Weekly Dish

From all of us here in the Weekly Dish kitchen, may your holiday be full of joyful celebration and delicious food. I, for one, am especially grateful this holiday season to have such kind readers. Thank you for visiting, for commenting, for listening to my stories and sometimes making use of my recipes. Without you, I’d never keep this up.

After a short trip to celebrate with family and friends, we’ll be back soon after the New Year. Merry, merry to all!

By nature, I am not a baker. Bakers, see, are precise. And organized. And neat. Rule-followers, usually. I am a cook. Intuitive, messy, and definitely a spirit-of-the-recipe kind of girl.

But, oh how I love to bake. Yes, this seeming paradox sometimes manifests itself in a great big doughy mess — cakes, especially, sometimes go terribly, terribly wrong under my erratic hand. Sometimes, though, every so often, a recipe for a baked good just feels right. As if I could do it little harm, even if I tried. These are the sorts of recipes that fall into my kitchen routine quietly, and before I know it, I’ve made the same kind of cookie or muffin or bready item a dozen times, and by some happy accident, they have turned out deliciously every time.

I first made these sandy butter cookies last holiday baking season, after I read about them on Orangette. Molly is right — this is quite an unassuming cookie, nothing much to look at. But it is exactly the sort of cookie that you can pile high on a plate, and before you know it, the plate has only tiny little crumbs to show for all your baking work. Left out, these cookies just get eaten, that is all there is to it.

I made these a number of times through the course of citrus season last year — I love them with Meyer lemon zest, as the original recipe calls for, but as you know, I have a supply of orange zest needing to be used. Orange zest marries so marvelously with plain old butter and sugar, I thought it would land happily in these simple little cookies.

Everyone has her own form of procrastination, and mine happens to be baking. So last week, when I should have been working on the semester’s final projects, I decided to make cookies for my students to eat while they took their final exam. David thought this recipe was an odd choice — he says these cookies are too sophisticated for college students’ palates. Perhaps he’s right, but as happens when they’re at our house, the platter piled high with cookies sat empty as my last student turned in her stapled stack of papers. As she walked out the door and wished me happy holidays, she turned around and said, “Oh, by the way, those cookies are good.”

Indeed they are. Simple, yes. But the separate flavors — orange here, a kick of sugar crystal there, finished with a bite of salt — come together after the crumbly texture has dissolved to make you want to take just one more bite.

Before you know it, you’ll be itching to make them again. Perhaps, like they have done with me, these cookies will work their way into your holiday baking ritual, and before you know it, you’ll have made them a dozen times. Happily they make great gifts. Or so I tell myself when I’m trying to remember what happened to all those little buttery disks.

Citrus Sables

–Amanda Hesser, via Orangette

Molly says you can bake and freeze them to give away, and that would be a lovely thing to do if you could keep from eating them all. That hasn’t happened around here yet, but I’m planning to wrap up the next batch to send with a couple of holiday care packages. They might not mail terribly well — they crumble a lot — but maybe if wrapped really well, they’ll do okay. I have frozen the wrapped cylinders of batter with good success; in fact, for a while, I kept at least one log of dough in the freezer for good measure — just in case a rainy cookie day appeared out of the cold, clear blue sky.

I usually hate recipes that call for only egg yolks or whites. Once I tried these, though, and kept making them, I had to think of something to do with all those whites, as I can’t stand to throw them out. Hang onto yours and stay tuned — a 4-egg-white recipe is coming your way shortly.

Other than that, the recipe is pretty straightforward, and I haven’t changed it much. I used demerara sugar in place of the turbinado, (Do you know demerara sugar? It is a lovely, lovely molasses-esque coarse sugar that I have grown to adore. They have it at my local grocer’s, and if you come across some, buy it. You’ll be happy you did.) and substituted orange zest for the Meyer lemon.

