Wendryn Doubt

I went to the grocery store over the weekend and I came across a food I had never heard of. That’s a weird enough occurrence for me to stop and take a second, then third, look. The tag said “Dragonfruit” and it looked like this:

I did a little research and found enough information to decide to buy one. It was $3.00 for one, so I figured we could split one to decide if we like it. That’s a bit of money for one piece of fruit.

I brought it home and Xander said he’d see it but hadn’t bought one the last time he was at the store. I put it in the fruit bowl and forgot about it for a day or so.

When I finally decided to open it up, it looked like this:

It was very pretty. I like the color contrasts. I scooped out the fruit, chopped it up, and put it into bowls.

I thought the remaining rind was rather pretty, too.

We stuck it in the freezer for a while. Hot day plus warm fruit was just not appealing. Once it had chilled a bit, though, it was quite nice. It has a very delicate flavor and I can’t describe it well. It isn’t too sweet, but it is pleasant. I’m not sure I would seek it out again. If someone offered me another, though, I would certainly eat some! It’s a cactus and it can put out both roots from its base as well as aerially. I love finding out random bits of information. I hope you enjoyed this short trip!

This week for lunches, I made this recipe to go inside these. I used to not like lentils, but summer tomato lentils are now one of my favorite recipes. I think that my dislike of lentils probably comes from not having them in anything other than lentil soup, where the lentils were a little grainy and the soup was too salty because of the ham. It just never did much for me. If lentils are cooked without salt, though, they don’t end up grainy, and the lentils themselves are not salty. I could quite happily have just eaten this recipe early on, when it’s just cooked lentils, goat cheese, lemon zest, and lemon juice, but every new ingredient that got added just kept making it better. It’s really very good, if you hadn’t figured that out.

Katja is an amazing little person. She is cheerful all the time except when she’s tired or hungry. She loves music and waves her arms energetically whenever she hears something she likes. She laughs a lot when I sing to her and she seems to really enjoy patter singing, which makes me laugh. I like watching her figure out new things. She and Nyx are starting to have a relationship of sorts; Katja laughs whenever Nyx licks her, and Nyx seems quite happy to say hello by licking Katja’s face. I’m sure they will get along even better when Katja starts on solid food and becomes a provider of random munchies for Nyx.

I’m back to walking more at lunch. We also walk on Saturdays as long as the weather is nice. It’s not consistently nice yet, but it’s getting there.

We went to several baseball games last week. Katja can get bundled up and zipped inside my coat. We were the warmest people in the park the night it started snowing. We also went to one that had beautiful weather. I think she enjoyed that one more. She has started recognizing people at the ballpark and smiling at them. She’s a very outgoing little person!

Life is pretty good right now. A wonderful husband, a little girl whose smile makes my life infinitely better, and excellent food all help remind me that life is worth getting up for in the mornings.

I do not go on diets. They aren’t healthy for me. Not so much physically, but mentally. When I was dieting, I got extremely obsessive about counting every single calorie, and my well-being was predicated on the number the scale showed every morning. Worse than that, though, was that I would get frustrated and angry. If I ate a few too many calories in a day, I’d decide it didn’t matter and eat more because I was so angry about having to be so careful. I don’t want to be obsessed, and I’m not pleasant when I’m angry. I did not like who I became while I was trying to diet.

That being said, I have lost seven pounds in the past six weeks.

I am not dieting, at least not the way I think of dieting. I do not pay attention to calories. I am trying to change how I approach food and exercise, and I am not getting angry or obsessive.

Michael Pollan, an author of several books about the relationships that people have with food, came up with this: “Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants.” I add to that “exercise more” and you get my whole approach to eating at the moment.

In general we do not eat a lot of meat. Maybe once a week we will have dinner with meat, and we try to have fish fairly regularly, but meat is not a huge part of our diet. Also, we do not eat out very often, and when we shop, it is from the outside edge of the supermarket, not the inside rows with all of the processed food. This is not a moral decision, mind you, and we will not lecture anyone on how they should eat. We both like to cook and eat, and the processed foods take much of the fun out of it. We do buy some canned goods, but not even a lot of those. We have canisters of different kinds of flour, many types of dried beans, a few kinds of rice, and various other odds and ends that we have purchased for various recipes. In other words, the “real food” and “mostly plants” parts are not very difficult for me. We already do that.

