see also: Kitchen Library — Jane Kenyon

1.  Make sure your cream cheese is soft and your spinach cooked and cooled enough to handle.  Here’s how I do it.  After cooking it in the microwave or on the stove, I put it all in a mesh strainer over a colander.  I use my potato masher to press out the water.  And then at the very end I also press down on the spinach with a clean dry dish towel.  It must be very dry!

This next photo shows just how dry I mean!

Doesn’t my son do a nice job of brushing oil around the pan?

Here are you main ingredients.

Now you cream the cream cheese.  I’m using a stand-up mixer.  Unlike what you see here, you should change from the
whisk to the paddle attachment.  Then add the eggs (which my son beat nicely as you can see).

Then comes the grated cheese.  Did I mention that seasoning and any optional herbs? 
I use maybe a half teaspoon of salt but this will really depend on your palate and the saltiness of the cheese you’ve used.. 
And yes I taste it even with the raw eggs to decide. 
Call me dangerous.

Pour half of your egg mixture into the nice dry spinach.  Mix it up.  Then press it down into your pain. 

Pour the remaining egg on top and smooth out.  It should look like more or less this when you put it in the oven!

Take it out of the oven when it’s golden brown but not too dark otherwise it will be dry. 

Cheers!

sat perched on the glass shelf along with many other glimmering bottles.  I can still recall sitting on the swivel bar chair, my feet not touching the ground, staring at that it. 

Now, forty years later, my father poured me a shot and advised me to drink it “in no more than two gulps.”

The interesting thing is that unlike wine, whiskey ages in barrels, but once it is bottled it is done.  Which means that this 1957 whiskey was unchanged, and frozen in time.  It had not matured a bit from its days by the mahogany bar.

As I belted it back, I understood for the first time that whiskey is not about the taste in your mouth.  It’s the trail of burning fire left down your throat.

I had finally learned to enjoy the warm sensation and even took a little more. 

Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt in a separate bowl. Whisking works like sifting; it prevents lumps and incorporates a little air for a lighter product. Set it aside too. Remember not to scoop, then shake the measuring cup when you measure dry ingredients. Lift the flour into the cup with your free hand, then level off the flour with a knife or your finger. If you scoop flour and shake the cup, you will measure more flour than you need and the cookies may be heavier than they should be.

Add both sugars to the butter and mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon. Add the eggs, one at a time, only adding the next egg when the previous one is fully incorporated. Add the yolks one at a time, and incorporate each one fully before adding the next. Add the vanilla extract. Mix well.

Pastry chefs often refer to wet ingredients as “the wets” and dry ingredients as “the dries” for short. Sugar, like here, when added to wet ingredients becomes wet and is often included therefore in the term “wets.”

So now you know the lingo: add the dries (your flour mixture) to the wets (butter mixture) all at once and mix gently until just incorporated. If you are using an electric mixer, add the dries on lowest speed and mix only until just incorporated. Do not over beat or the cookies will be tough. Best bet is to stop mixing in the dries when there is maybe a little flour still to be mixed in so that when you add the chocolate chips, you do not over-mix the dough.

Add the chocolate chips and very gently fold them in with a spatula. Again, do not over mix. At this point, if you want to bake off a cookie or two (or three or four) just take ice cream scoop size balls and gently flatten them into disks on a parchment-paper lined, greased or nonstick cookie pan and bake at 350 degrees F. until golden, about 8 minutes or more. Cool on a rack. The rest we will freeze.

If you have used melted butter instead of softened butter to make your dough, you may have to refrigerate the dough briefly to get it to a consistency for forming logs easily. This is done quickest by spreading the dough on a sheetpan first, then refrigerating it. Check it every fifteen minutes until it is pliable but not sticky and too soft.

Now we will make the logs. Pull out a long length of plastic wrap over your work surface. Alternatively you can use parchment paper if you don’t want to use plastic. Parchment will require some finesse however to get the logs smooth.

Place a dollop of dough onto the plastic wrap, and then another and another.

It will look like this. From this doubled recipe, I always end up with two logs like this so don’t worry if you still have lots of dough left in your bowl.

Pull the near edge of the plastic wrap or parchment over the log until you can wrap up the log completely in the wrap.

The wrapped dollops of dough will look like this.

With both hands on the log, pull the log gently from the center out until it is even and smooth.

That’s it! You can now freeze the log. Repeat the procedure to use up the dough in your bowl. Most likely you will end up with two logs. For the full recipe plus instructions on how to bake it off, click here.