One urging — don’t skimp on the salt, and whatever you do, don’t use plain old table salt. What happens when you stir the coarse salt in at the end is that the granules hold their shape rather than dissolving into the batter, so the flavor is concentrated in tiny little bursts (rather than making the cookies salty). If you’re skeptical, at least try it with the full 3/4 teaspoon. It will look like a lot, but once you bite into a cookie, I think you’ll be glad you did.

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 t. baking powder
2 T. orange zest, grated (or other citrus zest)
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
3/4 t. coarse sea salt
4 large egg yolks
1/3 cup coarse sugar, like demerara

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 large baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone mats.

In a small bowl, combine the baking powder and flour. Toss in the orange zest and stir until it’s coated with the flour mixture.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the butter and sugars with the paddle attachment until smooth and creamy. With the mixer running, add the egg yolks. Scrape down the sides of the bowl if you need to to make sure the egg is fully incorporated into the creamed butter and sugar.

Turn the mixer down to low and add the flour mixture, a little at a time, just until the flour is no longer noticeable. Stir in the salt.

Divide the dough into 4 equal portions. Drop each portion onto a piece of plastic wrap, and using the wrap to work the dough, form it into a long, slender log. Refrigerate for at least an hour.

Now the cookies are ready to slice and bake; I’ve left them in the fridge for as long as a week, or you can freeze the logs of dough by wrapping them in foil or dropping them into a plastic freezer bag.

When you’re ready to bake, spread the coarse sugar onto a plate. Roll each log of dough in the sugar, pressing with your fingers to make sure it sticks. Slice disks of equal thickness (about 1/4 inch) and place on the baking sheet. They will spread out a little bit, so leave a little space between them. Bake for 10-12 minutes, or until the bottoms take on just a hint of color and the edges are beginning to turn golden. Makes somewhere between 6 and 7 dozen cookies, depending on the size of your slices.

Last fall, David and I bought an orange tree to plant in our yard, next to the Meyer lemon tree he bought for the first birthday I celebrated in Baton Rouge, right under our bedroom windows. We’d just found out that I was pregnant with Josie, and the tree planting felt symbolic somehow, a visible reminder of the life I was busy growing inside of me. Oh, I know, I’m such an English teacher — my students would tell you that I find everything symbolic. Still, the orange tree meant something. Something important, even if just to me.

When we bought it, the man at the nursery told us that citrus trees are generally safe to plant here because it only freezes in southern Louisiana about once every ten years. Citrus trees don’t like to be frozen.

The winter after we bought our orange tree (and many other non-freeze-tolerating plants), only the second winter we’d lived here, it froze. Twice. The hibiscus leaves shriveled, the elephant ears bowed their heads to the ground, and the basil finally kicked the bucket. But the citrus trees, especially the orange tree, I was determined to protect. During the week of the freeze, David would scamper outside before we went to bed, and stake up bedsheets to cover the little still-green shrubs. Every morning, I’d wake up and look out the windows to see if I could tell if they were still alive. And every morning, they were.

So, when they blossomed in the spring, basking our backyard in a sweet, flowery aroma, just weeks before my due date, my attachment grew stronger. I photographed them and talked to them and breathed in their heady scent with a sentimentality that is probably particular to women in the third trimester of pregnancy.

And, as the rules of nature dictate, the flowers eventually gave way to tiny round green globes, and Josie made her way from inside my belly out into the big bright world.

Once the oranges were there, hanging from the branches, they didn’t do much deserving of notice. They were growing, to be sure, and every so often, I’d glance out the window and think, “Wow, those are really getting bigger.” Unlike the care they required to keep them alive during the freeze, or the showy way their flowers demanded attention with their unmistakable scent, the little green oranges grew inconspicuously, day by day, drinking up the sunlight and water they needed to ripen.

Until, one day a few weeks ago, they seemed ready to be picked. I took my basket outside, gathered the small, orange orbs, and brought them into my kitchen. I ate a couple of them just as they were, but they don’t have the most exciting flavor. They are sweet, but subtly so, and not very acidic. The scent of the zest, however, is overpoweringly orange-y, so I grated it all, and started trying to decide what to do with it.

