Food in Milwaukee. And other places.
You know how you shove things in the oven to get them off the counter so you look more organized than you actually are when people are stopping by to drop things off and then forget and turn it on preheat?
I lost my entire batch of cookies and some dinner buns that I’d planned to eat with hot dogs. More bummed about the buns than the damn cookies.
All just to look tidier than I am. As if I’m fooling anyone.
Just bring the straight jacket, I’ve got the papers signed.
I had this idea (while I was running—when I am not listening to German lessons, I am thinking about food) to make Christmas cookies with red and green stripes. As if I need more crap to do, I already made one batch of the damn things, and then as I ran, the idea became more and more complex and pretty soon I was making fucking Royal Stewart tartan plaid cookies. The idea, fully formed in my mind, turned out to be a complete freaking horror show. I nearly had a stroke trying to squeeze the dough out of a pastry tip. Eventually I rolled the colored dough out and cut thin strips that promptly fell apart in my hands but still somehow (and not without a great deal of effort) I managed to get one batch of them onto a tray and into the oven.
The color is awful, watermelon and mint, more like Easter than Christmas and the final cookies look like they’re made of Play-doh. Hm, there’s a thought maybe I should get one of those Play-doh machines and run my cookie dough through…ack….SHOOT ME.
I threw out the red and green dough so I wouldn’t be tempted to experiment with it again—really I had a stiff neck and a lower back ache from the torture of it. And then I gave the finished cookies to my mailman. At least I put them in a bag with his name on it and put it in the mailbox. This may be a felony. In any event cookies that look like this ought to be if they aren’t.
Pardon me, I’ve got to go google Play-doh fun factories…
I have no idea why I am compelled to make these damn things every year. I end up eating most of them. My mother likes them but she’ll eat about 2 of them. And really, there are cookies and sweets all over the damn place anyway.
I went all out this year and sprang for organic flour. I used vanilla bean seed paste from Madagascar (possibly organic, but probably not, definitely exotic). But instead of cutting circles I used a ravioli cutter and made (relatively) square cookies. There is something not as festive about this. Maybe I need the misery (yes Carol, more drama) of cutting the circles, having to re-knead and re-roll until I’ve used up all the dough. It speaks to the festive nature of Christmas.
They may not have been as festive but they fit in the cookie jar a lot more efficiently.
For someone as ambivalent as I am about Christmas, I seem to make a lot of cookies. Actually, I seem to make a lot of food in general. But I made another batch of cookies here in Wisconsin where the weather is more, if not exactly, Christmasy. This time though I split the dough in half and added spices to it. My intention was to make something along the lines of a spice or gingerbread cookie. This did not happen. What I got was a clove tasting cookie that I did not like. So to ameliorate the problem I put chocolate on them. Another not great idea. It was a pain to do and the results were unspectacular. It’s OK, I can foist them off on people pretending to be all holiday spirit-y.
I did, though, pioneer another method of making the damn things. The rolling out and cutting is a misery. So I used a ravioli cutter and made square cookies. I don’t see any reason why this shouldn’t be a norm. It’s so much easier than circles (less waste, too) or the horror of stars which are pretty but a royal pain to make. Next year I will be more precise about measuring and cutting them into uniform squares.
