suffering cookies

Every year we hold a post-Christmas party for family, church friends, work friends, significant others, neighbors, random strangers… lots of people. This year that party proved Murphy’s Law.

Let’s start with these cookies, which have been dubbed “Heartache cookies”, “$60 Cookies”, and “Suffering cookies” at different intervals.

They are a great big pain in the ass!

It started with the Washington Post cookie special in the Food section. They do it every year. This year ALL the recipes looked like a pain in the ass. Weird ingredients, complicated methodologies, general sense of fussiness. However, my mom thought the Oaxacan Chocolate Cookies, from Jaleo, Jose Andres’ original restaurant in D.C., sounded sufficiently interesting that they were worth the fuss.

Well, let’s recount what happened:

- The recipe called for 2 teaspoons of mezcal. Mezcal, for those of you who do not know (as I did not until relatively recently), mezcal might be considered the Scotch of tequila. It’s agave liquor, aged. Wonderfully smoky and delicious. But we only needed 2 teaspoons. And the smallest amount the liquor store carried was a fifth. For $28.

- Then we needed 10 1/2 ounces of very high cacao percentage dark chocolate. My sister was kind enough to donate two chocolate bars she got for Christmas to the cause. We needed one more and opted to get Mexican chocolate, as the recipe called for. A bar of Taza chocolate (which is delicious, and direct trade, admittedly) was $9, without tax. Absurdly expensive ingredient #2. And let’s not forget the massive amount of butter going into this, too.

- The methodology was bizarre, and instructed the cookie maker (my mom, at this phase in the process) to quit using a mixer and fold, by hand, an enormous amount of flour into wet ingredients that were not all that wet and did not particularly care for that process. It took forever, and resulted in dough with the consistency of gravel.

- Then that gravel was supposed to be formed into logs. Yeah. Right. When my mom finally succeeded (seemingly) in forming one log, she wrapped it in wax paper and went to, per the recipe’s instructions, chill it in the fridge. When the log promptly collapsed, causing a very very large amount of dough to scatter all over the kitchen floor. Awe. some.

- Lest you think the suffering was complete, after the lengthy chilling time we then had to follow absurd instructions that involved baking for seven minutes, rotating sheets, baking another seven minutes, brushing the cookies with egg and salt (which I made the executive decision to change to sugar, spiked with salt to make flavors pop, because the cookies were barely sweet at all)

The cookies were good, but NOT WORTH THE SUFFERING.

   

Along with suffering cookies, however, I completed a fun and emotionally satisfying baking project: vasilopita. Also known as Saint Basil’s bread, it’s a Greek tradition: every New Years Day (which is the Saint’s Day of Saint Basil a major saint in the Greek Orthodox church) this bread is made. Inside is hidden a coin. Whoever gets the slice with that coin supposedly has good luck for a year.

This was a recipe from Flavors of Greece, truly the only Greek cookbook you will ever need. It has the perfect, Platonic (get it? get it?!) recipes for all of the Greek standards, as well as some creative unexpected recipes. This vasilopita was quiiiiiite decadent, with lotsa butter, honey, sugar, etc. But what gives it its signature va-va-va-voom is a flavorful combination of anise and orange. SO good.

Furthermore, we very sadly lost my dear great aunt Rose, very unexpectedly, a few weeks before I made this. She made delicious traditional Greek specialties, and her vasilopita was always gorgeous and tasty.

So this was also a bit of a tribute to her.

Also, it was ENORMOUS.

 

Also on the list of things made by me was gluten-free shortbread. Our choir director’s wife Betty, who sings soprano with me, has Celiac disease.. and her husband just got diagnosed too! Guys, is it contagious?! If so, I NEED TO STAY AWAY FROM THEM.

But at least I know how to make good gluten-free shortbread. This recipe, using all-purpose gf flour and rice flour, pleased everyone, including those of us who can (thank God) process gluten.

 

I wasn’t around these parts for Thanksgiving this year, but according to multiple sources, the White House recipe for thyme-roasted turkey, which my aunt Jeanie made for that holiday, was “the best turkey ever”.

So my sister nominated it for our party.

Hint: butter.

 

(Go Redskins! Or Seahawks?! Both Washingtons are in a certain sense my home! Eek!)

My sister also made bacon-wrapped dates. SO good.

 

And deviled eggs with caviar on top, which people ate in like thirty seconds.

ANOTHER Murphy’s law story: we had a container of caviar in the kitchen, which my mom said she had bought for deviled eggs in the past. But the not-too-distant past. But there was no expiration date.