David went through a scone phase over the summer — he tends to bake in frenzied sprees: first, there were muffins, then cookies and biscuits and bread, and, for a while, scones. I remembered that he made the orange chocolate chip ones from Once Upon a Tart…, and they were good, but we agreed that the chocolate overwhelmed the delicate orange flavor, and made them quite rich for breakfast.

So, with the zest and juice from our newly harvested oranges, we made scones, buttery, soft scones with a lovely whisper of orange in every bite. As we sat on our deck this past Saturday, nibbling scones made from our first oranges and watching our giggly baby, now almost seven months old, I was reminded that the emergence of life is at once the most ordinary and the most remarkable event, no matter how expected or natural or commonplace.

And so it is with food, it seems, as our daily existence requires that we fuel our bodies with what the earth produces, or some variant of it, but that act, the act of feeding ourselves and each other, however everyday and routine, can possess great magic. Perhaps I am imbuing a simple scone with more meaning that it deserves, but I have to tell you, as I sat with people I love, eating food that my hands had made from ingredients our little patch of earth had grown, I felt a sense of connectedness and joy that I don’t find in many other areas of life. As the busy, harried holiday season is gaining speed, I hope that you will find a way to share a little food magic with people you love. And, if you happen to want that magic to come in the form of a scone, I highly recommend this one.

It is, after all, the season for both citrus and sharing. Happy magic-making to all!

Orange Scones

4 cups all-purpose flour
4 t. baking powder
1 t. salt
1 cup sugar
1/4 t. freshly grated nutmeg
3 sticks butter, diced
4 large eggs
1 t. vanilla extract
1/2 t. almond extract
1/2 cup freshly squeezed orange juice*
1/4 cup orange zest (loosely packed strips)*
2 T. orange marmalade (optional)**

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, and nutmeg until well-mixed. Add the butter and work it into the dry ingredients with a pastry blender. Be careful not to over-mix; you just want to blend until there aren’t visible traces of the butter and the mixture looks like little round crumbs. (Jerome and Frank say to do this in a food processor, but we don’t have one big enough.)

Toss the orange zest with the flour and butter (I use my hands; you just want the zest to get evenly distributed).

In a small bowl, whisk the eggs, and then stir in the vanillla, almond extract, orange juice, and the marmalade, if using. Pour this mixture on top of the buttery crumbs, and fold, just until the dough sticks together and the flour has disappeared. (Jerome and Frank recommend a wooden spoon for this job; I like to use a sturdy spatula). Watch carefully to prevent over-mixing. As my friend Tee will tell you, over-mixing makes for a tough baked good. (And just in case you’re put in charge of mixing in his kitchen, be very careful! He hates to see anything over-mixed, much to the amusement of his wife, Kathryn, who probably over-mixes just to annoy him.)

Spoon the dough onto the parchment-lined baking sheets in scant 1/2-cup rounds (about a palmful of dough from my hands). Make sure to leave space between the scones, as they will spread as they bake. You may have to bake in batches, depending on the size of your baking sheets. Bake for 18-24 minutes, or until the tops are golden and the edges are beginning to brown. Serve immediately. Baked scones are only good for the next couple of days, but the batter will keep in the fridge for at least a week. We usually bake 4 at a time until the batter is gone. It will make about 12 scones.

*You’ll need about 3 medium-sized oranges or 2 large ones for the zest and juice; I use the long strips of zest you get from using a claw zester.

**We’ve made the scones with the marmalade and without (it’s not something I keep in my fridge), and I can’t really tell a difference, so I’ll leave it out from now on.

–Adapted from Once Upon a Tart… by Frank Mentesana and Jerome Audureau

A few weeks ago, I was catching up on my food blog reading, and I came across this post on What We’re Eating in which Amanda put out a call to other bloggers to join her in Paying It Forward. Since I happen to love giving gifts so much, and since it is that time of year, after all, I couldn’t resist joining in the fun. I love the thought of packaging up some homemade goodies to send out to some of you people out there who stop by here to spend some time in my virtual kitchen. (Plus, now Amanda has to send me a present too — everyone wins!)

