Merry Christmas Cookie!!!

On Sunday, my friend Stephanie hosted a cookie exchange. We've talked about it for years, but she took the bull by the horns last Christmas and now I hope it's here to stay. The idea is simple: everyone bakes 6 dozen cookies, then we get together for a potluck brunch and lay all the goodies out on the table to be admired. On their way out the door, each of us loads up a box with a variety of beautiful handmade cookies. There were chocolate orange stars and trees, iced snowflakes, sugar cookies with sprinkles, and Santa shortbreads. There were gingery molasses thins, pecan cakes dipped in powdered sugar and nut bars with dark and white chocolate (I brought those). There were buttery cookies with M&Ms! There are two kinds I can't name 'cause I haven't tasted them yet, but that's really only a matter of time. Minutes, actually. 

Women used to spend the better part of December baking. I remember my grandmother, Peg Osburn, mailing carefully packed handmade cookies from Pennsylvania at Christmas. The box contained at least a dozen varieties, one of which was the time consuming but much appreciated springerle, an anise-flavoured cookie that was imprinted with a special mold. No wonder I have a hard time with keeping things simple: in my family, the more complicated the effort, the more love is being demonstrated. Unless the sheer enormity of all those cookies to roll, cut, and bake, and the pile of dishes and the mess that results turns you into a complete bitch. 

Therefore, let's get real: find a few friends with good family recipes, make a simple cookie (bar cookies are the easiest) and get swapping!

Caramel Nut Bars with Cranberries and Chocolate

This recipe came out of tinkering with a Gourmet magazine pecan pie bar recipe.

 

3/4 C. Butter

2 C. Flour

1/2 C. Brown Sugar

1/2 t.  Salt

2 C. Mixed Salted Nuts

 1 C. Dried Cranberries

1/2 C. Butter

1 C. Brown Sugar

1/3 cup Honey

 2 T. Cream

1 oz. Dark Chocolate

1 oz. White Chocolate

Preheat oven to 350°F.  Cut 3/4 C. butter into 1/2-inch pieces. In a food processor process all ingredients until mixture begins to form small lumps. Sprinkle mixture into a 9x13 pan and press evenly onto bottom. Bake shortbread until golden, about 20 minutes.

In a heavy saucepan melt 1/2 C. butter and stir in brown sugar, honey, and cream. Simmer mixture, stirring occasionally, 1 minute and stir in nuts and cranberries. Pour nut mixture over hot shortbread and spread evenly. Bake in middle of oven until bubbling, about 20 minutes.  Remove from oven.  Melt the chocolates separately and use a spoon to drizzle each over the bars. Cool completely in pan and cut into 32 bars.

Merry Christmas!

A Wild and White Christmas!

Needle Felting at Stephanie's: Christmas Gathering #1

Well, there. It's less than two weeks from Christmas, and it's starting to get crazy. The Cafe is buzzing with parties and shopping lunches (we are, after all, just across the street from Bargain Harley's) and the kids are wrapping things up at school. We're also trying to make and buy meaningful gifts for each other, find the perfect tree right on our own land, make new traditions and keep up the old ones. My friends and family and I are trying to keep it “simple”. That's not easy for a group of women that is driven to make everything by hand, plans about ten gatherings during the month of December and have a collective brood of about twenty kids, give or take (we're all waiting for a special baby girl right now!). But this year is a little different. This year, we're putting the hustle and bustle into perspective, trying to be grateful for all we have and sharing that with another family halfway around the world. This year, our thoughts will be with a young father and his two children as he returns home to Liberia from a refugee camp in Ghana that he has called home for nearly twenty years. My sister Meagan and her partner Sean know him from their time spent volunteering at Buduburam and organized the gift of money for travel and accommodations once they arrive. We will all breathe a sigh of relief when they get there.

Thinking of this, everything else drops away and all I feel is unbelievably lucky. It seems a little frivolous to extol the virtues of local food when for so many there is no food at all, yet I truly believe that we can secure our future food security and improve the lives of all of us by making these choices when they are available. Maybe then our economy will improve to the point where we can begin to help and be a model for others. We have so much already. Finding joy and richness in the simple pleasures of good food, locally grown and fairly traded, is a reminder three times a day of how very grateful we should be.

