Holiday Spirit is all about Cookies

More than ever, this year, holiday spirit seems to be tied to cookies. My perspective may be skewed slightly by the websites that I read, many of which are cooking blogs, as well as a recurring theme of trying to make the holidays healthier by either modifying cookie recipes or abstaining from cookies on Sparkpeople.com. Consequently, I recently made a batch of my first holiday sugar cookies and brought them to my class. As it turns out, homemade sugar cookies (in combination with the majority of the class hardly sleeping the previous night) can make grammar really exciting! Who would have thought.

I used the icebox sugar cookie recipe in the Joy of Cooking Christmas Cookies (with very slight modifications, found here) and the students loved it (they were shocked the the cookies were homemade). They finished every last one.

Warning: the cooking time and the active preparation do not take a long time, but there is at least 3.5 hours worth of waiting involved. Plan accordingly.

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups (7.5 ounces) all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2/3 cup (5.25 ounces) unsalted butter.
• 2/3 cup (4.75 ounces) sugar
• 1 large egg
• 2 teaspoons vanilla

Directions:

1. Thoroughly stir together and set aside the flour, baking powder, and salt.
2. Cream the butter and sugar and beat until fluffy. (The recipe says with an electric mixer and it says to soften the butter. I took the butter straight out of the refrigerator, chopped it into small pieces put it in and made it fluffy by hand with a fork. Either way works).
3. Add to the creamed butter and sugar mixture the egg and vanilla. Continue beating until these are incorporated.
4. Mix in the flour mixture until just smoothly incorporated.
5. Cover and refrigerate until slightly firm, 20-30 minutes.
6. Upon removing from the refrigerator, place the dough on a long sheet of wax paper. With lightly oiled hands, shape into an even, 11-inch long log. Roll up the wax paper and twist the end to prevent unrolling.
7. Place on a tray and put in the freezer until completely frozen. You can also leave the log in the freezer for up to three weeks, but if you are going to do this, wrap the log in an airtight bag before placing it in the freezer.
8. To bake, preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Lightly grease the cookie sheets or use a non-stick baking sheet.
9. Carefully peel the wax-paper off the log and cut into 1/8-1/4 of an inch slices, immediately transferring them to the cookie sheet and spacing about 2 inches apart.
10. Decorate the cookies with colored crystal sugar.
11. Bake the cookies on the upper oven rack for 7-10 minutes (note:: I experimentally verified that they do not work out so well in a toaster oven-- they puff up and burn).
12. When the cookies are golden all over, remove them from the oven. Transfer the cookies to wire racks to cool.
13. NOTE: these cookies do not taste good warm. I don't know why. They taste much better when fully cooled. They can also be stored, airtight, for up to 3 weeks.

 

I thought I would also share some other Christmas cookie fun for the sake of your holiday cheer. Two recipes one for sugar cookies and one for "butter cookies" from My Year on the Grill. One Perfect Bite also did a holiday cookie roundup.

My mom also sent me this cute piece by a "dough artist" the other day. I have to say, as a kid, I was always disappointed watching the ball drop on TV. The ball dropping depicted by this artist is much more along the lines of what I expected.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Touch at Your Own Risk

This morning I went on a mini-adventure to try to find some of the ingredients for a special holiday appetizer [1].

One of the things that characterizes the holiday season, according to much of the buzz on SparkPeople.com, is holiday parties, and specifically "the dreaded potluck" [2]. I really enjoy cooking, so I love bringing food. The problem is, that party-organizers always seem to ask my family to bring appetizers, which tend to be pretty boring (although my mother has come up with some clever things in the past). This holiday season I found an appetizer that I wanted to make: the Gỏi Cuốn from My Year on the Grill.

The Gỏi Cuốn are non-fried vegetarian spring rolls-- essentially the salad rolls from my favorite Thai place by my Alma Mater. These wraps are yummy and full of vegetables with a spicy dipping sauce. In order to make them, one needs rice-paper wraps in order to make them. In order to do that, my mom and I took a trip to the local Japanese (but really more general Asian) grocery store.