So, here’s how it works: I will send a handmade gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment on my blog requesting to join this Pay It Forward exchange. I don’t know what that gift will be yet and you may not receive it tomorrow or next week, but you will receive it within 365 days, which is my promise! The only thing you have to do in return is pay it forward by making the same promise on your blog.

So, if you have a blog and you like the idea of giving away stuff you’ve made to folks who read your blog, then leave me a comment and I’ll start dreaming up what to make you. Just make sure you leave an email address so I can get in touch with you about how to get said gift in your possession.

I love the holidays!

I like Thanksgiving just fine — a holiday celebration that is all about food is one I can’t complain about too much. But, to be honest, I could do without it. Oh, yes, I love the food. But it’s rushed and harried and there’s never enough time to prepare and then it comes and it’s wonderful to share a nice meal with people you love, and then, whoosh!, it’s Monday again, and wow, are you tired. Especially when you live under the academic calendar, Thanksgiving holiday is just a big tease. The two weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks are perhaps my least favorite time to be in the college classroom — my students are stressed and tired, and all they really want is to be done. And I am also stressed and tired and all I really want is to be at home in my fuzzy slippers baking something. So, together, my students and I go through the motions of talking about the last book of the semester, but I can tell, our hearts aren’t really in it.

So, Thanksgiving? Take it or leave it, but I wish we could end the school calendar there. Because where my heart really is, come November, is not in turkey and dressing. It’s looking toward Christmas.

Because I love Christmas. I love it because, unlike so many other occasions, Christmas still warrants its own season, a building up to the actual day that brings weeks of festivity. For nearly a whole month, I get to actually prepare. Which, if I’m really honest, is where I do a lot of my celebrating: in the list-making, decorating, baking, partying, and, of course, shopping. Now, I am not the kind of girl who ordinarily loves to shop; in fact, when I’m shopping for myself (especially for clothes, bleh), I often loathe the experience.

Oh, but how I love to give gifts. I love all parts of it, from making my list of who to buy for, to thinking through what to buy for whom, to wrapping and ribbon-tying and card-writing. And so Christmas is the one time of year when I actually enjoy shopping. It’s purposeful and rewarding and brings me great joy. But I know there are those of you out there who do not share my zeal for holiday shopping. It can be a lot of pressure, especially if you’re trying to come up with just the right thing, and then there are the frenzied crowds, which can make shopping stressful. So, for those of you who do not share my love of gift-buying but need to do so anyway, just in case you have food-lovers to buy for, I thought I’d make you a little list.

For the culinary enthusiasts on your shopping list, here are some suggestions for how to make their holiday happy and bright:

Cute mixing bowls are always a good gift — useful for cooking and serving, the sets that come in a variety of sizes are particularly handy. (I would love to find some that have lids, but it seems that the sets I’ve found are more practical than attractive. If you find cute bowls with lids, please, leave a comment and tell me where!) Tie on a wooden spoon and a ribbon, and this gift is ready to give.

For the baker. I don’t have a cookie press, but I gave one as a gift to a co-worker who made cookies all the time, and she loved it. This one got pretty good reviews on Amazon (and my friend really liked it), but there are also stainless steel options (for a little more money). Cake decorating kits might also be a good choice for one inclined to make pretty baked goods.

For the hostess, versatile serving ware works well. Especially if you’re buying for someone whose taste you aren’t certain about, go with simple and white. These inexpensive pieces from Target would go with most anything, and for someone who entertains a lot, they would get a lot of use.

Kitchen tools make fun stocking stuffers or gift tie-ons for cooks, and these are some of my favorites. I use my microplane zester (a gift from my sister-in-law) all the time, for citrus, for cheese, for nutmeg; it’s a handy thing to have around. Heat-proof tongs also are an essential in my kitchen, and good silicone spatulas have been on my wish list for some time (and aren’t the glittery ones pretty?)

