Making ANZAC Biscuits

What in the world is an ANZAC biscuit? These cookies (or “biscuits” as they are called in the UK and Australia/New Zealand) are considered a traditional cookie to honor ANZAC day in Australia, New Zealand and Tonga.

“Anzac Day is a national day of remembrance in Australia, New Zealand and Tonga that broadly commemorates all Australians and New Zealanders ‘who served and died in all wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping operations’ and ‘the contribution and suffering of all those who have served.’ Observed on 25 April each year, Anzac Day was originally devised to honour the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who served in the Gallipoli campaign, their first engagement in the First World War (1914-1918).” (See more at https://anzacspirit.com.au/blog/the-traditions-of-anzac-day/)

Several sources online suggested wives and mothers would mail these cookies to their soldiers in ANZAC, because without eggs and being quite sturdy, they traveled and kept well. Other sources said, “contrary to legend, Anzac biscuits weren’t sent to our troops serving overseas in WWI. However, they were commonly sold at church fetes and galas to raise funds for the war effort. They didn’t get their name until peacetime, with the first Anzac recipe appearing in about 1919.”

You can see, the history of the Anzac biscuits has been around for over 100 years! Whether they were popular because they traveled well, or they made a good baked item to raise funds, I might have to bake some to sell at our Boalsburg Fire Company Auxiliary Yard Sale in a few weeks (September 19-20, 2025). If I include the recipe and a little history, they might generate some interest and sales!

Because they were popular in Australia, they are called biscuits…like cookies are called in the UK. However, they are basically a simple Oatmeal Coconut Cookie. They are sturdy, travel well and taste good!

Here’s the recipe I followed. I added vanilla and cinnamon to my recipe just because!!

The ingredient list is pretty simple. After making 2-3 batches and reading several variations of the recipe at various sources, I think you could add other ingredients of your choosing…walnuts, chocolate chips, etc.

Making the ANZAC Biscuits

  1. Assemble the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix thoroughly.

2. Melt one stick of butter and add 2 Tbsp of honey and mix well. (This is when I added the vanilla.)

3. Put the baking soda in a small cup and add 2 Tbsp boiling water. This was a real pain in the neck…next time I’ll add the baking soda and water to the melted butter and just mix it up.

4. Combine the wet ingredients and the dry ingredients to make a moist batter. Scoop about a tablespoon or two into your hand and form a ball. Place on cookie sheet and flatten gently with your fingers. They will spread and flatten as they cook.

5. Bake at 325 degrees for 12-14 minutes (to make a firm chewy cookie) or about 15-18 minutes to make them a little crunchy. Rotate trays as needed halfway.

This batch made 14-16 cookies…each 3-4 inches across! They can be made smaller and the recipe can be doubled. Might be the perfect cookie to sell at our bake sale! Enjoy!

If you have questions or comments, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com. Thanks.

Garden Update August 15, 2025

What a difference two weeks makes in our garden! Two weeks without any measurable rain, hot temperatures and produce ripening every day keeps us busy! Bert waters everything every day, but it’s hard to keep all the plants happy without a good soaking rain. When it’s dry like this, plants must think fall is coming and everything ripens faster. Of course, that means my focus is on the produce that needs to be processed.

We’ve cooked and canned the first round of tomatoes…about 42 tomatoes made 13 pints of cooked tomatoes:

The zucchini plants are still producing so I’m trying to catch them when they are still small (obviously I missed one!). I’ve made a batch or two of my zucchini chocolate chip cookies (see the recipe at https://marykisner.com/marys-zucchini-chocolate-chip-cookies/) and I’ve found a good zucchini bread recipe. I’ll post about that soon.

Now, for a tour of the garden. The onions are definitely ready to harvest. So far, we’re digging them up as we use them. They’ll probably keep better for a few weeks right there in the dirt!

The next batch of lettuce is ready to eat and the radishes are doing fine!

The “Raindrop” tomatoes have done very well, but the plants are not looking very healthy. We’re not sure if they are just stressed from the hot, dry weather or if they have a fungus. Either way, the tomatoes are still ripening just fine!

The pumpkins are doing well…EXCEPT they were being eaten by something!

Check out this pumpkin…almost half-munched away!

The one pumpkin Bert put up on a stand seemed to be safe!

Bert set up a trap with a small pumpkin as bait and within a day he caught a HUGE groundhog! The groundhog must have thought we planted those pumpkins just for his own salad bar! After that groundhog was dispatched, Bert set the trap again. So far, no other groundhogs have been caught!

Up in the garden, the lavender still looks pretty stressed.

The tomatoes are doing well. I can see I’ll have my work cut out for me when they all ripen!

The carrots are quietly doing their thing. We’re always surprised when we finally dig them up in the fall!

The zucchini keeps producing…we’ll see how long that will continue!