“Not too much”, on the other hand, can be a significant challenge. I like food. I like eating good food. Portion control is not my strong suit. I mostly need one meal a day with some snacking the rest of the day, which I only recently learned. I am switching from having that main meal be lunch to having it be dinner because I think it is important to have dinner together. It is something that was very important to both of us growing up, and we would like to give that to our child, too. Considering how difficult it will be to set new habits with a new baby, we are working on setting that habit now. That did not work if I had already eaten my main meal for the day, however, so I am shifting to adapt. I eat fruit and popcorn throughout the day, but not too much. I am less hungry now, which makes it easier, and eating more slowly keeps me from eating too much. Also, if I want two eggs, I’ll have one instead. I end up pleasantly full, and the next time I think about two eggs I remember being content with one. It is getting easier.

The piece I added, “exercise more”, is another habit I need to form. I decided that I would spend the summer exercising in ways that did not require me to spend money to do them. That means running, for the most part. I am not doing Zumba, swimming, or belly dancing at the moment. I hurt my shoulder earlier this year and running does not make it worse, which is good; it is most of the way healed at this point. I do best when I exercise in the morning. I get up and climb into running clothes almost before I am awake. If I wait until I have fully woken up, I will often talk myself out of it. I had the same problem with swimming, so I know this problem. Once I am dressed, though, I feel like I might as well go and get it done. My running clothes are always on the floor next to the bed and I can put them on in the dark, so I do not have any excuse for not going running.

I do not count calories. I am tracking my weight on the Wii, but only the simple test because that way I don’t get commentary on whether or not I’m doing well enough. There are days that I eat too much, like last night – we went out to dinner. With this approach, though, I don’t care. It’s okay to have gone up a little bit in weight over a day as long as the general trend continues downwards.

I’m trying to build these habits so that once we have a child the habits will be sustainable. I would like to lose weight, but I refuse, at this point in my life, to spend the energy to obsess about it or to let it affect my moods. I need to be stable and happy as much as possible. There is enough other stress in my life; why add to it? This lets me adjust my eating and my approach to food and exercise without the guilt that comes with diets or goals or any of that.

I’m changing my relationship with food, and so far it is going pretty well. Guilt-free weight loss without weird chemicals! I’m actually having fun, which I never thought I would say in any way associated with losing weight.

Stew sounded good tonight, but we didn’t have anything that seemed perfect to go into a stew, so I decided to skip perfection and just see what came out.

We have friends who hunt, and periodically we trade fresh bread for fresh meat. Some of it ends up in the freezer because we can’t finish all of it at once. One of the packages was elk stew meat, already chopped up into small-ish chunks. That seemed like a good place to start.

We always have stock of one sort or another, so I found beef stock and added that to my idea. Potatoes and carrots, which we generally have, were next, so I peeled the carrots, washed the potatoes, and chopped them. I found a can of stewed tomatoes and chopped those up, too. Oregano, marjoram, thyme, basil, bay, and a few cloves of garlic went in, as did salt and pepper. I decided I wanted more tomato once everything was cooked, so I added in some tomato paste, both as thickener and to get more of a tomato base.

It’s good. It isn’t amazing, but it suits my needs right now. I needed comfort food, and tomato soup is something that generally helps my state of mind. This is more like stew, but it fits. I remember, when I was little, when it rained we would get to go outside and play in the rain. When we came in, we’d dry off and climb into warm clothes, and by the time we came back up there would be tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches waiting for us. I don’t know how many times it happened, but that’s a memory that is comforting on many levels. I wanted a piece of that memory tonight. I didn’t want an exact replica, since I was not in the mood for grilled cheese, but the stew helped.

Sometimes food helps ground me. It reminds me of simple pleasures. Cooking something and then eating what I have cooked makes me happy, too. It is more satisfying than buying soup in a can or at a restaurant. I can spice it exactly to my taste, make as much or as little as I want, and add random things as they strike my fancy. I am still not used to throwing food together without a recipe, but I had fun tonight, and the results were quite good. I have lunch for a few days, too.

This week’s Indie Ink Writing Challenge was a good one for me; I love this subject.

I challenged The Onion, who did a nice job on her challenge, and my challenge this week comes from Jan. “Rain. What does it do to you? Write about a memory or a story that involves some powerful emotions and rain.” I amended it slightly because there isn’t one specific story to tell, but there are several small vignettes.