So, we called the company, gave them the serial number on the jar, and they said the caviar didn’t expire until March 2013. Awesome. Oh, but… “We see there are some black spots in the caviar. Is that anything to worry about?” “… We’ll call you back.”

Well, fortunately they did, because it turns out that the kind of caviar we’d bought had been discontinued in 2011. Furthermore, the serial numbers apparently repeat (?!) in canned goods and as a result the jar could’ve been from 2003 or 2006. SO IT’S GOOD WE CHECKED HUH?

Let the record state, my family doesn’t buy caviar regularly. (Clearly!)

Also present at the party were dips: lotsa dips.

Our “secret family recipe” for artichoke dip (artichoke hearts from a can, mayo, garlic, and cheese), made by my mom. A white bean dip I made.

 

From the Greek store, labneh (white) and taramosalata (pink).

My favorite project, a new recipe. The Washington Post food section (attempting to redeem themselves in my eyes for those cookies? I’m sure) did a special section on vegetable pates. The carrot ginger pate caught my eye, as I anticipated great flavor and beautiful color. It delivered on both fronts. Make it! It’s a keeper!

The bacon wrapped dates and, in the other category of stuff-wrapped-in-meat, cantaloupe wrapped in prosciutto.

More Murphy’s Law: my mom brought fruit salad to Christmas Eve. We went to H-Mart a few days prior, which can usually be counted on to have beautiful produce that’s exceedingly ripe. We got mangos, pineapple, and cantaloupe. And… Christmas Eve, none of it was ripe. The other stuff got used, but I figured out-of-season melon would be best served with something else.

It was good with the prosciutto. My grandma made that, back in the day.

Took ANOTHER trip to the delightful Red, White, and Bleu, my new favorite cheese shop, because my mother had bought the Groupon too!

This was a delicious selection that disappeared almost immediately.

Unpictured are the finished meats, but in addition to the turkey (which was good but not earth-shattering, in my opinion) we also had a ham. People went NUTS for the ham, which is funny since I spent a total of 20 seconds making the glaze for it (you’ll see why below)- dumped mustard, brown sugar, and cider vinegar in a bowl, tasted it, went “yeah okay”.

For making little sandwiches, we bought an assortment of rolls. They all looked similar, so you were playing “roll-ette” (HAHAHA!)

Anyway, here’s a photo conveying the general scene.

 

The reason there are fewer pictures, and perhaps they’re a bit blurred, was the state of UTTER CHAOS in our house prior to the party.

I have two words for you: plumbing emergency.

I’m not shedding details, but suffice it to say that while it wasn’t fun running out for a last minute emergency errand to buy scented candles, praying the plumber would be there by the time I returned, it was really nice getting out of a very stressful house.

Anyway. It all worked out. The cookies were good.

 

return of the potluck

Let’s rewind a week!

Remember when everyone’s office was going in on Mega Millions tickets?

We did that. I also had a nice half a grapefruit as my morning citrus pick me up.

Despite an astonishing FORTY TWO CHANCES, our office still did not win. I am stunned. Among other things, I could have quickly livened up my blog: “Today I ate diamonds.”

Lunch: assorted colors, flavors, textures, nutrients.

Bread. All I wanna eat is bread.

Greek yogurt and applesauce, the official lunch item of late March.

Red peppers. Yum!

Edamame zapped with soy sauce. Vair unattractive, vair delicious.

Afternoon snackage. Hummus ‘n carrots, pre-class.

 

Oh wait! Class is canceled!

Beautiful sunshine walk :D Post office errands, much improved. Fun decor!

 

Impulse buy at natural foods store on way home (also got chia seeds, score!)

It started sweet and awesome and ended disgusting. Like all orange soda. Also felt weirdly disappointed that when you buy “natural” orange soda, it’s not… orange.

Friday morning I ate a new breakfast! It’d been awhile.

In a yogurt container : oats, banana, chia seeds (yay!), last of the yogurt, milk. Almonds on top.

Gloomy day. My professor dismissed us a few minutes early and said, “Go out and enjoy the… whatever.”

Lunch in on-campus bookstore cafe. Assortment, with overpriced but warming Starbies tea.

GOOD GRIEF I ate a lot of this.

Here’s a fun fact: I have ceased eating this. I ran out of homemade applesauce, but ALSO, word to the wise, if you have ever left some yogurt out on the counter and said to yourself, “Oh, it’s got healthy bacteria, that’ll keep anything nasty from growing in it and giving you food poisoning”, FALSE. FALSE. FALSE.

Bleurgh.

