The Hungry Tiger

Elevenses

American English is sadly lacking in names for proper structured between-meal meals. "Snack" doesn't do it, because it has skittered away from structure and taken up residence with furtive fumblings in desk drawers and that sort of thing. I am not quite at the hobbit level of proliferating meals, but I will certainly confess to enjoying both elevenses and afternoon tea -- the latter often featuring coffee, in my case. A hot drink and a little something to take the edge off is just what the between-meal dips in morale and blood sugar call for.

My afternoon goûter is very well in hand, as S. and I have taken to faithfully stopping for a cappuccino and a little bite in Little Italy on our way home from work in the evenings. Midmornings more frequently get short shrift, but sometimes when I am working at home I manage to take the time for a little spread like the one pictured above.

The cookies are Almondias, which I always pick up when I happen to be in a Trader Joe's. I've only ever tried their "original" flavor, but I have found no reason to want to stray. (That said, now that I know that they make other flavors, I find myself intensely curious about what they are like.) Not too sweet, not too unsweet, thin and crunchy, just the thing. Some occasions call for for a baked good that is small and crisp, rather than large or gooey or chewy. The manufacturers take a lot of trouble to emphasize that they are not dreadful for you, but that is entirely beside the point. The important thing is that they are very tasty and a fine complement to a restorative cup of tea.

Fear not the fruitcake: panpepato

This is the season that makes a young girl's heart turn to fruitcake, and that is just what fills holiday guests with fear and dismay. Everyone has met at least one fruitcake of the classic horrific variety. These, as you know, feature sawdusty batter through which unfortunate brightly colored nubbins are distributed liberally. The nubbins are bought in plastic tubs with labels that read something like "FRUIT CAKE MIX," and they are not food. As a result of all this hanky-panky, people tend to harbor a certain skepticism about fruitcakes.

The fruitcake I make, based on a recipe in Carol Fields' Celebrating Italy, is not like those fruitcakes. It is very ugly and quite ancient and entirely delicious. It is called "panpepato," which means "peppered bread," and is a wonderful wodge of real fruit, nuts, honey, spices, and dark chocolate. It is a cake in an older sense only, containing just enough flour to hold those other, more important elements together. There is no butter or egg and certainly no leavening of any kind.

The ingredient list is long, but if you bypass the two most time-consuming steps by buying excellent quality candied citrus peel and pre-toasted, -peeled, and -chopped hazelnuts, it is actually a snap to make. It is not, no matter what you do, cheap to make, because it is chock full of the luxuries of the season. But then, that is what makes it so good, and I find it cheering to be partaking of something that has been a winter luxury since a time long before central heating. Besides, it is rich, which means that you serve it in tiny slices and it goes a long way.

Cookie followup: chocolate and plain sables

In the end, I made both kinds of cookies featured in that New York Times article (hoping this is a more permanent link), and really, I can't decide at all which I like better. The plain ones are addictive because they're a little saltier, a little crunchier, a little less obvious. The chocolate ones are addictive because it's so hard to find a good chocolate cookie, and these are certainly that: not boring, dark and cardboardy like an Oreo or Necco wafer; not squashy and too sweet like a brownie masquerading as a cookie. Both are an impressive balance of avoiding both insipidness and pretentiousness. And yet French! Amazing!

And in the end, they're just extra good icebox cookies, which means that they're convenient, too. You can make a batch and pop it into the freezer for up to a month if you want, and slice off some fraction for baking up whenever you feel like it. And if you go so far as to make both kinds and do that, then you'll really look fancy. So anyway, I'm not ready to give up these recipes any time soon, and want to be sure to preserve them. I get anxious about the New York Times, you know. The recipe lists, therefore, are below.

For future reference: Mix them up by creaming the butter (but not overcreaming), adding the sugar and salt, then mixing in the dry ingredients as quickly as possible. The dough, especially with the chocolate cookies, will be alarmingly crumbly, but perservere. Knead and pat and roll each half-batch into a tube about one and a half or two inches in diameter. Once they've been chilled, cut into slices. I like them cut about 1/4" thick myself, which I baked at 350° F for about 17 minutes for the plain and 13 for the chocolate.