Finally, the echinacea has given up and gone to seed. Oh well, hopefully next year they’ll last a little longer!

That’s what’s happening around here. While Bert is watering and keeping up with the garden outside, I seem to be doing a lot of dishes! That’s OK. Harvest season doesn’t last very long and if I need something we don’t grow, someone at the Farmer’s Market probably has it! Enjoy!

If you have comments or questions, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Making a Cover for My Dehydrator

My Excalibur Dehydrator has been an important and useful tool for me over the last 10-15 years. It is basically a low-tech appliance with few moving parts, but it is safe to dehydrate foods without having to monitor the oven at low temperatures or the food over many hours. It is a large box-sized appliance (about 20″ x 18″ x 12″ high). I do not use it often, but when I do I want it near the kitchen where I prep the food to be dehydrated. Here is a picture from the instruction manual. It does have 9 trays, but the food shown in the picture is not realistic. They do not recommend dehydrating so many different kinds of food at the same time!

A few weeks ago, I showed pictures of dehydrating shredded zucchini…the shreds needed to be spread out so they would dry properly. The trays shown above are much too crowded.

Anyway, the dehydrator is stored in our garage, right outside the kitchen door. When not in use, it is covered with a cloth cover I made many years ago, then covered with a custom board Bert made that has a hole for the temperature dial so it doesn’t get squished. The board keeps the whole dehydrator safe from being bumped and we find we store stuff on top. Packages from UPS often appear there when delivered!

This original cover was made from plain cotton and must have gotten snagged or just worn through with holes! Yikes! Time for a new cover!

To make a new cover, I needed to measure the dehydrator. Pretty funny…trying to get my tape measure to stay put so I could take a picture of it just right!

So I ended up measuring the old cover instead. The new cover didn’t need to be snug. I wanted to be able to just slip it on to keep the dust out.

The measurements became this pattern:

Once I found a piece of fabric big enough to make the cover, I cut the pieces out as measured above:

I stitched the 4 side pieces to the top and tested it on the dehydrator inside out before I sewed up the side seams. (I obviously didn’t go to a whole lot of trouble to iron the pieces before I started sewing!)

Once the side seams were sewed (and zigzagged for strength) I tested the fit again before I hemmed the bottom edge.

And right side out, it works great. Guess I could break out the ironing board if necessary!

Remember, I said we store the dehydrator under a board with a hole to accommodate the dial on the top. Believe it or not, that board has prevented damage to the dial for 15 years!

Now, this space is ready for UPS to drop off packages, etc. I feel better that the dehydrator is now covered! Enjoy! If you have questions or comments, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Garden Update August 2, 2025

Garden produce is now beginning to take over the kitchen table and it looks like more is to come! Every day involves watering, picking what’s ready and processing when the pile gets big enough! I’ve added a fourth activity…giving away what I can’t use to any neighbor that walks by! (smile)

Now that I’ve tried out quite a few recipes with shredded zucchini, I think the rest will be shredded or cut into cubes and frozen or dehydrated. They will be great additions to soup and baked goods all winter! Very soon, the large tomatoes will be cooked and canned into something I can use all winter. I should not have to buy cans of diced/cooked tomatoes for many months!

Here’s what the garden looks like today!

The latest planting of radishes is popping up. The lettuce is ready to harvest.

We’ve been using onions and soon will dig them all up (or dump them out)!

More “Raindrop” tomatoes are ripening every day! They are tasty!

The pumpkins are turning orange!

The lavender is still attracting bees, but it is sure having trouble standing up!

The Bodacious tomatoes are ripening first, while the SuperSauce are finally starting to turn color.

Bodacious

SuperSauce

The carrots are hanging in there!

The green and yellow beans are DONE and gone! Looks like the zucchini plants will spread out into the space.

The zucchini is producing at least 3-4 a day!

And of course, the Echinacea is nuts! The bees love them!

So that’s what is happening in our back yard (and kitchen). Enjoy! For questions or comments, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Making Cream of Tomato Soup from Scratch

Tomato season is just getting started and most of the ones we’re eating are the small “Raindrop” tomatoes

We had 3 regular tomatoes from the garden turn red, but each had a blemish that would need to be cut out. Then, Bert came home from camp with 4 tomatoes each in a plastic shell. They looked great but I knew they weren’t local and fresh. While we were eating the small tomatoes, I knew we’d ignore the big ones until they spoiled on the counter!

I wondered how hard it would be to make a small batch of tomato soup…I had a memory in mind of a lovely bowl of tomato soup my mother had made…MANY years ago. Somehow, the cans of condensed tomato soup just didn’t taste like my memory!

First, I looked up the recipe for “Fresh Tomato Soup” in my Joy of Cooking cookbook.