Cookbooks are such great gifts, but there are so many, how do you decide? Here are a few of my picks for different kinds of cooks:

• Sara Foster’s Casual Cooking is perfect for the busy home cook. Her recipes are a little fancier than just your run-of-the-mill dinner, but the book is full of fast and easy preparations for weeknight meals. One thing I like about this book particularly is that it’s also inspirational; in addition to recipes, Foster gives you lists of possible variations on quesadillas, egg dishes, uses for sausage, etc. When I need a dinner idea, this is the book I turn to.
• I don’t have Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From My Home to Yours, but everyone I know who does swears by it. It’s been very popular among foodbloggers as well. If you know a baker, this book comes highly recommended by folks of the baking persuasion.
• Adam Roberts was one of the first foodbloggers I started reading before I started my own site. I have looked through his book (and read lots of reviews), and I think The Amateur Gourmet would be a great choice for anyone with a sense of humor (he’s hilarious), but also for people you know who are just getting into cooking.
• Shauna James Ahern is also a blogger I’ve been reading since before Weekly Dish, and when I first looked at her site, I thought, “Oh, this is about gluten-free cooking. The recipes won’t be useful for me.” I kept going back, though, first and foremost for the writing — I love her voice — and then for the food. I can’t wait to read the whole book, but from the reviews I’ve read (and from what I’ve learned on her site), Gluten-Free Girl is about living life joyfully by embracing the happiness food can bring; rather than focusing on what she can’t have, she makes the most of what she can, which translates into lots of creatively delicious ideas. This would be a great gift for anyone who’s struggled with food allergies, but I also think other food enthusiasts would find a welcome story in Shauna’s.

Often I want to buy kitchen gadgets for someone, but I don’t know what they have or don’t have. If that’s the case, then foodie t-shirts might be a good option. I like these from Cafe Press and this one from Threadless, but there are tons of options with food-related content. If you go with Cafe Press, some of the designs can also be printed on aprons. Which leads me to…

A girl who loves to be in the kitchen can never have enough aprons, and there are so many cute ones out there. I particularly like those with character; the one on the far left is made from a vintage tablecloth (the seller has a few of them available). Anthropologie has an adorable collection, and Jessie Steele’s super-girly ones are available at Amazon.
Coordinating kitchen towels and oven mitts are also available if you want to add something extra to this fashionable gift.

For the cook who has everything, get consumables. Package a bundle of vanilla beans (do a search on ebay; most folks like the ones from The Organic Vanilla Company) with a pretty bottle, some inexpensive vodka, and a print-out of Melissa’s instructions for making your own vanilla, and you’ll make some project-minded cook very happy. Salt may seem like a silly gift to many, many people. But for cooks who love to use the best ingredients, good salt is expensive and will be most appreciated (and used, which is the best part of giving a consumable gift.) Spices from Penzey’s will also be appreciated by cooks who like unique ingredients. Some suggestions: an assortment of different kinds of cinnamon, whole nutmeg with a tiny little grater, or a gift box with a variety of spices. And, of course, there’s chocolate. I am no chocolate expert, so if you want to buy nice chocolate for someone you love, here’s a look into the favorites of chocolate connoisseur, David Lebovitz.

For the philanthropist, donate in his name. Every year, food bloggers around the world collaborate to raise money for a good cause. This year, the proceeds will go towards a school food program in Lesotho, a tiny country entirely surrounded by the Republic of South Africa, where one out of twelve kids die before the age of five and 56% of the population live on less than $2 per day. You can buy a raffle ticket (or several) in the name of someone else, and if they win the prize, yay!, and if not, you’ve given money in their name towards a worthy cause. Check here on Monday, December 10, for more information about how to participate.

Well, clearly, I could go on and on (can you tell I like to think about what would make the perfect gift?), but that should be sufficient for now. Happy holiday preparations everyone!