tablespoon or so.

You don't want to fill these right up to the tippy top, because they do expand a little bit.

And le me tell you about this recipe.

This makes a lot of little brownies.

People are going to want to have more than one.

That's something I can assure you of.

Just going to fill the rest of this one, and then we'll fill the rest of them later.

But this will make at least four dozen mini brownies for this recipe.

It's only a cup and a half of flour and a cup and a half of sugar, along with the chocolate.

Four ounces of chocolate and the two, little discs of Mexican chocolate.

So it goes pretty far.

There you go.

That's the last one.

And as I said, we'll fill the rest of these and, put them in the oven because we have a lot of volunteers.

I want to show you some of the finished ones that I have here.

Oh, yeah.

Now, if you have a chance on picnic day, take them out of your plastic bag, put them on a nice platter and then get some powdered sugar just so that they're going to look a little bit fancier, a little bit nicer.

So give them a couple of squirts of that.

Tuesday.

I have to also tell you if you happen to bring ice cream to your picnic can put one of these on top of, a little cup of, vanilla ice cream.

Not a bad thing.

Not a bad thing at all.

And I have to taste one, tak one out of the back of the pile.

Here it is.

Wholly Mole.

Wholly Mole.

Brownie!

It's chewy.

Fudgy.

And when you first put it in your mouth, you do not taste the chili.

Now I taste the chili.

It starts to come on.

And you feel this sort of warmth, a little bit of tingle in your mouth.

But it's that wonderful smoky flavor.

The flavor of mole, the Mexican creation that includes, chil and chocolate in a sauce, for, all of their other recipes.

But now we've included them in brownies.

My Wholly Mole brownies for your next picnic.

There's no question that these little treat will be the hit of any outing, and they really are easy to make and easy to carry and talk about.

Easy to make.

So now our next recipe comes from Nancy Polinsky.

It has three ingredients and it takes almost no time whatsoever.

It's ready.

Oh, it all looks so yummy.

Hi, I'm Chris Fennimore and I'm Nancy Polinsky.

Hello.

We're all getting, you know, it's thinking about the holidays, and you and you have gifts either to give people or, you know, for house housewarming.

You go to somebody's house for a party, you want to have something to give them.

But, also a lot of people are thinking in terms of homemade gift instead of store bought gifts.

Absolutely.

My mother used to always send on the first day of school in my little lunchbox, a little wrapped up, jar of homemade aprico preserves to give to the teacher to say hello.

Welcome.

First day.

It was her way of extendin a homemade gift to our teachers.

Every year was a traditio in our household, and it's well.

And then gifts, don' just have to be at the holidays.

Actually, as you said.

And that's what we've done, is we've gathered together a bunch of recipes, that were sent in by you and your neighbors.

We're calling it gifts from the kitchen.

Now, these gifts could be at the beginnin of the school year or whatever.

But the big thing is that they're they're homemade, they're handmade.

And I think that that may be the best kind of gift that there is from the heart.

It's also more frugal, you know, you know, and, and depends on what you're making.

Well, yes.

And but you don't.

I think it just means something so much more when you have actually created the gift that you're giving.

So we're going to give you a chance to get your own copy of this, you know, about 150 recipes that are in here, 150 different ideas for gifts that you can prepare in your kitchen, and then you can give them, fo whatever occasion you give them birthdays, the holidays, beginning of the school year.

And you and a lot of people, as a sort of secondary gift, tie the recipe prettily written on a pretty recipe card to the gift, so that if the recipient really enjoys it, they can make it.

They can.

They could do it.

They can pass it on to me.

I think that you could ti an entire cookbook to your gift and give it if you wanted to call in and pledge and get enough cookbooks to do that.

That's right.

Okay.

We'll tell you more about that later.

So we're going to start yo the first recipe is yours.

And, and I have to say do we have 30s to make it.

It is a typically Nancy Polinsky.

You know, over the years that we've been doing this, you always say, I don't know how to cook.

I'm not a cook and everything.

This isn't cooking.

However, every time we do a show, what recipe is it that everybody remembers?

What recipe is it that the crew goes crazy for?

It's your recipe.

Can I sa usually they're five ingredients or less and take ten minutes or less to make, that sort of like one of your hallmarks.

This one tops them all is the way I make it.

It's one dish and about really two minutes tops.

And how many ingredients?

Three, three, three and including salt is one of the ingredients.

So what's it.

It's just it's so good.

It's called, butter roasted.

And this is debatable.

Pecans.

Pecans.

Let me, talk about that in a minute because this is really interesting.

All right.

So here's what you need.

You need pound of nuts whole nut chopped.

And then you need one stick of butter a melted.

And then you need salt okay.