Next Saturday we will make and freeze the dough for One Badass Ginger Molasses Cookies. If you’d like to join me, have these ingredients ready for next week:

3 cups unsalted, sweet butter (1 1/2 pounds, or 6 sticks)
4 cups white sugar
1 cup molasses (for cookies with a more bitter taste, use robust unsulphured blackstrap molasses, for cookies with a lighter taste, use unsulphured light, cooking, or fancy molasses)
4 eggs
8 cups all purpose unbleached white flour
2 T. plus 2 t. baking soda
1 t. salt
4 t. cinnamon
1 1/2 t. ground cloves (this may be increased up to double the amount if you are a clove lover)
4 t. ground ginger
1/4 cup crystallized ginger (available at most supermarkets that carry dried and candied fruit)
Turbinado sugar, or any large crystal sugar for baking

See you then!

see also: How to Freeze Cookie Dough in Logs

canvases that call attention to their physicality with their sheer size and surfaces that are nuanced, painterly, varied, layered, and gloriously worked, surfaces that represent the passage of time, the artist’s hand and his immense ambition.

The placement of a triptych on one curved wall so that it mimicked a feeling of surrounding the viewer was testament to the encompassing feeling Monet wanted to create with these oversize works. He is quoted often as saying that he wanted to communicate to the viewer his experience of nature, to say something about the space between himself and the thing seen.

I was struck by how many viewers stood before the paintings to have their portraits snapped with digital cameras, delighted by the smooth, crisp contours of skin and modern clothing silhouetted against the texture of the painted canvas.

There were also many viewers moving along the canvas’ length holding camera phones up between themselves and the work, the better to capture the surface plasticity up close. The atmosphere was lively with talk and movement, animated by the effect of these large works, and not the hushed, reverence in front of masterpieces that I had anticipated. Something about these objects was not only effective but also affective, animating the space.

I did long to be alone with them, if only to experience them without distraction. Sitting on one of the viewing benches in the room, I spied a young man doing something different than the other visitors. He was crouched before one of the paintings, carefully observing its every detail up close. I suspected at once that he might be a painter too and felt drawn to him with a magnetic pull. I approached him to confirm what I thought I knew of his vocation. Of course I was right.

“I’ve been thinking about Monet’s paintings in terms of his legacy,” I ventured, hoping for some insight from this kindred spirit, if stranger, “I’ve been wondering if his experience of Nature is the point, more than the objects themselves.”

“Well, painting is one thing, and Nature is another,” he replied, “And Monet knew the difference.”

We had a conversation, entirely facilitated by these beautiful objects, and this experience plus his remark made me revise my assumptions on the spot. Perhaps Monet’s legacy is not contained in the room with these individual paintings. Neither is it limited to the impressively large body of his work, writings and grand property, nor his position as a precursor to modern developments. Instead, Monet’s legacy is partly and importantly the confirmation of the relevance and importance of painting itself, as objects, meaning every uniquely identifying feature about them — their weight and size and materials, their wood and fabric and primer, their scumbled, buttery, brushy, dragged, scraped and built up surfaces, and most of all, their power to engage and create dialogue, even between strangers.

Talk about them all you want, but in the end you’ve got to see them — in person. 

waxed paper and filled with cookies.

I don’t have hens, so I don’t need my basket to collect eggs. As an artist, I love the shadows it throws when the sunlight hits it, and I love the contrast between the thin lines of the wire and the broad expanse of my table. I also appreciate, as I do with all vintage things, the passage of time inherent in its aged surface, its connection to other lives I can only imagine.

Here’s an old recipe I found for stuffed eggs. Farce is an old cooking term for the word, stuff.

To Farce Eggs
Take eight or ten eggs and boil them hard. Peel off the shells and cut every egg in the middle; then out the yolks. Make your farcing stuff as you do for flesh, saving only you must put butter into it instead of suet, and that a little. So done, fill your eggs where the yolks were, and then bring them and seethe them a little. And so serve them to the table.”
---The Good Housewife’s Jewel, Thomas Dawson, with an introduction by Maggie Black, London, 1596 (p. 86)

Shared interests create community; I was delighted when a fellow blogger spied my basket in the photographs from my last post, and wrote to me that she has the same one. You can find them online on sites like ebay. Here’s a link to a page with lots of different ones if you’d like one too.

see also: Vintage Canisters in the Modern Kitchen

a few little tips and tricks.

Make it by hand, gently. Overworking cake batter is the main reason why so many cakes are rubbery and heavy. Don’t let the butter get too soft. If it gets too soft and shiny, refrigerate it until it is pliable but not greasy.