Nova Scotia Wild Rice Salad

Perfect for Christmas buffets and potlucks, this salad feels very special. You can leave out the dressing and stuff your turkey with it!

1 C. Wild Rice (believe it or not, there is a source in Amherst!  Contact Dolphin Village to order)

4 ½ C. Water

1 C. White Rice

1 ½ t. Salt

½ C. each chopped Dates, Raisins, and Dried Cranberries

½ C. each Pecans, Sunflower Seeds, and Almonds, toasted and chopped

1 C. each diced Red Pepper, Celery, and Red Onion

½ C. Olive Oil

Juice of 1 Lemon

2 T. Red Wine Vinegar

1 clove Garlic, minced

¼ C. Honey

Salt and Pepper

Combine the wild rice, water and salt in a heavy medium pot. Cover, bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer 20 minutes. Add the white rice and simmer another 25 minutes, then shut off the heat and let the rice sit, covered, while you prepare the rest of the salad. In a large bowl, combine the dates, raisins, cranberries, pecans, sunflower seeds, almonds, pepper, celery and red onion. Whisk together the remaining ingredients in a small bowl, then add this dressing to the large bowl. Add the warm rice and stir gently. Taste for salt and serve immediately, or let cool and refrigerate.

On the 1st Day of Christmas My True Love Sent to Me Some Garlic and it's Spray-Free

Yes, Sir, that's my Garlic

Last Wednesday I planted fifty pounds of garlic. I had put it off for weeks, daunted by the task of preparing the soil. Finally, after much discussion and many appearances on my “to-do” list, I tilled it, and Sean made it into a nice wide bed. I scratched furrows and broke bulbs into cloves and stretched my entire body over the row to get the furthest spots (much more efficient I think than going back again the other way). I'm used to edge-of-my-seat tension in most tasks in my life-you're never quite sure if you'll be ready for a Friday night at the Cafe-so it's a mental challenge to get into the garden. Gardens plod. You can't really rush through the physical demands of this kind of work and do it for hours. I always feel anxious to get it over with until I get into the groove, just like when I run. 

Garlic is easy to grow, but also hugely rewarding. For one thing, there is the cost. Garlic grown without chemicals is fetching up to $13 a pound retail in the Valley. This makes it really worthwhile to bother with the minimal hassle it is.  I'm growing it for the restaurant and for us and my friends. I'm also growing it because my Dad is enormously proud of his garlic crop, whose lineage he can trace back to the purchase of a few pounds of “seed” garlic from the famous Fish Lake Garlic Man many years ago. Mostly I'm growing it because the flavour is way better then the dry tiny grown-in-China garlic that all you can find in most grocery stores. For someone who includes garlic in almost everything but dessert,  that just means tastier food for the same effort.

Inspector Hen checking Garlic Clove Depth

 If you can find some untreated healthy looking garlic, by all means plant your own. The time to do it is right now. Break each bulb into cloves, push them into decent soil at least 6 inches apart, and mulch heavily with straw. In the spring start watching for it to emerge (I'm always impatient and push the straw aside to peek). The little green shoots poke their heads up slowly, but grow pretty quickly once the ground warms up. Sometime in July you will notice a flower head emerge from the center. It's called a scape and I think they look like little elves with long pointed green caps. You must break this off mercilessly or you won't end up with nice fat garlic bulbs. I have heard rumors of large scale growers that slice off the whole top of the plant with a machete, but I go through the rows and snap them one by one. I love the smell of garlic on my hands after I'm done. The only other work to attend to is harvest. When the lower leaves of the plant die off in August, pull up the plants, give the bulbs a hosing and hang them up whole to dry for a week or so. Cut off the dry stem and roots, and store your crop in a re-purposed onion bag. It'll last at least until spring if stored in a cool dry place.  If you can't find your own source of great garlic, come buy a pound from me at the Cafe!

Have your Chickens Prepare the Straw Mulch

Hang the Washed Bulbs to Dry

Cut off Stem and Roots