Do we need to go over that again.

1 pound of nuts whole I got one stick of butter melted and salt.

All right You've committed that to memory.

You could double this recipe I'll bet.

Yeah.

Okay.

We're trying to stretch this.

All right.

So you're going to preheat the oven to 200 between 250 and 300 degrees.

It's sort of a standard oven.

Melt the butter.

You look.

When we look at this recipe we didn't have microwave.

So it actually says you know melt the butte in the oven in the baking pan.

You could microwave it.

You can do whatever.

And we would actually when we made this the way my mother did it, as she would pour the butter, put the butter in the pan, melt it, and then put the nuts in the pan.

Chris prefers and I can see his argument for doing it, to keep the nuts in a bowl and to just pou the butter on them in the bowl, because when it comes to tossing them and the recipe does say, you know, toss the nuts with the butter in the bowl, it is neater and easier to do it in the bowl than to do it in the tray.

I'm sorry, I meant to say toss them.

That's on the pan.

So that's what you're doing here now?

Let me do tha while you make the distinction between pecans and pecan.

Well, yeah, this is a this was so interesting.

I was once you could do both.

I was once.

Well, let me think about that.

And so I'm going to I'm up to the challenge.

I've been in the community kitchen now for how many years I can do this?

I was heard a linguist on the radio talking about how to identify where people come from by the region, in the country, and he said, somebody can come up to me and not say a word, and I will just ask them to say the word pecan for me.

And he said, and how they pronounce that one word tells me what region of the country they grew up in and learn to speak, because there are exponentially eight times eight 64 different variations on how you can say that because, whoops, I stopped stirring.

I can't do two things at once.

Okay.

Here.

Okay.

So there's so simple.

This first, there's the first initial.

Is it p or puh pecan per can.

Then there's the second second syllable.

Did I say initial syllable.

Is it pecan.

Pecan.

Then there's the emphasis pecan.

Pecan.

And then there is there's a fourth thing.

Whatever it is, I'm having such a day P pecan pecan pecan pie.

Okay, I can't remember the fourth.

Anyway, whateve combination of those variations somebody does, this guy could say that's the region of the country he or she is from.

How do you say it?

You know, I I'm totally confused because I've, I've tried to mirror what other people say to me.

My aunt actually had a pecan farm.

Know pecan.

Pecan.

Well, in in Albany, Georgia.

Yeah.

And because that's a southern way of saying it.

Pecan farm.

Is that what it was?

Well, okay, well, if it was in Georgia, it was a pecan.

She was in Albany, Georgia.

And, her husband's name was Bill dollar.

I always love that name.

And, so she was my aunt Jenny Dollar, and, why they named him Bill.

You know, because he came at the end of the month he was born.

No.

Never mind.

So, they said pecans.

Okay.

Well, I grew up.

My mother taught me how to speak, and she's from Boston, and she always said pecan.

So I grew up saying pecan.

But here's what I call these things pralines.

You know, you're not going to get any regional identification from me when I call these pralines.

Yeah.

You want to add the salt?

Now, that's what I prefer to add it when they're spread out.

You go for it.

And in fact, that's what we call them down south.

And most of you know, I grew up in South Carolina, and, these are when they're al buttered and roasted like this.

They are called pralines.

And, you know, there are plenty of companies where you can order pralines online and spend oodles of money, or you can do this.

I, you know I mean, pecans are just yummy, as a nut, but especially when they're toasted.

But I like to put them in cakes and, every kind of dessert you can think of.

And, I made a batch of these yesterday just to, to see.

And you could put this on your cereal.

You could.

I mean these toasted are so delicious.

Yeah.

Buttery flavor.

Oh, and, you know, you can put brown sugar on these, too.

And that is just.

Good.

I also thought that if you wanted to you could make batches of these in different flavors.

In other words to just where you're adding the salt.

Now you could also add things like a little cayenne pepper.

Yeah.

Oh I want this to be nice and spicy.

That would be even southwest thing going out of a chili powder thing you could do on here.

Or you could just do herb de Provence.

You know, just put some of that and it would be like, never thought of.

Oh, yeah.

Anyway, pop this in the oven right about 20 minutes and and you are going to turn them, every couple two times in the course of it.

You just kind of flip them over so that they're roasting evenly.

And then there they are, there they are.

So how do you say p e c a n?

Is it p can p con puck con.

Well, what.

Once you make this recipe you'll just call them delicious.

And once again, Nancy Polinsky came through with the favorite recipe on that day.

Today we went for a walk on the sweet side and I hope you enjoyed the trip.

And as I always say, we do it for you, but we can't do it without you.

So keep cooking and keep watching.

So just let it all begin.