Holiday baking

My oven is currently occupied by a batch of the basic sable cookies described in this week's New York Times style magazine. I suspect linkrot will soon render that reference useless, and as so often seems to happen with the Times things I want to link to, this article seems to have the kind of "special URL" that the New York Times Link Generator can't handle. As it just so happens, however, the recipe is basically the same as this one, but without lemon and with the cookies cut a little thicker and baked a little longer. I also added a bit of Maldon salt to the demerara sugar I used to decorate the edges of the cookies, for even more salt-sweet sophisticated appeal. I highly recommend taking the minimal extra trouble required to gild the lily with the egg yolk wash and sugar around the edges. The result is both chic and texturally pleasing.

I'd love to post a picture of the cookies, as well as the army of nutsacks (ho ho) I made up this weekend as part of the holiday gift preparation extravaganza, but the battery charger for our camera is malfunctioning. Crumbs.

Coffee cookies

People who know my habits in coffee-drinking would be surprised to discover the little jar of Maxwell House instant coffee crystals on my kitchen shelf. But they're not for making cups of filthsome brew, they're for baking. I love coffee-flavored desserts, and consider there to be absolutely nothing wrong (and everything right) in having one with a nice cup of proper coffee, too.

This recipe is adapted from one in Baking With Julia for "Mocha Chocolate Chips." That calls for a great deal of chocolate and some optional dried apricots (?) -- but while coffee and chocolate certainly do taste good together, the reflexive mochafication of everything coffee felt just too ubiquitous this week. Why not make plain coffee cookies? Be a rebel.

UNMOCHA COFFEE COOKIES

2 cups flour
3 T. instant coffee crystals
1 t. baking soda
1 t. salt
2 sticks (8 oz) butter
3/4 c. white sugar
3/4 c. (packed) brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 t. vanilla extract


Whisk the flour, coffee crystals, baking soda, and salt together in a mixing bowl and set aside. In your mixer, or with a hand mixer, beat the butter on medium until it is light and fluffy. Add the white sugar and beat about half a minute more; then add the brown sugar and beat for another 30 seconds. Add the eggs, beating for a minute after each one.

With your mixer on low, add the dry ingredients and beat just until everything's incorporated fully. Scrape everything down and insure that it's mixed thoroughly, with no streaks or clumps. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap or a plastic bag and put it in the refrigerator for at least a couple of hours to firm up.

Bake on parchment paper in heaping tablespoon-sized helpings of dough, at 350° F. They'll spread quite a lot, so leave plenty of space. Bake for 10-12 minutes until the middle is just baked, while they are still soft to the touch. Cool to room temp on cooling racks.

New age chocolate

Today I purchased a bar of chocolate in a moment of severe weakness. It was an Aveda salon, of all places. It contains essential oils of various things and wonderfully chewy pieces of citrus peel. It promises to provide me with "intelligent nutrition deliciously delivered through organic chocolate" and instructs me to "enjoy entire bar for personal inner calmness." The chocolate itself is quite good though not fantastic, and the combination of flavors and textures is definitely a success.

They charge a steep premium for the inner peace, though, so I am feeling compelled to consume it in very small portions over several days. I am like Charlie of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fame, only without the grandparents and with micronutrient aromatherapy.

Naga hot chocolate

I love Naga chocolates. So tonight I made myself a Naga-style hot chocolate, by adding a couple of shakes of leftover homemade curry powder to my hot chocolate. It rocks. Rocks, I tell you!

This is very good for tired people who have toiled over both research and midterm-writing, and who have to get up early in the morning. It is probably good for you, too.

For one big mug, I took the milk, a heaping tablespoon of cocoa, a heaping tablespoon of sugar, and a square of dark chocolate. This I heated to a simmer and took off the heat. I added a shake-shake-shake of my curry powder, which was made along the lines of the first recipe here, whisked thoroughly and put back on the heat.

Because I like a nice thick luscious hot chocolate, my favored method is to heat it gently up to a boil multiple times. Each time, the very instant it comes to the boil, it comes off the heat. I let it settle down and whisk it well (or use an immersion blender). Then I put it back on the heat, bring it just to the boil, and take it off again and whisk. Repeat as necessary to get the thickness you desire. It thickens up quite impressively at the third boil or so.