When it is raining outside, when it is pouring down and thundering through the sky, I sleep better than any other night. Even if it is just a light rain, the water pattering on the roof and the windows lulls me to sleep and holds me there all night until I wake, rested. I don’t always sleep very well, so when the rain comes it is a boon.

I sometimes sit outside and watch the rain fall on the plants that need it so much here. There is little rain, so it feels like the plants expand to catch all they can when it does come. I’m probably anthropomorphizing, but I can live with that.

I grew up in a place where it rained fairly often. It was generally a warm rain, so, when we were very little, our mother would let us go outside in almost no clothes and play in the puddles in the backyard. I would turn my face up and catch rain on my tongue, feeling it sliding over my face and into my hair. When we came inside, she would dry us off, tell us to get dressed, and sometimes, if we were lucky, she would make tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. I still love that as a meal.

I used to ride to school in the rain. I would take off my glasses and just go, everything in my backpack bagged so it wouldn’t get wet, no worries. I felt free, speeding down hills and meandering up them. I could ignore the traffic more easily because of the sound of the rain. I would get to school soggy and dripping, but the pool had warm showers after swimming practice anyway, so by the time I went to class I was warm and happy.

When I separated my shoulder and was impatient for it to heal, the rain would calm me enough that I could sit and read for hours. Some days I would pace, wanting to be moving more than I could, but rainy days I could settle and be glad that my arm had a chance to heal without more damage.

Rain brings me peace. Rain helps me remember spring, something in short supply in the desert. Rain keeps me from feeling lost and alone. Hot chocolate or cider when the day outside is dark and dripping feels cozy and comforting. Sometimes, on very bad days (of which there have been a few lately), a hard rain will come to the desert, and I will go out and stand under our huge maple tree, letting the rain pour down from the sky and pound all of my pain into the ground. I can feel my muscles relax as the water soaks me to the skin. I need the rain to be happy, I think, and sometimes I miss it a lot living here. Someday I will go back to a rainy place and I will remember more of why I love it.

I spent last weekend puttering around. I made three different kinds of bread – a basic whole wheat, French bread for garlic bread, and pizza dough – and I got the house cleaned up a bit. I spent some time at the gym, got a haircut, and helped bling up a belly dancing costume for a friend. Sunday evening we had guests for dinner, so Xander and I cooked together. The menu consisted of pizza, garlic bread, and hot wings, and Xander made his blue cheese dressing as a dip. Our guests brought a very good salad to add to the mix. Somehow, at least for me, cooking together helps solidify what we love about each other. We play together in the kitchen, an imprecise dance in which we ask for help, hand over required ingredients, and are careful to avoid poking each other with sharp objects.

We’ve been playing with various pizza crusts for years and have never found one that really works. The biggest problem is that we often don’t finish the pizza the same day we make it, so by the next morning it is soggy. Last time we made pizza I used a crust recipe from Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates. The recipe has to be cut at least in half, as it makes a lot of pizza dough. We tend to halve it and then make two pizzas with the dough, which gives a slightly thick crust. The next morning, after we’d used this recipe for the first time, I took a piece out for breakfast, expecting to have it fall apart. It held together and the crust was not soggy at all. Considering how much we had loaded onto that pizza, I was pleasantly surprised.

We have also been working on grilled pizza for about a year. The basic approach is make a pizza crust, brush one side with olive oil so it doesn’t stick, throw it on the grill, cook until that side seems done, brush the other side with olive oil and flip it over, and then add toppings and cook until it all looks done. The smoky flavor from the grill adds nicely to the flavor of the pizza. This requires a somewhat burly crust too, though, especially if we load it up too much with toppings. We have learned. This time the toppings were Portabella mushrooms sliced thinly, mozzarella, asiago, roasted pine nuts, and fresh garlic. The toppings were spread to cover most of the crust, but the pizza wasn’t loaded down. That’s one of the benefits of having a crust with some taste to it; you don’t have to load up the pizza to have it taste good.

We used the pizza crust we had tried with the last pizza as the base for the grilled pizza and it came out very well. The small amount of honey in the crust added a touch of sweetness which balanced well with the smoky flavor from the grill and the tang of the cheese. The garlic was nice and not overpowering, and the mushrooms added a mellow note to the assembly of tastes.