I borrowed this picture from My Year on the Grill.

The first thing I noticed about the store were the 20 lb bags of rice. The best part, was that there were not only 20 lb bags of white rice and brown rice, but rice from different regions (California seemed to be the most common) as well as sweet white and brown rice (which looks more like seeds than actual rice), different sizes of rice grain, red rice, black/forbidden rice, and various mixtures. There was even brown jasmine rice! I've never heard of brown jasmine rice. I also noticed that there was some wonderful cookware, including every size and shape of rice cooker imaginable.

My favorite moments came in the fish and shellfish section. On the pre-packaged shelves, there were some lovely cuts of salmon sitting beside what proclaimed to be fabulous cuts of squid. The most amusing part, in my opinion, was the shellfish. There were tanks upon tanks of crabs and lobster. The tanks themselves were kind of sad-- the crabs and lobsters were pretty crowded. However, there was a gigantic...vat (for lack of a better word)...which contained some kind of shellfish. I did not actually peer in because I was distracted by the sign above which said "Touch at your own risk. We are not responsible for your injury." Suddenly, I was struck by one of those ridiculous impulses to stick my hand in and see if something bit it, but luckily I refrained. The sign totally cracked me up.

Cerinthus later told me that I should make a comic strip out of my life and that he could totally imagine the cartoon version of me sticking my finger into the tank, getting pinched by a lobster, and saying "this one's fresh!" Ponticus introduced Cerinthus to Questionable Content a few months ago, and Cerinthus is clearly addicted.

Most of the rest of the trip was without incident. We found the rice wraps.  As we were browsing around we also found wonton and gyoza wraps [3]. We also wandered by the hot food section in which a very snappily-dressed Japanese man looked at my mom suspiciously, as if she might be tempted to impede his efficiency.

I am really excited about making the Gỏi Cuốn. I will report back!

Endnotes

1. Obviously the term "adventure" is amusing after my last blogpost on Sartre's Nausea.
2. Personally, I do not attend that many holiday parties and I have never been particularly partial to holiday food, so (since I almost entirely stopped eating holiday cookies) I do not gain that much weight during the holidays.
3. I love vegitable gyoza. if anyone has a recipe, please send it my way. I saw a couple having it at the table next to Cerinthus and me at my favorite Japanese place near my Alma Mater and I ordered it on a whim. This was definitely the right decision.

Pizza for Wimps and Newfound Fame

My bread has not been turning out well. I'm not sure whether it is the fact that I'm no longer in a climate conducive to bread or that I am no longer dependent on my bread in order to finish my thesis, but it has not been working. Even when the bread was working, I was never particularly good at making pizza dough. Tonight I cheated. I made pizza with my mom but we bought a pre-made whole-wheat dough from Trader Joe's. The pizza was great. I used my pizza stone which I've never used with pre-made dough and I was shocked at how well the dough cooked and cooked with the proper timing as the cheese, so right at the point where the cheese had melted sufficiently, the dough was soft and fluffy on the inside and clumsy on the outside. I also had fresh basil from the garden.

The other odd thing that has happened recently is new-found fame. I have been a member of sparkpeople.com for two years now. I have lost 50lbs and gone from being a size 14/16 to a size 2/3/4. My life has changed a lot. Recently, I wrote a blogpost about walking which was one of my primary weight loss tools. Chris Downie, the founder of sparkpeople.com commented on my piece and the next thing I knew, I had been catapulted into the spotlight because my blog-post was emailed out to everyone on the site. Suddenly, people were commenting on my page, emailing me for advice, and finding me all sorts of ways. It was really gratifying. The best part was that a number of people commented on how much they liked my writing. It reminded me that, although I am teaching part time right now, in my real life I want to be an academic and a researcher and will publish books that people will actually read (even if that readership is limited to the classical/philological community).

Speaking of sparkpeople, one of the books I've read this summer was Chris Downie's book. I thought that it was a quick read and extremely enjoyable. He began his site as a way to connect and inspire people. I felt that I was fulfilling that dream when so many people were inspired by what I had written about my walks around the neighborhood. It was fabulous.