Lunch had additional, more fun components:

 

Marvy farmer’s market tomatoes with oil and balsamic and

DIPPING LUNCH!

 

I am such a snacker I love love love eating lunch this way: made a sardine salad (mushed up sardine, tiny minced celery and carrot, oil and lemon juice), then toasted up a whole wheat wrap and broke it into crackers once it got crunchy.

Dip, scoop, eat. SO FUN! And such a pleasantly elongated meal.

Scampered home after class on Friday because THIS awaited me:

Duhhhh, turkey in brine!

Wait… you don’t regularly roast turkeys in the springtime?

Background: I work at a food bank. Round about late November, I was sitting at my desk, typing away, when they call me from the front desk and go, “Get your turkey.”

So I went downstairs and was handed a rock-hard frozen turkey. It sat beside me as I finished my data entry.

I deposited it in my freezer, and forgot about it until…

The RETURN OF POTLUCK!

New readers: last year, when I was in Americorps with a delightful group of young persons, we had a weekly potluck every Thursday night, often by theme, always with delicious (if not necessarily healthful) eats. The main instigator of this (the person who would mercilessly nag people if they did not attend) was Erin. Erin lives in Georgia now, but is visiting for the week. Soooooooooooo… POTLUCK!

Erin is also aggressively friendly (aggriendly), so I decided that we should just invite everyone we knew. And volunteered my house. And thought “Yesssssssssss, lots of people! I will ROAST A TURKEY!”

I was a bit apprehensive, because other people at work had already made their turkeys (on Thanksgiving, like normal people :D) and had warned of dryness.

So I brined the bejesus out of it and hoped for the best, and was heartened when this emerged from the oven.

   

Thanks to YouTube, I am now a superb turkey carver. (As anyone who has been near me after having carved a turkey can confirm. I am also a turkey carving braggart of the worst kind).

I find it a pleasant and calming activity.

 

Annnnnnnd that’s largely where the pictures end, because that’s when the guests arrived and I as usual utterly failed to document the party, other guests’ contributions, etc. etc. because it was just too. dang. fun.

One buffet shot.

Kudos to Brian, Lydia’s boyfriend, for being a fellow person-who-photographs-delicious-food. He just posts his on facebook, which I love. And raid for my blog, clearly.

This is a Steve invention that is GREAT and EASY: sliced cucumber. Tofu. Soy sauce. Sriracha.

 

Yum! Also in that shot: the hilarious GIANT SANDWICH my cousin Ashley and her boyfriend brought. And in that bottom, Jiffy cornbread which I also randomly made, fearing people running out of food and being confused and kind of sketched out to find a box of Jiffy cornbread in my pantry.

Here’s my plate, the highlight of which was Lydia’s pasta which was GREAT and everyone was all, “Wait, this isn’t real sausage?” and even I was kind of thrown even though my vegetarian best friend had made it but fact: Tofurkey brand Italian sausage is awesome. Also threw together a stir fry at the last minute which I was glad I did, since, there were many foods of the junkier persuasion and it was good to get in at least some veg.

But, quite honestly, a lot of the consumbles at my party were liquid :D Earlier in the day, I’d thrown together somewhat random proportions of fruit/wine/booze/soda to make white sangria.

Not bad. Maybe next time I’ll follow a recipe. Probably not.

I spent most of the evening drinking Malbec brought by Ashley (yum!). We also did a tasting at one point of some rather bizarre chocolate wine that I was given as a gift. It was… uh…

Also in the junkiness department: LOTSA delicious desserts. Patricia texted me that she was running a little late and had also “Taken something healthy and made it unhealthy”.

Witness: sweet potato cupcakes. YUM.

There was also the apple bundt cake I made and froze awhile ago, homemade key lime pie (!), Richard’s astonishingly delicious first attempt no less. And Amy brought no-bake cookies that involved peanut butter and chocolate and were like… Ho.Ly. Crap.

And we ate and chatted and hung in my living room and it was just like old times but also with new fun people :D

salad days

Ahhhh, summer. Everything is just so EASY in the summer. In the winter you have to *cook*. In the summer, you can just… throw things in a bowl, basically.

Yes, you have to chop them… but I chop recreationally.

Today’s fabulous protein-packed post-workout lunch included a fun new salad:

A chopped carrot, a chopped Monterey Jack string cheese, half a chopped apple, and turkey, all dressed in homemade parsley dressing. Scrumpsh!

I really have become *really* conscious of where everything I eat comes from. Which is important to me, but also sort of annoying. It was easier mentally (though certainly not physically) when everyone just grew everything themselves- you knew where it came from! The apple gets four stars (local) the carrots do all right too (organic but not local), and the cheese, though real food in a fairly natural form, is just string cheese from Safeway.

