Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

So Saturday the 11th was the blizzard; all last week it stayed cold. Then last night, we got a few more inches of snow, that changed to freezing rain. Now it’s about about 32 degrees, and seems like we’re getting all set to have the same kind of grey, slushy Christmas we had last year. Yuck.

2009 grey Christmas

I’m getting a few random emails that the cookie boxes have made their way to their destinations – one really nice one from Lea,with all the cookies in their baggies spread out on her table; so nice for me to know that they arrived still in cookie form, and not as bags of crumbs. Cookie trays and cartons have been delivered to folks here in town.

I have 10 more papers to grade, for my 30-student course. I have to do the students’ final evaluations, and submit grades for that course, plus do the same for a 6-student independent study, then I’ll be on Christmas vacation. I expect this will occur at about 4:00ish on Thursday afternoon. My boss is having a cocktail party – I’m going to take some artichoke quichettes.

So now I can start thinking about Christmas dinner – we’re talking pork roast, sweet sour red cabbage, potato-celeriac mash, and cookies and creme caramel for dessert. And then of course, there’s new years.

I guess, if last year was the cookie season with a broken thumb, this year was the cookie party of the blizzard. We had about 40 – 50 people, which is probably 1/3 to 1/2 the usual number. (100+ folks). I think I’ve been too buried under snow, or cookies, or both, to write.

On Thursday after work I shopped for the party, and shifted from making cookies to making party food. There was:

• Squash quesadillas: cubes of squash roasted in olive oil and smoked paprika, with a parsley & toasted pumpkin seed pesto, and pepper jack cheese;
• Antipasto: Marinated mushrooms, honey goat cheese with home made roasted tomatoes on top, lentil pate with onion confit and cornichons, 2 kinds of olives
• Spicey peanut dip and the veggies with it all came from my CSA box – orange carrots, cauliflower, giant yellow carrots that I cut into rounds for scooping dip, and beauty heart radishes
• Home made caramelized onion dip with store bought potato chips and sweet potato chips
• fancy schmancy pigs in blankets with 4505 meats hot dogs and my yeasted pastry dough
• devilled eggs
• pepperoni roll with pizza sauce to dip
• baked brie – wrapped in puff paste with cranberry chutney inside
• bacon dates
• Jacque Pepin’s sweet cheese spread — the ends of the fancy cheeses that we ate at Thankgiving mashed with toasted pumpkin seeds and raisons
• warm spinach dip
• cocktail meatballs
• Buffalo chicken dip
• artichoke pastries – a Martha that I don’t know if I’ll make again
• Leek quichettes that I definitely would make again, and in fact the artichoke pastry filling might be a lot better in quiche than in the pastries. I made the shells first, and then took them out of the little tart pans and arranged them in rows on another baking sheet, before putting in the filling of eggs and cheese and cream and leeks – that would have permanently welded the quichettes to the pans.

Also a bunch of different cheese and crackers, and little baguette slices.

I didn’t photograph a thing – John was going to, but all he shot was the beauty hearts. The kids didn’t go back to Milwaukee until Monday – the WI DoT and the state highway patrol were saying stay off the highway, and there were parts of I-94 closed most of Sunday.

On Sunday morning, while we were shoveling snow, my brother, in Seattle, was bailing water out of his basement.

Now I’m being the cookie fairy, hand delivering cartons & platters of cookies to friends in Madison who missed the party, and packing and shipping boxes. On Monday, I spent from 1:30 – 9:00 p.m. just getting all the cookies packed in plastic bags. Packing the boxes after the cookies are bagged is easier, but I don’t have the energy for it tonight. I shipped 4 boxes today, and I’ll do another 4 tomorrow. Monday I made 3 deliveries, today 4, and tomorrow a big platter to work, for our office holiday potluck.

