Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

As Rach predicted, since the weather was fair, I got a huge turnout for the cookie party. People showed up immediately at the appointed start time – 5:30 – and I had dips & spreads out but nothing to dip or spread them on. I still had all the cookie platters under plastic wrap, cheeses coming to room temp upstairs, safe from cats. I had good help tho – Pat sliced bread, and topped the onion puffs (new this year and I think a keeper). Heike’s brothers went and retrieved the cheeses, and Max made the cracker baskets.

The food was mostly hits – I made the standard Heinz chile sauce meatballs, with the sauce that is supposed to be a 50/50 mix of Heinz chile sauce, and either grape jelly or canned cranberry sauce – neither of which I have ever used (you’re supposed to buy the meatballs, too – never done that either). I usually use red currant jelly, but I forgot to buy any – so decided to use the frozen since Thanksgiving cranberry sauce, and it was delish. Four pounds of meat – all that will fit in my big Dutch oven – and still they went so fast I never got one.

I tried a crab rangoon dip – deconstructed crab rangoon; the cream cheese and the crab baked as dip, with wonton skins made into chips, instead of wrappings. That also went in seconds.

I usually make Mollie Katzen’s pesto-peppercorn torta – neufchatel and ricotta cheese wrapped around pesto – but I wanted something more dramatic – and I had a lot of cream cheese (Costco) – so I made this sun-dried tomato & pesto torta – it’s huge and all but about 1 tablespoon got eaten.

Edamame hummus – not so much – coulda had more of the regular hummus, and probably shoulda stuck with my vision of a trio of dips – edamame, green; hummus, white; and muhamarra, red.

Mark Bittman’s idea of potted shrimp – again, good – but people didn’t snarf it like the other stuff – I think I’ll use it for pasta sauce (maybe with that 1 TBLS of the torta that’s left).

Chive sour cream cocktail buns with ham & cheese – I made about 3 dozen buns and could have made twice as many – I had enough ham for more sandwiches, and plenty of cheese. Heike’s brother tried out a bun with a meatball.

Some of the other stuff sort of goes with out saying – spicey peanut dip with blanched broccoli from the co-op and cauliflower, beauty heart radish, and yellow and orange carrots from my CSA box. Leek tart – I ended up making 2 rectangular quiches and then sliced them into squares instead of doing the individual shells. Bacon dates. Baked Brie – with American Spoon tomato preserves inside. Devilled eggs. Cheese & crackers. Layered dip – refried beans with corn & poblano salsa, sour cream & cheese. Roasted squash quesadillas, with cubes of squash, Cafe Flora pumpkin seed parsley pesto, and pepper jack. Wienies in poppin’ dough with the good 4505 meats dogs. Caponata that I made last summer from the freezer. Boursin and red pepper tarts with red pepper relish, also from the freezer. Because I bought the Boursin at Costco, I now have a lifetime supply of Boursin – too bad it doesn’t actually keep that long.

Heike washed a lot of dishes and Ann also did a lt of washing up at the end. My schedule was kind of brutal – cookie party Friday, then off to Minneapolis for Al’s graduation party Saturday. I got up and threw together the hot spinach dip that I hadn’t done done for the party and made a pan of peppermint patty brownies – a hybrid of Maida Heatter and Milwaukee Journal, with melted unsweetened chocolate instead of cocoa – because I didn’t want the Dutch process cocoa disaster to happen again. They came out really good – I promise to write up the recipe real soon now™. [And ha, I already did; I kind of thought so. So all I have to do is add the melted chocolate option].

Picked up Al’s grilfriend and off to the Twins. Nice party thrown by the parents of one of Al’s roomates – it’s a house of 5 guys, and lots of their parents, AND girlfriends’ parents came for the party. The kids went off on a party bus -I asked the next morning where they went and at the same time, Al said, “Hudson” and Emma said, “divey townie bar” and Al explained that the point of the bus is to be on the bus – the driving is supposed to be better than the destination. I went over to Tincher’s, via East Riverside Drive. Took him his cookies, and nodded off while he was skyping with his sweetie. In the morning I knew I could walk back the way I drove over, and walk by the river, so I did. Had coffee with Tincher, took the kids to brunch, and home by 5:00. Whew. Of all my trips to the Twins, this had to be the best for NOT getting lost.

I thought yesterday – Sunday – with the driving and all, might be my first cookie-less day since Thanksgiving, but I ended up decorating the gingerbread, and making the marzipan dates. Today I shipped off 13 more boxes, bringing this year’s total to 20. Whew again. And still various platters and Tupperwares to deal out to people around town. And I hope to take a cookie tray to the homeless at Savory Sunday on Christmas Day.

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So, my grandmother, my mom’s mom, is of the main reasons I make all these cookies at holiday time, and send out goodie boxes to the family. She always did, and opening the box and finding out what was inside, what new recipes she’d tried this year, was always great fun – especially when my brother and I were high school age potheads. But even at that point in my life, I appreciated my grandmother’s scientific approach to recipes, trying this and that from various cookbooks, to see how well different methods and combinations of ingredients worked – and, as Julia says “critically tasting” the results.

One of our favorite cookies that showed up in those long-ago goodie boxes was a ginger creams – a kind of chewy ginger cookie, with white frosting on top. We looked for the recipe, and in the late 1980s when I was a sorority house cook, I found a recipe in one of the sorority house cookbooks, for ginger bears – a ginger cookie that said it had the thin crust and chewy center that we remembered, and I hand copied that recipe and have been using it ever since. A few years after that long quest, once the hand-copied recipe was firmly in my cookie pantheon, I discovered what was probably the original, ginger creams, what my gramma called them, in the the 1963 Betty Crocker Cooky Book that she gave me for Christmas in 1964 (according to her inscription on the inside of the front cover). That recipe has shortening; the ginger bears have butter, so I stuck with the ginger bears.

