Speaking of Cookies…have a favorite?

After that last post, I find I’m thinking about Christmas cookies. I like traditional sugar cookies, but hate the effort involved (mix, chill, roll, cut, roll, cut, decorate, blah blah blah). I like spritz cookies mainly for nostalgic reasons. I love any kind of spice cookie–molasses cookies, gingersnaps, gingerbread people, you name it. Those are my favorites. The last few holidays we’ve also made some pistachio-white chocolate-cranberry biscotti, which are both seasonally pretty but also ridiculously yummy, and rugelach, with its tender butter-cream cheese dough and raspberry-cinnamon filling. This year I think I’ll try this recipe for pumpkin biscotti, as well, and see if it’s a good addition to my holiday repetoire.

Do you have a favorite holiday cookie? Something you’ve loved since childhood or something you’ve only made up recently? I’d love to hear them, and try them out myself. There’s nothing like a houseful of cookies from November until January!

Time for Cookies

There’s a really old issue of Gourmet on the floor under the coffee table at my house. It’s from December of 2004, and the cover has all these glorious holiday cookies all over it. I’ve been seeing it down there for a week or so, since it was randomly pulled out of my collection of backissues to peruse for dinner recipes. It didn’t yield any of those, but I’ve been itching to make cookies ever since.

These are shortbread cookies. They didn’t come out of Gourmet but from some online site–one of the about.com extensions. They’re tasty and easy to make, so long as you’ve worked with shortbread before. The dough for these cookies and any other shortbread, for that matter, is very dry, and this can cause hand-wringing and dough-throwing if you don’t expect that. It can take a little time for them to come together.

Begin by softening a stick of butter.

Once it’s soft, cream it in your mixer. Add:
1/8 tsp salt
1/4 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp almond extract
and blend together.

Then add:
1/3 c sugar
and slowly add
1 c all-purpose flour

And you’re going to have some very dry dough. At this point I pulled out a big sheet of plastic wrap and dumped my dough on top of it. You want to work it into a log. The problem is that some areas will be very sticky–where the butter melts with your hands–and some areas will be annoyingly dry. Do the best you can, using the wrap as a tool so you don’t get stuck to the dough itself. Pop into the fridge for half an hour.

Preheat the oven to 450. Slice the dough into 1/4″ slices, and place on an ungreased cookie sheet. Any slice that falls apart because it’s dry you can mush up with the others (I had a 2 inch section that wouldn’t slice well) and make a new log for cutting. Bake about 10 minutes, until the bottoms are golden. Makes about 20 cookies.

Vintage cookbook! Scary shells edition.

There wasn’t a great deal of cooking here over the weekend as yesterday was Mr. Pea’s birthday, and I drove him to the Former State for a surprise party. There was pizza, cake and bowling, just like it might have been when he turned 12. I’ve only known hims since he was just 12, so I couldn’t tell you what he did that year. For those of you who live out in the Boston area, I can’t recommend cakes from Party Favors in Coolidge Corner, Brookline enough. We had a Fenway Park cake and it was awesome.

But without any cooking, what to post? Time to return to the Vintage Cookbook collection. Today’s is from the 1983 Dover Library “Food for Thought” centennial fundraising cookbook. The recipe? Chicken Filled Shells. Sure, you’re probably thinking of stuffed shells with a ground chicken and tomato sauce, and maybe some mozzarella. Well, you’d be quite wrong. 1983 was well before ground chicken was readily available on store shelves. So here we go:

2 c cubed, cooked chicken
1 c cooked peas
1/2 c mayonnaise
1/3 c finely chopped onion
1 pkg jumbo shells, cooked and drained
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1/2 c water

Mix together first four ingredients. Stuff into shells. Arrange in baking dish. Stir water into soup and pour over shells. Cover with foil and bake in a 325 oven for 25 minutes. Garnish with chopped parsley, if desired. Serves 8.

Ahh, nothing like cream of mushroom soup poured over mayo first thing in the morning!

Posting from the archives…

Was what I thought I’d be doing today. We’ve been eating some classics at the end of this week, stuff we have made numerous times, stuff I thought I’d posted ages ago and which would thus be hiding in the archives, waiting for a little cut-and-pasting. You know what they say about assuming things, though! Turns out neither dish–Moo Shu Vegetables or Beef Stroganoff–were in there at all, and if you want a photo of them now, well, you’ll need a laproscopic camera, as we’ve gobbled down all the leftovers.

Beef stroganoff is an easy dish to make, though, so I’ll post the recipe even without a picture. We ate bowls of the stuff last night while sitting on the porch, handing out candy to ravenous trick-or-treaters. We had well over 100 of them and went through about 10 pounds of candy. I kid you not.

Start by assembling the following:
1 lb of sirloin, trimmed and cut into bite size slices or chunks
2/3 lb mushrooms–white button, or a combo of button and crimini are good, chopped into nice big chunks. This meant halving most of them.
1 onion, sliced thin
14.4 oz can beef broth, or some water, a bouillion cube, and a little worcestershire sauce
2/3 c sour cream

oil, butter, flour

Start by putting about 1/2 T of both canola oil and butter in a pan over fairly high heat. Add beef, season with salt and pepper, and brown on both sides. Remove with a slotted spoon.

Add mushrooms and onions, a little salt and pepper, and drop the heat to medium. Remove with the spoon.

Add 1 T or so of butter and 1 T or so of flour to the pan, and cook the flour, making a roux. Add your liquid and bring to a simmer, scraping all the beefy bits off the bottom. Cook until thickened, five or so minutes. Add veg and beef back to the pot and simmer a few minutes to meld. Add sour cream, warm through, and turn off the heat.

Serve with warm egg noodles. It’s warm, tasty, and hits the spot on a cool night.