Tuesday was ruggelach night. Well, I glazed the rainbow cookies with chocolate, and cut them up, and I made the windmill dough logs and chilled them to be sliced & baked, but mostly it was all ruggelach, all the time, 6:00 – 11:00. I got a new, giant Tupperware from the nearby hardware store that had a literal fire sale – in October, they had a fire, so they decided that the best thing to do was sell off all their inventory, empty the shelves, and then clean up. So it’s about the size of a small plastic baby bath – it’s full of cookies now, so I can’t read the bottom but I’d guess it’s more than a gallon, maybe 2? maybe 6 or 8 quarts? I filled that, plus a 5-qt bucket, plus a 3-cup cottage cheese container to give to John tomorrow, when he comes to town for a dentist appointment. I couldn’t help but smile at how many there were, and I carried them all upstairs to show Mark, and got to watch 5 minutes of Johnny Depp on Letterman.

Baby basinette size Tupperware of ruggelach

I made A LOT of cookies Sunday. And I started writing about them Monday, but somehow lost the post – oddly, since Word press usually is good about saving even when I don’t tell it to.

Anyways, I made the dough for the nukhorns, 3X, 12 rounds of dough to be rolled out and filled with nuts and brown sugar.

Then I made the spritz, which was satisfying, not only because I had to go to three grocery stores to get the Christmas M&Ms, but also because last year something was not right, and a dismaying number of the spritzes broke when I tried to take them off the pan. Maybe it was because I couldn’t pull the trigger hard enough on the cookie gun with my broken thumb. Maybe it was the Costco flour. Or maybe it was the composition of the dough. I use the recipe from the Betty Crocker Cooky Book, and I have 2 editions, 1965, with a “Merry Christmas, Debra” inscription on the inside cover in my grandmother’s hand; and 1977 that I bought myself. The ingredients are just a little different, in amounts of sugar and flour, and whole egg or egg yolk, plus I have annotated both recipes, with my past thinking on spritz-cookie-dough butter:flour:sugar ratio. I had 9 egg yolks left from all the almond paste cookies, so I went with the 1965 version that calls for yolks, further reasoning that since the cookie gun was manufactured in the ’60s, I was matching the formula with the tools of the times. Seems to have worked.

I made Mark’s rolled ginger bread, and royal icing’d them, and took a dinner break to watch the season finale Boardwalk empire (since we’re grownups and can do whatever we want, as Mark said, we ate the last couple of slices of the Thanksgiving pies with ice cream for our main course, and “free sample” – broken & mishapen – cookies for sides). Afterwards, I made the chocolate toffee bars and the raspberry-almond bars. The chocolate toffee bars are from Silver Palate, and the raspberry-almond Richard Sax’s Classic Home Desserts – both long time members of the cookie pantheon, that I make almost as written, with my well practiced tweaks. On Monday, it took almost an hour to cut up all the bars and pack them into containers – well, and I washed all the cookie sheets, too. Three more night to go …

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… are a lot of work. But they’re so charming. My brother calls them the little hamburgers – he would; that’s what they look like to a vegetarian. The original plan for last night was to make the Sambuca crinkles, then bake the spoon cookies, then, while they were cooling, make the coconut cookies. Ha. I made the Sambuca cookies, but the spoon cookies take so long to shape, squeezing bits of the dough into the spoon, that all I did while they were baking was shape more of them, and then while they were cooling, I was melting and straining the jam (a tasty mixture this year, BTW, of cherry, apricot, strawberry and raspberry, and I’m going to have good PB&J sandwiches the next few days with the resulting strained out, extra-fruit, apricot-cherry preserves). And, I don’t think that baking and then jam sandwiching them the next day is an option – seems to me you have to get them jammed while their pores are still open from the warmth of the baking for everything to adhere properly. Now, that’s the kind of stuff I worry about when I wake up in the night. I made 4X the recipe, 2 pounds of butter and 8 cups of flour, supposed to yield 120; I ended up with 110 – plus one extra free sample made from the last two spoons of dough – one of them was on the skimpy side – and they got a little too dark on the bottoms. I guess that’s not so far off. I used a smaller spoon this year than previous. I noticed a spoon that strikes me as smaller in the silverware drawer when I was putting stuff away. Maybe I’ll try that one next year. Or maybe I’ll find the perfect spoon at Goodwill, in the meantime.

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