Gingerbread hamentaschen

I grew up in a very Jewish neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This has spoiled me for life, because I have never quite gotten used to the idea that one cannot just pop around the corner and get the most authentic and delicious baked goods of the Jewish persuasion at a moment's notice. Of course, that is no longer as true as once it was, even back home -- the serious bagels of dear old Bageland, for example, are no more, replaced by the puffy pseudo-bagels of Breugger's and their kin -- but it is even less true in Maryland. So accommodations must be made.

My Jewishness, such as it is, is partial (it comes to me only through my mother's father) and cultural, not religious. The extent of my experience with actual observance is limited to a couple of trips to the shul with my antique babysitter when I was four or five. All I remember is that the lovely old ladies doted on me and gave me coffee candies. Later I went to an after-school program at the JCC, where I learned the blessings for snacks. Thank you for the graham crackers, King of the Universe, and challah on Fridays! And there was some garland-making for the Sukkot sukkah, and plasticine menorah-crafting, and so on.

But here it is about to be Purim, a holiday I have never celebrated, though it sounds like fun, with the noisemakers and the dressing up and the whole All-of-a-Kind Family wholesome carnivalesque cavalcade of festivities. The point, however, is that just knowing Purim is there is enough to make me want hamentaschen. I am a shameless hussy when it comes to holiday foods, and I don't care who knows it. Hamentaschen, of course, are the traditional cookies of Purim, the three-cornered numbers that come filled with fruit or poppy seeds or whatever outlandish and nouveau thing you can get away with. I have always been fondest of apricot.

On eGullet, I was exposed to the entrancing idea of gingerbread-apricot hamentaschen. The recipe is this: take your favorite recipe for gingerbread men and use it for the dough. Roll it out and cut circles with a cutter, or make balls of dough and flatten them into thin disks. Fill with apricot filling, which you can make from reconstituted dried apricots or cooked down jam, but I was lazy and used the Solo brand canned filling. It's good and it's classic, and I felt that this time, bringing gingerbread into the picture was daring enough. Fold the sides in to make a triangle, leaving space in the middle, and pinch to seal. Bake at 350 for about 10 minutes, until they are baked but still a bit soft.

I am not a practiced hamentaschen folder and pincher, so the results at my hands are a rather homely collection of lopsided things. But they taste divine, so I am not complaining.

Snark's chocolate Xmas cookies

These are adapted from a recipe for amaretti in The Italian Baker. They are the soft, dense, chewy sort of amaretti, not too sweet. Because they are chocolate, I think they are better with coffee than with tea, but either (or neither) is fine. You will hate me and not want to make these because I did the measurements by weight, and the units don't even match. But too bad for you if you don't, because they are extremely easy and delicious.

200 grams almond flour or finely chopped almonds
100 grams brown sugar
2 egg whites, lightly beaten
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, the darker and fancier the better

Mix almonds and sugar thoroughly. Stir in the egg whites. Melt the chocolate, let cool a minute, and stir that in, too. Pipe or spoon into 1 1/2" rounds on buttered or parchment-lined cookie sheets, leaving about 3/4" between rounds. Smooth with a damp finger and press gently with a fingertip in the middle of each. Leave out to dry for at least an hour. You may dust them lightly with confectioner's sugar before baking, if you like. Preheat oven to 300° F and bake 30-40 minutes, until the bottoms are firm and lightly toasty. Let cool on racks.

This recipe makes about 24-30 small cookies, about two cookie sheets' worth. If you only have one, I think you could lay out the second half of the cookies on a plain sheet of parchment on the counter for the drying period.

Crustless pumpkin pie

This crustless pumpkin pie was very good, and happy with everyone's blood sugar. And I get to have leftover for breakfast, of which pleasure I felt sore deprived after our pieless (but delicious) Thanksgiving.

1 can pumpkin
3 eggs, lightly beaten
1 can evaporated milk
1/2 c. brown sugar
1 t. cinnamon
1/4 t. ground ginger
1/4 t. ground cloves
a little nutmeg
pinch salt
almond flour or ground almonds for dusting the pie pan

Mix all ingredients but the almond flour in a large bowl. Butter the pie pan and sprinkle generously with almonds. Bake at 450 for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 and bake another 30 minutes or so, until set. Let cool before serving. This made just a little too much for my not-so-deep 9" pie pan, so I used a couple of ramekins for the overflow.

