Rosemary Parmesan Crackers

Adapted from Parmesan Cream Crackers by Mark Bittman

2 cups flour
1 tsp kosher salt
1 cup packed and grated Parmesan cheese
1 stick unsalted butter
1/2 cup cream
2 tsp finely chopped rosemary
1 tsp each: ground pepper, nice flaky salt for sprinkling

Pre-heat oven to 400°. Pulse flour, salt, cheese and butter in a food processor until combined. Add the cream and let machine run; adding more cream if needed, a teaspoon at a time, until mixture holds together but is not sticky. Divide dough in half and roll out on a lightly floured board until 1/8" thick. Carefully transfer rolled out dough to Silpat (or parchment) lined baking sheet. Sprinkle top of dough with sea salt, ground pepper, and chopped rosemary. Pat toppings lightly with hands. Bake until lightly browned, about 15 minutes, rotating pans half way through cooking time. Cool on a rack. Serve warm or at room temp.

My Notes: These are not as crispy as I was hoping for, but they sure taste good and were quite easy.

Pick A Peck Of Pretty Pink Peppers

After reading this article about pink pepper-berries, I couldn't wait to see if there were any growing at my Mom's house when I visited for Christmas. Just off the back yard, there is a huge and graceful Peruvian pepper tree. That's where my tree-house was when the tree and I were much younger, but I don't ever remember there being pink berries on it.

Turns out that these trees bear little or no fruit if there are not enough female flowers present. Since I've been away though, there has been a new Brazilian pepper tree growing under and among some other plants by the fence, stretching way up high for a bit of sunlight. And there were pink berries on it. Not a lot, but a few.

This scrawny lanky "tree" was a volunteer in the yard, and though I didn't pick a peck* of pepper-berries, I did manage to reach a couple clusters. Next time we'll need to get the ladder out. With these rosy little foraged berries, homemade crusty bread, and some goat cheese, we'll be all set for New Year's Eve! Now if only I had the thyme...

Pink Pepper Goat Cheese Spread

My Notes: This couldn't have gone together easier. I split the goat cheese between two shallow 4 oz. ramekins (truth be told, they were from Trader Joe's frozen créme brulée). No fresh thyme was available, so I used some that I dried myself from our old garden before we moved. The spread smelled fantastic coming out of the oven and tasted great smeared on the homemade bread. The honey really countered the pepper berry perfectly. As easy as this is, I love that it can be made ahead of time and kept in the fridge. Let's see: it's super easy, really tasty, not your average party offering, and it's pretty too. Most definitely a keeper.

*Ever wonder just how many peppers were in that peck that Peter Piper picked? Click here to find out.
Peruvian Pepper Tree (Schinus molle)
Brazilian Pepper Tree (Schinus terebinthifolius)

Blackberry Lemon Redemption Cookies

First of all, these treats were named by my Hubs. I had wanted to call them Reincarnation Cookies or Resurrection Cookies, or even Recycled or Repurposed Cookies. Hmm... How 'bout Metamorphosis Cookies? His idea trumped them all for its sweetness, appropriateness, and positive once-bad-now-good swing.

You see these cookies are the final reward for my Blackberry Pâte de Fruit from last summer. I'd saved it, ate one or two sticky globs, but there wasn't much to be said for it. Except that it was a big fat fail. Disastrous, yet still edible. It was thick, gooey and crunchy (the sugar that it was rolled in had been absorbed but not dissolved), beyond jam but not quite candy. But still there was that incredibly intense blackberry flavor that I couldn't turn my back on. So there it sat in an airtight container in the fridge. In limbo.

(Hazy Shade Of) Winter Cookies

These cookies are the color of my mood. They are mood-cookies. Did you ever have a mood-ring? I did. When I was in elementary school. I quickly figured out its secret. It was sensitive to heat and would change colors as your body temperature fluctuated. I was a skinny little kid though and most of the time my ring only turned dark blue. That's the first color it would go to beyond the default black. If I rubbed my hands together (or put them under warm water), the ring would change to all sorts of lovely teals and amber colors. But it didn't really tell my mood. These cookies though? They are doing just that.

It's five days before Christmas and two days before we leave to go visit family. Everything must be finished in the next two days or it doesn't get done at all. This is a time when I realistically reevaluate everything on my to-do lists and drop the things that are not going to get done. This generally drops my mood exponentially. And so I've discovered that it's not the best time to bake cookies.

Baking is all about the love. And if you're not feeling it, your end result will show it. This is not to say that all baking disasters are the result of a poor mindset. Just that, if you start out that way, it'll show in the final product. Baked goods are empathic. Thus, my mood-cookies: I'm feeling muddled and depressed, the skies outside my window are dark and cloudy, my cookies are muddy gray lumps.

I was sure that I'd created baked-bads instead of baked-goods. But they say that every cloud has a silver lining, and I've always found that to be true. The silver lining of these cookies is that they are really quite tasty, and they go splendidly with tea. They are, in fact, our new favorite tea cookie. They are, in a word, lovely.

Quiz time! Finish the following sentence: Beauty is... a) as beauty does. b) in the eye of the beholder. c) only skin deep. d) vastly overrated. e) all of the above. Substance really is so much more important than appearance. The trick is to find your own real and genuine happy-place and then get baking. If you're happy and you know it, then your cookies will surely show it.

Buttery Jam Cookies from Joy The Baker

My Notes: Accidentally put the eggs in before the sugar. Oops. Used my Triple Berry Jam that I made last summer. The dough turned a lovely shade of mauve. Oven was running on the hot side so the trays sat out waiting for an extra 15 minutes or so while I tried to adjust the oven temp. It dropped too much and the first batch took an extra 5-6 min. since the oven temp was still around 350° for most of the time they were in there. Bah. The mauve-ness made it hard to tell when they were browned. 

They smelled good when I took them out of the oven but they didn't flatten out all the way (maybe due to the temp. problem). And they were a somewhat unappetizing shade of gray now. Don't know if these are going to make it as gifts (as intended) or not. Next time I'll try swirling the jam in last so it doesn't permeate the dough so thoroughly. I also flattened the last few dough balls before baking them to see if that would help... It did. Next time I'll try all that and increase the ginger and jam quantities.

Empathic: Sharing another's feelings as if they were your own.
Answer: e) all of the above.

Quoting... Dodie Smith

"I thank heaven there is no cheaper form of bread than bread." 
- Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle, 1948