The wings were a new experiment. I had never made chicken wings before, but a few weeks ago I cooked a chicken in the slow cooker with a sauce made of beer and sriracha. The recipe called for chili sauce, but I think they meant something with a little less bite than sriracha has, because the sauce was very spicy. It tasted good, but it cleared out my sinuses really fast. Anyway, once I had put together the chicken and vegetables and used as much of the sauce as I wanted, I still had about two cups of sauce left. I was not sure what to do with it, but Xander looked at it, tasted it, and said “Wing sauce!” We put it in the freezer. This weekend, since we knew we were making pizza and pizza goes well with wings, we decided it was the perfect time to use it. The wings came out very well, and the blue cheese dip was, as always, excellent.

I forgot to take pictures, but the food was quite good. I am still tasting garlic a little bit this morning. Earl grey tea with a hint of garlic is odd, but not unpleasant, surprisingly enough.

Cooking for more than just the two of us is nice sometimes. Left to my own devices, I probably would have had popcorn for dinner. It’s easy, fast, and I can season it any way I want to. Knowing that we had people coming over, though, meant that we had reason to play in the kitchen. It was nice having good company, especially company that appreciated good food, and the conversation never lagged.

We are both introverts. Xander is absolutely an introvert, and I am right on the cusp; I test as introvert or extravert depending on the day. We’ve had people in our house lately for the home study for adoption and it felt like an invasion. I had begun to forget that having people over, preparing for company and then enjoying the conversation and companionship, could be a very good thing. This weekend helped me feel like our house was our home again rather than someplace that people would be judging. I like our home, I like what we’ve done with it, and it feels more comfortable again now that we have had friends over to share good food.

I’ve had panettone before, years ago. I’ve had two types. One had too much fruit and was gummy and rather odd. The other was dry and unappetizing. I had heard people talk about how wonderful it was, but I never quite understood.

A couple of weeks ago, I happened to be online when @FreshPanettone asked for food writers/bloggers who might be interested in reviewing his panettone. I am not exactly a food blogger, although I am working on it, so I responded. Nick Ignazzi was kind enough to send me a panettone to review. I opened it with a certain amount of trepidation due to the earlier not-terribly-good experiences. This is what I saw when I opened the box (with Nick Ignazzi’s approval, I used one of his photos because none of mine came out well):

Definitely a good beginning!

I took a deep breath. An almost floral scent mixed with fruit and a little bit of yeast wafted up. This already was an improvement over the others that I had tried.

I cut a small piece for me and one for Xander. We both enjoyed it. It is definitely bread with fruit in it, and the bread itself is a little sweet. It wasn’t dry at all, despite its travel time, and it was quite good without any additions. We each had another piece.

I took the panettone to work with me the next day. While it was very good, three pounds of panettone was too much for two people. I gave pieces to several people and they all liked it very much. One even asked for a card because she had decided what she was going to get her family for Christmas this year. I was quite amused by that!

The next place I took it, later that night, was to belly dancing practice. They each ate a piece and declared it good, too. Both the dancers and the work people who tried it would have been very happy to tell me whatever they felt about it, since I’ve tested food on them before. The responses to food experiments have mostly been positive, but if they don’t like it, they’ll tell me, and they’ll make suggestions. This, however, was all positive, which was interesting partly because of the wide variety of tastes these people enjoy.

I had about a quarter of the panettone left. I wanted to do something interesting with it rather than just eating it, so I did what I do with many leftover bread products and I made bread pudding. There wasn’t a whole lot left, so I used a small loaf pan. Eggs, milk, vanilla, a little bit of sugar, and chopped up panettone all got mixed, soaked for a while, and then cooked. I like bread pudding in general. It is one of my favorite things. This was even better than usual; the taste of the fruit permeated the bread pudding and enhanced the texture.

I was worried that I would not be able to write a good review of this, since I had not had good experiences in the past. I decided that I would write whatever was true, good or bad, and I wouldn’t worry about it. I got a free panettone and it ended up being good enough that I will probably send a few to people I think will enjoy it, too. It’s a pretty, nicely scented, good tasting food. Presentation and taste combined is always good.

I haven’t been writing much of anything lately other than Indie Ink Writing Challenges. I have been enjoying those, and I’ll keep participating. I thought, perhaps, that I should write something else once in a while as well, so I’m going to try to get back to posting twice a week, even if it is only snippets of things.