Haut Chocolat

Oh dear. Today the Vosges chocolate catalogue arrived on my doorstep. Alas that it did not come with a complimentary bar of Naga, which is the most delectable flavored chocolate bar of all time. (I owe my acquaintance with it, as well as my gratitude for getting to have a WHOLE BIG BAR of my very own, to the lovely and generous John and Jen 13.) It turns out that we could have had a Naga wedding cake. Our far less schmancy classic Pittsburgh burnt almond torte was perfectly delicious and thematically harmonous, and I wouldn't have wanted it any other way, but Naga! Cake! Naga cake!

On the other hand, I don't think I'm quite ready for the "Vincent gallo" savory chocolate line, although they do have a point in that cheese and chocolate go well together when they are not combined in the selfsame piece of food. But yeah, not right now, thanks.

Adolf Loos Gingerbread

"When I want to eat a piece of gingerbread, I choose a piece that is plain, not a piece shaped like a heart, or a baby, or a cavalryman, covered over and over with decoration."

That is architect and theorist Adolf Loos, writing in his essay "Ornament and Crime".

Once upon a time, my friend A. was taking a much beloved history of architecture class. The final project was an architectural model, and these were all displayed at a festive show in the art building at the end of the semester. A. thought it would be dandy, considering the Loos quote, to make some very plain gingerbread cookies, accompanied by a very plain label bearing that quote. But she was working up to the very last minute on her model, so I volunteered to be her technician.

What, we wondered, would qualify as the most functional and plain possible shape for the cookies? Round was all right, but didn't make very efficient use of each rolled-out sheet of dough, requiring unnecessary re-gatherings and re-rollings. Squares were appealing, but the corners always cooked faster than everywhere else, resulting in an unhappy inconsistency in the texture of the finished cookie. We settled on using the top to a container of amaretti, which had rounded corners. We would use A.'s mother's excellent gingerbread recipe, and of course no icing.

They did indeed look very stark and functional, piled up on the plainest white plate. Then we tried them and discovered that hey! This was a really excellent size and shape for gingerbread! The cookies were indeed evenly cooked to a delightful degree. They fit pleasingly in the hand. They tasted good and were large enough to feel like a substantial treat, but not so large as to be overwhelming.

As S. said when I told him this story, it is a happy fable about two girls who intend to merely imitate form following function, for the sake of appearances, but find that their functional form does indeed follow function, and they like it.

ADOLF LOOS GINGERBREAD

This is a large batch of a very stiff dough. You can make it by hand, but a Kitchen-Aid is of course easier. I suspect most hand mixers wouldn't be able to handle the dough after the flour goes in. It can be divided in half.

1/3 c. Crisco
1 c. brown sugar
1 1/2 c. molasses
2/3 c. cold water
7 c. flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. allspice
1 Tbs. ginger
1 tsp. ground cloves
1-2 tsp. cinnamon


Cream sugar, Crisco, and molasses together in a very large bowl until fluffy. Add the cold water and mix. Sift together the remaining ingredients and add in thirds. Mix thoroughly.

Gather the dough into a ball. You may want to divide it into a few batches for easier handling later. Wrap in plastic wrap or wax paper and chill for an hour or more.

Roll dough to about 1/4" thickness, perhaps a little less. Cut out your cookies. Bake on an ungreased sheet at 350° F. until the cookies are softish but bounce back from a touch, but before the edges get dark. This will vary depending on the thickness of your dough and the size of your cookies. I seem to recall that it tends to take about 14 minutes, but I don't know where I got that number from. Keep an eye on them.

Lemon cookies (or, I am a nasty wasteful yuppie, but slick)