When the cakes are still in the pans and warm, not cooled completely nor piping hot, wrap them completely in plastic wrap to let them steam. You can also do this by placing a pot lid on top and wrapping the cake pan in a towel if you’d rather not use plastic. When the cakes are cool, unwrap and frost them.

Here’s my favorite recipe:

Fudgey Chocolate Layer Cake

For the cake:
1 stick sweet unsalted butter, softened, not greasy
2 cups dark brown sugar, packed
3 eggs
2 t. vanilla extract
3 ounces semi-sweet chocolate, melted and cooled slightly (or alternatively 3 ounces unsweetened chocolate and if using unsweetened chocolate, add 1/4 cup more brown sugar to butter)
2 1/4 cups all-purpose unbleached flour
2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
8 ounces sour cream
1 cup boiling water.

For the frosting
24 ounces (or two 12-ounce bags) of semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup heavy cream

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease two 9-inch cake pans. Line them with parchment paper and brush paper with butter again. Flour the pans and set aside.
2. In a large mixing bowl, beat butter and sugar with a wooden spoon until well blended. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition.
3. Add vanilla and then melted chocolate to the batter. Mix gently until combined.
4. Add baking soda and salt to flour and whisk together. Alternate dry ingredients with sour cream, beginning and ending with dries (adding 1/3 dries, then 1/2 sour cream, then 1/3 dries, then the rest of the sour cream, then the last third of the dries.) Combine gently until batter is smooth and all ingredients are incorporated. Lastly, add the boiling water slowly, 1/4 cup at a time, and mix gently between additions until it is all incorporated.
5. Divide batter between pans. Place pans on a sheetpan and place the sheetpan holding the pans on a rack positioned in the center of the oven. Bake for about 25 - 35 minutes, checking the layers half way through the baking time for doneness. When a toothpick inserted in the center of the cakes comes out almost clean, they are done. Do not over-bake. Cool on a wire rack for ten minutes or so until the pans are not burning hot anymore but still warm and wrap the pans in plastic wrap, or cover them each with a pot lid and wrap them in towels until they cool completely.
6. Make the frosting: Place the chocolate chips in a mixing bowl. Scald the cream, then add it to the chips. Whisk gently to combine, then beat to incorporate a little air and make a spreadable frosting. Place one cake layer on a serving platter and frost it. Place the second layer on top. Frost the outside and top of cake. Serve immediately. If you have leftover cake, refrigerate it or freeze it and always let it sit out at room temperature to soften it before serving.

These are my Badass Chocolate Chip Cookies, but the ingredients are doubled so there’s lots of dough to freeze:

4 cups all-purpose flour
1 t. baking soda (you may use half this amount if you like a denser cookie)
1 t. salt
1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) sweet unsalted butter, melted
2 cup white sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 T. vanilla extract
2 egg
2 egg yolk
4 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips (or half white chocolate chips and half dark chocolate chips)

See you next Saturday!

see also: One Badass Cookie - Chocolate Chip Cookies

good bitter candied orange peel for the Hot Cross Buns. She even gave me her recipe for the candied peel, which I will make and post this coming Friday. Having no good spice shop nearby, I went online for English spice. My favorite online source for all things spicy and ethnic, Kalustyan’s, had nothing similar. Next I looked for recipes. No surprise: this search yielded as many variations as there are cooks. So I studied them and made up my own.

I have two electric grinders; one for coffee and one I keep just for spices. Some people prefer a mortar and pestle though I wonder how difficult it might be to grind up some of the spices that really are hard and fibrous like the cinnamon stick. For the spice mix, whole cinnamon stick is preferred over ground, and ditto for whole berries or seeds of cloves, allspice and nutmeg if using. Coriander and cardamom were often listed as optional, but since I love them I included some. In most recipes, the ground versions of ginger or mace seem acceptable. Equal parts of every ingredient are included except for coriander and cardamom which are added to taste. The goal is an aromatic mixture of spices like what one finds in apple or pumpkin pie, but ground together rather than measured separately. The end result was quite beautiful in color and aroma.

Here’s what I came up with if you would like to have some too.

Nancy’s English Spice
Note: you want to grind this up well: it would be very unpleasant to get a hard bit of spice in a bite of pastry.

1 T. whole cloves
1 T. whole coriander
1 one-inch piece of a cinnamon stick
1 T. whole allspice
1 T. ground mace
1 T. coriander seeds
1 T. cardamom pods, broken open and seeds removed, hulls discarded.

Grind all ingredients together until the mixture is powdered and has no solid bits left in it. Store in airtight container.

see also: A Search for Hot Cross Buns