In 2007, I entered the recipe in a Waitrose food essay contest – they were looking for the next Elizabeth David – a vicar’s wife in the UK won – but the magazine went out of business shortly after. Anyhow, I don’t think I ever made the cookies from this transcribed version – I always went back to my hand written copy. This year, I used a print out from my old blogspot blog, doubled – so 8 cups of flour – and only 2 sticks of butter. When I got to mixing the dough, I thought it looked awfully dry – I remembered other years literally pouring this dough into a bowl to chill after mixing. I checked the recipe and thought I had doubled everything except the molasses – so I added more molasses, and the quickly realized that what I now had was 4X the molasses, and 2X everything else. Forgetting the cardinal rule that adding stuff almost never solves a kitchen disaster – you just end up with more fucked up food, instead of a solution – I added enough of everything else – butter, brown sugar, spices, egg, flour – to get everything to 4X – and ended up with a giant bowl, a 16-cup of flour batch of the dough, that was still way too dry. Which got me thinking – 1 stick of butter to 4 cups of flour is really low on the butter. Could I have transcribed the recipe wrong? Should it be 1 cup, 8 ounces, instead of 1 stick, 8 tablespoons of butter? I couldn’t find that original hand copied sheet – I think I remember chucking it last year, thinking “well, I’ve transcribed it to the web now, don’t need this”  – but I checked the Betty Crocker Cooky Book ginger creams, and that has 1/3 cup shortening to 2 cups of flour. Ah Ha.

So I dumped  the whole mess and started over again with 1 cup butter for every four cups of flour – and the resulting cookies look a little flat, but I think they’re going to be right – taste like our memories. Whew.

I was really looking forward to making these cookies. I made them last year for the first time, although I’d been looked at the recipe for years, since it was part of a Swiss cookies feature in the December 1994 Gourmet magazine, and I’ve been making the Biberli from that issue probably since it was published. They’re made with ground almonds, sugar, cinnamon, and egg whites – you make a meringue, scoop some if it out and save it for brushing onto the cookies, and then use the rest to bind the dough together. The recipe (this is dated 2000 in Epicurious; it’s the same as the older version from Gourmet magazine, except for the commentary) says they’re tricky, but in 2010, they went together like a dream, and I liked the little crunch the star cutter made going through the nutty dough. The only downside was I didn’t make enough of them. That’s why this year I planned to make an extra big batch, and expected to enjoy the process. Turns out the trick is measure. The recipe says, “1/4 cup egg whites (about 2 large)” and last year I must’ve measured – this year I counted; 6 whites for my big batch. I thought the dough looked a little wet … I tried rolling it a few times, and even got as far as cutting stars, which only squished when I tried to pick them up. I scraped the dough up off the counter, thinking maybe I could grind the nuts in the dough more finely in the food processor, and the dough’d be more workable – but the machine protested and it didn’t help. Scraped up again, and added more powdered sugar – still goo. Finally I added some gluten-free baking mix, and used the same stuff to flour the pastry cloth – and got them to roll just fine. I was afraid they’d be too sweet or too blah with the extra sugar and flour (albeit gluten-free) – but the little stars are just as yummy as last year – and there’s a lot of them!

On this same night, November 30th, one year ago in cookie season, I allowed as how I was being a wimp – knocking off early. But it looks as if I made three kinds of cookies that night (or at least glazed a kind, and mixed a dough, and baked one kind) – and tonight I am contemplating being done by 9:30, AND only one kind, the biberli. But I guess it’s OK – last year I justified quitting early because I made a mistake mixing a dough, and thought I should quit before I did anything stupid. This year I did a lot of other extraneous to cookies, but necessary stuff – like cleaning the cat litter, and packing up and freezing the turkey broth from the Thanksgiving turkey, and painting the Simnel cake with glaze and booze and wrapping it up to age for a few weeks. And washing a small load of laundry with dish towels and hot pads and my pastry rolling cloths. I haven’t even put the tin foil up to cover the window in the vestibule to make it dark and cold in there for cookie storage.

I guess it’s OK. Or else my standards have just gone to hell – a few of the biberli have that flat look that they did a few years ago when I took the rejects to work, and made them over. But this year I feel no compulsion for the do-over. The jam cookies are done and there’s close to 20 dozen. The fruitcake gems are tiny and cute again – tho UN-photographed as yet. The fruit balls are made and glazed. The first new recipe I tried – Christmas Chocolate Bars from Joy – almonds, dried cherries, yellow raisons, and chopped chocolate in a bar cookie with beat up eggs and no shortening – went in the trash. Awful, spongey – I thought it might come out like an Italian nougat cookie, but no. It’s OK – there’ll be time – it’s a two weekend cookie season this year – I’ll just sit here and write and post pictures and listen to one if the cats snoring. And then I’ll go pack up the biberli, and maybe I can go find that Boardwalk Empire episode I fell asleep to on Sunday on demand, or on HBOGo.

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First cookie kind:

Joy of Cooking lebkuchen

These are the ones that are kind of a sleeper – just a plain brown bar cookie, with a lemon & powdered sugar glaze that tastes mostly like raw cornstarch and too-sharp lemon at first. They age and mellow and the combination gets pretty special.

I also made these fruit balls, that are a Molly Wizenberg recipe – but they still need to be topped with chocolate – they’re not wearing their cute chocolate hats, as she says. That’ll be tomorrow. Looks like last year I thought they’d be a good batch – I think this year’s will be even better.