As for the turkey, what are your thoughts? I went to Trader Joe’s seeking out the highest possible standard of deli meat and this is what they had:

With ground beef, it seems pretty clear that 100% grass fed is the way to go, with local being the gold standard. An advantage of that is it can be purchased in bulk at Costco and is less pricey. That being said, I don’t want to (and shouldn’t) eat red meat every day (especially ostensibly in the interests of environmentalism! That’s insane! It has a huge carbon impact!)

I bought a free range local chicken at the farmer’s market the other week (it was so horrifically expensive! Also, I’m afraid to cook it because if I make it poorly it was a huge investment!).

Anyway, I’m less clear on deli turkey. Any ethical meat pros out there? What should I look for?

The rest of lunch:

The remainder of the apple with some PB, and some soup.

The soup is Trader Joe’s roasted corn and poblano flavah, which I bought for the first time.

Trader Joe’s soups are so SPORADIC! I like that you can get them in those cardboard containers so they don’t taste metally, but the quality is so varied! The carrot-ginger, butternut, and roasted red pepper and tomato are amazing, but the black bean is hella boring and this corn one kind of tastes like feet.

So I put on scads of hot sauce.

 

And then it tasted fine. The smiley helps. I love a smiley face bowl in the summertime!

So for the grilled lamb on Sunday, the recipe instructed you to make a sauce for the lamb by mixing some of the marinade (that did not go on the raw meat!) with chopped diced tomatoes.

No one got it. It didn’t look like sauce. It was confusing. So we had a lot of leftover chopped tomatoes. Fortunately, those tomatoes were in a home where no food goes to waste. Ever. Ever ever. And so they live on in… gorgeously colorful taco salad filling!  

The leftover tomatoes, a can of black beans, half an avocado, an ear of corn, and a sprinkling of taco seasoning. So yummy!

Taco salad is one of those things I love to make at home and never order in restaurants.

Because a “salad” should not have your entire day’s allotment of saturated fat in it, in the form of cheese, sour cream, fried chips, etc. etc. etc. Quite honestly, sour cream has never particularly done it for me, the chips on taco salads are always inordinately greasy, etc. etc. etc.

That is not to say, however, that when making a taco salad I do not like some crunch.

Oh, I like some crunch.

As usual, we are out of tortilla chips. I kind of want to get some Food Should Taste Good chips, just cause everyone raves about them and they’re a whole grain… yet I am too lazy.

Anyway, these utilized some of the 10,000 corn tortillas currently in my fridge.

Just take however many 6 inch corn tortillas you want, cut them into sixths, and put on a cooking spray’d pan. Then give them another spray, and if you so desire season them with salt or taco seasoning, and put them in a toaster oven until just browned on the edges.

They joined other ingredients on an attractive toppings plate:

The chips, pepper jack cheese, and some nice crunchy Romaine.

I obviously topped my finished taco salad with dousings of Franks Red Hot.

Then I invented kind of a bizarre microwaved dessert. I was going for peaches and cream?

I combined half a nectarine, the last 1/4 cup of a container of cottage cheese, 2 T flour (I used white whole wheat), 1/2 tsp of stevia baking mix, and 1/4 tsp of baking powder.

I microwaved all of that on half power in various increments… it probably ended up being about 3 minutes total?

Anyway, it kind of looked and tasted like baby food.

Experiments. What’s to lose?

I mainly want to give Safeway some credit for having a really high quality and affordable organic brand. Tip of the hat to you, Safeway!

I went to the farmer’s market today where I was informed that this was the last week for the incredibly sweet nectarine variety I’ve been eating with such gusto! *Sob*

So I bought nine.

However, though we say goodbye to old friends, there are new arrivals. Including STRIPEY SQUASH!

Longtime readers may remember me falling in love with this last summer. Apparently the variety is actually called Zephyr Squash. It is SUPER sweet and delicious (and come on just so cute!)

Also:

Fresh beans that I have on assurance from the farmers taste like black eyed peas (!) and oooooooooookra! So much love. This is far from the only produce for the week: this is the Thursday morning  from Annandale haul.

Then there’s the Thursday night from Ballston (where my mama will likely pick up tomatoes and blueberries, as she is wont to do most Thursdays), the Saturday morning from Falls Church, and the Sunday midday (after church) from Potomac. Hurray for the explosion of farmer’s markets in my area!

Oh, incidentally, yes those veggies are in plastic bags- they are ALL reused.