Tonight I have been making cookies, very good lemon cookies that are called by the author of the cookbook in which the recipe appears* "lemonade cookies," which is kind of horribly twee and unnecessary, but there you are, and I have gotten into this wonderful slick rhythm of making them which relies upon my having made the kitchen extra clean and organized, so that I have maximal counter space. I actually laid out three pieces of parchment paper and put the blobs of batter on them, all at the beginning, plus the one on the cookie sheet. Then I could do this clever little maneuver when each batch was ready where I neatly slid the parchment and cookies onto the counter, set the cookie sheet on the stovetop, brushed the cookies with the glaze, slid the cookie sheet under the next piece of parchment, gave it a little cautious tug, put the sheet in the oven, set the timer, and then turned and transferred the cookies from parchment to cooling rack. The downside of this technique is that it is wasteful of parchment, which on a different day would have made me feel terrible, but today I did not care, because the slickness was so very, very slick. And all the dishes are in the dishwasher (oh blessed dishwasher), which I will go run now. The cookies are pretty darn lemony and soft and delicate, but pleasantly dry and yielding-yet-resiliant on the outside, in many ways just like little hand-holdable cakes. For some reason I feel they are the kind of cookie that should be spelled "cooky." Here is how you make them: LEMON MIXTURE 3/4 strained lemon juice 3/4 c. sugar 2 T. light corn syrup (how is it that I had corn syrup in the house? I wonder.) 1 T finely grated lemon zest BATTER 3 c. flour 1 t. baking soda 1/4 t. salt 2 sticks (16 T.) unsalted butter, softened 1 c. sugar 2 large eggs Heat the lemon mixture ingredients, except for zest. over medium heat until the sugar is completely dissolved. Cool to room temperature and stir in the zest. Reserve 1/3 c. of this mixture for finishing the cookies. Preheat oven to 400° F. Mix flour, baking soda, and salt in a bowl. Beat butter and sugar together until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Lower speed and beat in half the flour mixture, then the lemon mixture (but not the reserved 1/3 cup), then the remaining flour mixture. Bake cookies 8 to 10 minutes on parchment on a sheet pan, until they have spread, risen, and turned light gold. Slide the parchment immediately off the pan and brush the cookies with the reserved lemon mixture. Transfer to racks and let cool completely before storing. It's wise to put layers of something -- that excessive parchment, perhaps, or wax paper -- between the layers of cookies. *The Cookie Book by Nick Malgieri

Return from Nuptial Land

We have returned from Pittsburgh and are really only so much the wiser. We have, however, ordered a cake (every Pittsburgher's favorite burnt almond torte from Prantl's*) and met our adorable and charming caterer. We still of course do not have the foggiest notion exactly what people will be eating, but she was very happy that we wanted it to be all vegetarian, which was a nice bonus. She is putting together a couple of possible menus for us. I think it will be a little bit of an orgy of multiculturalism, aka Aloha Amigo-san, and definitely a little bit of an orgy of delicious nibbly things. I will keep you posted.

This having people do stuff for one is very strange to me, and we are so far seeming to have some kind of Bizarro Wedding, where everyone we interact with is way more accommodating than we expected, and we are paragons of undemandingness. Trust me when I tell you that in my everyday life I am not undemanding. It is apparently just by comparison with the bridal norm that I am supremely laid back (S., by contrast, is pretty laid back, even in real life). It is a lot easier when the center is shifted to a place where people talk for hours about what kind of cocktail napkins they will have. But anyway, we're getting everything we actually care about AND I get to bask in the totally uncharacteristic glory of being Low Maintenance. Hot dog.

* Really, no substitutes will do. But if you were to want to try to replicate it at home, you could try this exhausting (and not tested by your faithful correspondant) recipe from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Little bensone (bensini?)

Our current breakfast phase. These mid-sized golden pastries somehow come out with an almost cornbread-like crumb, though not as dry as a lot of cornbread seems to be. I don't really know what makes them turn out so pretty and yellow, but it is a nice bonus feature. They are nicest warm, can be heated up in your oven or toaster oven, and freeze well. They are an evolution of a recipe from Carol Fields' Celebrating Italy, but the recipe there is for great big cakes that you cut into slices. I like the individual ones better myself.

3 scant cups flour, plus extra for kneading
3/4 t. baking powder
3/4 t. baking soda
3/4 c. sugar
pinch salt
grated zest of one lemon or lime
7 T. cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
2 eggs
6 T milk
1 t vanilla
milk and turbinado sugar (or ordinary sugar, if that's all you have) for dusting

Preheat oven to 350° F. Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and sugar in a large bowl. Stir in lemon zest and salt. Add butter and rub it into the dry ingredients until you get a sandy consistency.

In another container, mix the eggs, milk and vanilla. Make a well in the dry ingredients and add the wet ingredients. Mix and knead lightly until the dough is smooth and soft, adding flour only if absolutely necessary.

Divide dough into 6 portions. Roll out into coils about 6" long and form into tight S shapes. Arrange on a parchment-lined cookie sheet. Brush with milk and sprinkle with sugar. Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden. Don't overbake!