I’m not very good at waiting. The adoption process is going well, as far as we can tell. The home study is being reviewed and should be completed soon. It’s nice to have that done. Now, though, the wait begins. We have no idea how long we will have to wait for a match. We’re a little hard to match in a couple of ways. We are not religious, which is one mark against us. We also don’t want extensive contact with the birth family. We’re comfortable sending letters and pictures as often as they’d like, but we’re not interested in having the birth family directly involved in the child’s life. In this age of completely open adoptions becoming the norm, that is not a particularly politically correct stance to take. On the other hand, when I go to sites that list people thinking about giving up their baby for adoption, a lot of them say they want letters and pictures and don’t mention visits. I’m sure that someone will come along eventually that matches up with us. For the moment, we wait, and waiting is not something I have ever been very good at. I suppose it is good practice, though.

Overall, life is pretty good. We’re stable, have enough income, and we’re both basically healthy. I know that’s more than many people have in these bad economic times. There are days when I wish we had enough to relax about money, but we make enough to cover bills and go out once in a while, which is good. I still budget everything, and someday I’d like to not have to worry about that, but as long as nothing catastrophic happens, we’re fine. I have to remind myself of how lucky we are when I get frustrated at having been on a very, very tight budget for years. It’s okay to be frustrated, of course, but a tight budget means that we have enough, and that’s a very good thing. I have to turn it around and look at the fact that, for the first time in a few years, we can get some of the luxuries. Not a lot, but some, and that’s really nice. I get to buy new work clothes soon, which will be especially good since the ones I have are starting to fall apart. Someday soon we will have a stand mixer, which we’ve been talking about since we got involved. It’s one of the few things neither one of us had in our kitchens. We took a day off and went to see movies and eat out, which is very unusual for us, and it was a very nice day. There are a lot of good things going on in our life, even if sometimes I forget. I only have one job. I work forty hours a week instead of the seventy that drained me for two years. We have good friends and interesting jobs. We get to go to two weddings this year of people who are very dear to us.

I think I’ll have to come back and read this the next time I get into a funk. It’s important to remember the good things.

We’re starting to plan our yearly BBQ. I love this tradition. We started it the year we bought the house, and every year since we have had an Inauguration of the Grill. Xander makes excellent burgers, we provide beer, buns, and anything to go on the burgers, and everything else is a potluck. There are people we don’t get to see often who show up for this like clockwork, so we get to see them at least once a year. There are always new people, too, and somehow they always manage to fit in with the people who have been coming regularly. We have musicians, dancers, fencers, work friends, and a variety of other people. One of the neat things about having intelligent and interesting friends is that they can almost always find something to talk about with other intelligent, interesting people. I love hearing conversations ranging from childrearing to physics to card tricks. A lot of work goes into making the party go well, but it is absolutely worth it. I love seeing the interactions, feeding people good food, and getting to reconnect with people I don’t see nearly often enough. It makes me happy on many different levels, and I’m looking forward to it this year.

I’m getting my brain back on track. I try to be a relatively positive person, but the past few years have been a long, hard slog. The death of my grandmother knocked me back in some ways to the death of my brother, which was wrapped up in the infertility grief, which was also surrounded by working too much and a lot of stress. I just have to work on remembering the good things and focusing on what we are working towards rather than looking back for too long.

I’m taking a few deep breaths, looking around for a good thing to think about, and moving on. The only way in life is forward, whatever else happens.

While I was growing up, we went running every morning. We were home schooled, and running was, I guess, a version of physical education. I never much liked it, not being very fast, but it was our routine. On weekends, Saturday mornings if I remember correctly, we’d go running and then we’d have pancakes for breakfast. We had a choice of thin pancakes or thick pancakes, and we got a say in which kind we had.

Thick pancakes were standard buttermilk pancakes. They were good, but they were not my favorites. They were thick enough that they ended up a little dry, at least to me. The thin pancakes were a little bit sweet, enough that I could eat them by themselves with no syrup or jam. They could be rolled up, which I liked, too. The thin pancakes always got my vote.

I don’t have pictures this time, but they are very good and easy to make, and the recipe doubles well. This is one of my comfort foods, a recipe that makes me happy and reminds me of good memories with my family.

Thin Pancakes

Ingredients:
1 cup milk
1 cup flour
1 tablespoon sugar
2 eggs
pinch of salt

Put everything into a blender and blend until smooth. Use a spatula to scrape down the sides of the blender, then blend again. Cook in a lightly greased or nonstick skillet over medium heat.