Sounded like the same procedure when I cook tomatoes in preparation for canning. I even had a fresh onion from the garden. I took the 7 tomatoes I had on the kitchen table and weighed them…almost 3 pounds! Good Enough!

NOTE: You can skip all the instruction below about preparing the tomatoes and just use several cans of diced tomatoes. Keep reading!

Next, each tomato needed to be trimmed and blemishes cut out. I cut an X on the bottom of each one. I got a pan of water ready to boil so I could dip each tomato into the hot water. In one minute, the skins would loosen so they would be easy to peel.

I lined the tomatoes up by the stove and put 4 and then 3 in the boiling water. After a minute I moved them to ice water. The skins were beginning to come off.

Of course, the steam clouded my camera!

I noticed the recipe said to remove the seeds. It wasn’t hard to just get rid of the seed pocket in the commercial tomatoes. Our tomatoes had hardly any developed seeds!

NOTE: If you have no interest in starting with fresh tomatoes, I think you could easily begin with a few cans of diced tomatoes and jump down to the step below that has the diced tomatoes cooking with chopped onion and go from there!

I had the onion ready to put in the pot with the cut tomatoes and simmered them on the stove.

After about 45 minutes everything looked pretty soft. I poured the whole pile into the blender and in less than a minute there were no chunks! Of course, I poured the pureed tomatoes/onions from the blender into a container before I took a picture of the blender! I put this container in the refrigerator until lunch time.

When it was time for lunch, I put the cooked pureed tomatoes/onions into a saucepan and started warming them up.

I added about a tablespoon of sugar, a teaspoon of salt, a sprinkle of pepper and a teaspoon of Basil flakes. I let this simmer about 10 minutes. Finally, I added about 1/4 cup of coconut milk. Bert added additional regular milk to his bowl.

Very tasty!!

I know it seems like it was a lot of work, but if I’m cooking tomatoes anyway, why not make a good meal out of them while I’m cooking! Even if you start with plain canned diced tomatoes, it will end up tasting pretty good! Enjoy!

ps. Just for fun, I looked up the ingredients in Campbell’s Condensed Tomato Soup. The serving size was 1/2 cup and was 90 calories! Here’s the ingredient list for that can of soup: Tomato Puree (Water, Tomato Paste), Water, Wheat Flour, Sugar, Contains Less Than 2% Of: Salt, Potassium Salt, Natural Flavoring, Citric Acid, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), Celery Extract, Garlic Oil. Contains: Wheat.

I think my soup tasted just fine without the wheat and “natural flavoring!”

If you have comments or questions, please contact me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Dehydrating Zucchini Shreds

Just as I was babying along the first precious zucchini…surprise! We are now picking zucchini every day, with more on the way! Of course! Since I didn’t want to keep baking every day using only one to two cups of shredded zucchini in a recipe, it was time to start dehydrating the shreds.

First, I got the dehydrator uncovered and ready to use. It sits right outside the kitchen door, covered in a cloth cover with a board sitting on top. That lets us stack things on top…like the mail or stuff that needs to be put away in the garage. When I need it, I just uncover it and it’s ready to go. When it’s running, the noise, heat and any food smells are not in the house!

There is a set of plastic sheets to keep small items from falling through the grid.

Next, I set up the shredder and starting shredding!

I spread the shreds on the dehydrator trays covered with plastic sheets. I set the dehydrator for 125 degrees (Vegetables) and left it alone for about 6 hours.

One cup of shredded zucchini makes about 1/4 cup of dehydrated shreds.

I ended up with 1/2 of a gallon ziplock bag of zucchini shreds. Much easier to store! We’ll see how they work when I soak them in water and use them in zucchini bread or cookies! I picked another 6 zucchini this morning…and so it continues! Enjoy! If you have questions or comments, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Mary’s Zucchini Chocolate Chip Cookies

A few days ago, I experimented with a recipe for zucchini cookies. The recipe came from allrecipes.com. They didn’t taste too bad, but they were basically undercooked. I didn’t know how to trust my oven temperature and couldn’t tell by looking if they were done. I kept thinking they needed more flour and since I don’t really care for raisins, maybe chocolate chips would be better. I even wondered if I could add a little coconut to the mix! Here is the original recipe:

The cookies that followed the original recipe came out looking like these…kind of flat and undercooked.

So today, I tried again. First, shredding the zucchini:

Two zucchini made 2 cups of shredded zucchini…enough for two batches of cookies. The second cup of shreds I put in a zip bag with a paper towel to soak up moisture and stored it in the refrigerator.

Here are my notes as I modified the recipe as I went along:

The flour mixture has all-purpose flour, 1/2 cup of coconut (like for macaroons), baking soda, ground cinnamon and salt (I left out ground cloves because we don’t care for that taste).

Then, I melted a stick of butter and beat it with the sugar. I added 2 eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla. Next came the shredded zucchini, the flour mixture and the cup of chocolate chips.

At this point the mixture was really sticky, so I put it in the refrigerator for an hour. I tried making dough balls but it was still too sticky so I just scooped up dough with a teaspoon and put them on the cookie sheets. Timing was different from the original recipe…at 375 degrees, I gave them 6 minutes. Then I rotated the trays and gave them another 6 minutes. They were browning nicely so I took them out of the oven. They turned out great! They are more “cakey” but tasty and used up a zucchini!

Finally, here is my revised recipe. Enjoy! If you have questions or comments, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Garden Update July 17, 2025

Garden season has begun spilling over into the kitchen…at least with zucchini! The last month or so has been all about keeping plants watered and watching them grow. Now it’s time to make room on the kitchen counter for assorted tiny tomatoes and zucchini. Finally, all those recipes for zucchini that I’ve been collecting over the last year will be useful.

If you’ve been following along with each update, you should be able to see that the plants are starting to really produce! The second planting of lettuce (Black Seeded Simpson and Little Gem) have finally popped up. I’ll plant the next section later today.

The radishes grow quickly and taste delicious! I’ll pull them today and replant for the next batch.

The onions are bursting out of the planters…we are using them one at a time, but it might be time to dump them out!

The small tomatoes (called Raindrops) are finally starting to ripen. From a distance, they look like of strings of pearls hanging on the plants.

The pumpkins are going nuts! Bert made a little stand for one pumpkin that was hanging over the fence. So cute! There are more hiding under the leaves.

Up in the garden on the hill, everything is going strong. The lavender has been beaten down by the rain, but the bees don’t care. I’ll try to cut some and avoid the bees.

The tomatoes are producing well. When they start to ripen my days will be filled with cooked tomatoes…and BLT’s!

The carrots are finally looking healthy!

I’ve picked beans twice now…they are yummy when fresh.

The zucchini explosion has begun! I will need to check them every day!

The echinacea are covered with bees and butterflies. Makes me happy!

So that’s the garden today! I hope you are enjoying your summer!

If you have comments or questions, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Making a Zucchini Cornbread Casserole

I now have a folder full of zucchini recipes to try…and we finally have some zucchini! I just couldn’t make myself buy zucchini when I saw the plants in the garden a few days ago. In three days since I took this picture, I picked two that were about 8″ long.

Of course, I forgot to take a picture of them before I put them through the shredder! This little hand-operated shredder worked just great for two zucchini.

The recipe came from https://allrecipes.com and I didn’t retype it yet. I’m starting to like the way allrecipes.com formats their recipes.

When I looked at the ingredients, I saw I needed a dry cornbread mix, 8.5 ounces. Interesting. I thought that must be a small mix. Sure enough, it was a Jiffy cornbread mix!

I started by shredding the zucchini and chopping an onion.

Then I added two eggs and mixed in the 4 oz of cheese.

Then I added the cornbread mix.

I put this mixture in a casserole sprayed with oil, and sprinkled the rest of the cheese on top.

I put the casserole in a 350-degree oven timed for 55 minutes instead of 60 minutes as called for in the recipe, just in case my oven temperature was still unpredictable. After 45 minute the cheese on top was very brown. I took the casserole out of the oven, worried that the top layer of cheese was baked too hard even though the inside could probably bake another 10 minutes.

The casserole tasted fine, but next time I’ll wait until the last 15 minutes to put the cheese on top. Here’s what it looked like after we’ve eaten most of it. It really was pretty tasty!

I will count this recipe a success and will make it again! If you have a question or comment please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Garden Update July 3, 2025

What a difference the sun makes! Here’s the latest from my cruise around the garden. On the patio, the onions have exploded! They are so tightly packed we’ll have to cut them out of the planter…or maybe we’ll just dump them on the ground and pull them apart. Obviously, they were planted too close together! I shouldn’t have to buy onions the rest of the summer!

The next round of radishes has sprouted. Last week I pulled them all out. Bert refilled the planter with fresh dirt so I could plant again.

The new lettuce seed has sprouted:

The small ‘Raindrop’ tomatoes are doing well…I’m hoping they start to turn red soon!

The pumpkins are reaching out and up!

Up in the garden on the hill, the lavender is finally turning purple and boy does it smell good when I brush my hand over the flowers!

The tomatoes are looking good…I’ll have a lot to work with in August!

The carrots have finally decided to grow!

The green and yellow beans are now flowering…the yellow beans seem to be about a week ahead of the green ones.

One of the zucchini plants is actually making zucchini!

And of course, the Echinacea is going nuts. Most seem to be pink, but in the far corner I can still see some of the other colors I planted.

It’s amazing what a little sunshine will do to get things growing. If you have comments or questions for me, please drop me an email at maryjkisner@gmail.com.