I’m going to start working on the food part of this blog. I love food, cooking, and eating, and we have some really neat and somewhat unexpected recipes from various places. I have no idea how to take good food pictures, but it’s worth a shot.

The first recipe comes with a story, as many of them probably will. Food and stories are very wrapped up in each other in my life. This started when Xander and I started combining our books and talking about cookbooks when he moved in many years ago. I grew up with a couple of standard cookbooks – Easy Basics for Good Cooking (I use the pie crust recipe every time I make pie), Better Homes and Gardens, and The Joy of Cooking. Xander grew up with the Settlement Cookbook. We were talking about the differences between older and newer versions of the cookbooks, especially since I keep an older version of Better Homes and Gardens specifically for a coffee cake recipe I loved growing up. I’ll get to that in another post, I’m sure. Xander said he would like an older version of the Settlement Cookbook, since the one he had was newer thant the one he grew up with.

I thought that sounded like an interesting thing to track down, so I went wandering online. I did find the version he wanted, but I also found a much older version, printed in 1901. I figured that was good, too, and when it showed up I discovered I was right.

First of all, on flipping through I found a section on invalid cookery. Invalid is one of those words, like POLISH, that you can pronouce two different ways, and most of that depends on context. It took me just a minute of reading recipes to discover that my interpretation (not-valid cookery) was wrong – it was a section on cooking for sick people, or invalids. That made much more sense. It is full of recipes for things like albumenized milk (milk mixed with egg whites), beef essence (warm a piece of beef slightly, then squeeze out the juices and give it to the invalid to drink), and wine soup (wine, sugar, egg yolks, and croutons). I’m not sure I’d eat any of it. Another amusing bit was that it has ads for various things like holeproof hosiery and  a company specializing in French dry cleaning.

The cookbook was printed before there were consistent thermostats on ovens, so it calls for cool ovens, warm ovens, and hot ovens. I’ll give you what I’ve found to work best in terms of temperature.

In looking at the recipes, I noticed that the cookies seemed different than those I was used to. The proportions were not the same, and I couldn’t tell exactly how they would come out. The recipe for molasses cookies sounded quite interesting, so I made a batch. They immediately became one of my favorite cookies ever. They are not cookies in the same sense we think of them nowadays, more like little cakes. They are tender and I really like the taste. They aren’t nearly as sweet as most cookies I’ve had in my life, since molasses is the only sweetener. I looked in the newer versions of The Settlement Cookbook (the subtitle, by the ways, is “The way to a man’s heart”. I always thought it was directly through the sternum rather than through the stomach, but I’m sure I’m being too literal about that. Heh.) and the recipe for molasses cookies was nowhere to be found. I don’t know who to ask about copyright, so if anyone has a problem with this, please tell me.

One very nice thing is that there aren’t any eggs, so there’s no issue with licking the spoon once you’re done mixing the batter.

Today I decided it was time to resurrect the recipe for a larger audience than those of us who peruse old cookbooks. With no further ado, here it is with my edits in parenthesis:

Soft molasses cookies
from the 1901 printing of The Settlement Cookbook

Ingredients:

1 cup molasses
1 3/4 teaspoons soda (this is baking soda)
1 cup sour milk (buttermilk, or a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar plus enough milk to make a cup)
2 teaspoons ginger (dried, powdered)
1/2 cup melted butter or other fat (I used butter)
1 teaspoon salt
Flour. (I used 3 cups of flour and it worked well, but this is a somewhat adjustable part of the recipe, as you will see)

(Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit – this isn’t mentioned)

Add soda to molasses and beat thoroughly, add milk, shortening (the melted butter), ginger, salt, and flour. Use enough flour to make mixture drop easily from spoon. (I used enough to make a slightly stiff dough.) Let stand several hours (refrigerate!) to chill. Toss one-half of the mixture on a slightly floured board (the dough will be sticky), roll lightly to 1/4 inch thickness. Shape with round cutter (I used the lid to a mason jar, since I don’t have cookie cutters, and we ended up with 28 cookies), first dipped in flour. Bake on a buttered sheet. (I’ve found that 15 minutes brings them out perfectly.)

I attempted to take pictures of the cookies, but I am not a food photographer, obviously. Here is the finished product. I hope you enjoy them as much as we do!