Old Fashioned Christmas Gingerbread Cookies (Advanced)
I will tell you honestly, I don’t make these any more. They are too difficult. But if you are fairly experienced at baking, these are totally amazing cookies my French grandmother used to make.
Gingerbread Cookies
Preheat oven to 400 F/ 200C
1 cup molasses (Brer Rabbit Green Label)
1 cup sugar
1 cup shortening
1 cup hot water
3 teaspoons baking soda
3 teaspoons Royal baking powder
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
5 cups flour
Add hot water to molasses, sugar and shortening. When well-mixed and cool, stir in sifted dry ingredients.
Roll out to 3/4 inches thick, sprinkle with sugar and cut with cookie cutters. Place on cookie sheets and bake about 10 minutes, maybe a little longer.
Doesn’t sound so hard, does it?
This is a very soft dough. My grandmother says it rolls easier if you chill it before rolling it out, but even so, it is very soft. The rolling surface should be well floured, as well as the rolling pin, and it is best to work fast.
Note to my niece: Little Diamond, I sent the fruit cake. This is the recipe for the cookies you promised to send 🙂
Christmas Cookies: Butter Tarts
These are particularly easy if you can buy ready-made pie crust. If you can’t, use the Never Fail Pie Crust published earlier in this blog. You can freeze what you don’t use for later. Easy easy easy.
Butter Tarts
Preheat oven to 375 F/190 C.
Cream together:
1 Tablespoon butter
1 cup brown sugar
Add:
2 beaten eggs
1 large cup currants, sultanas or raisins
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Line patty or tart tins with pie crust (cut with cookie cutter to fit) and drop in enough mixture to nearly fill. Small tart tins work fine, and make a great one-bite sized tart.
Bake 10 – 12 minutes,
Santa’s Wish List: Cookbooks
You might think I love to cook. You would be very wrong.
I had a great friend for many years, one of those Southern gals with a last name first name, and when one day I told her of my secret guilt – that cooking wasn’t FUN for me, she said “what we do, every day, is SURVIVAL cooking. We just meet the expectation of getting a meal on the table. That doesn’t have to be fun, it just has to be done.”
That’s pretty much what I do, and why I have been giving you all these great recipes. The truth about the recipes I am giving you is that most of them are EASY and they taste good. A few require special equipment and mastering a new skill, but it’s like swimming – once you’ve done it, it’s easy. There is nothing complicated about the recipes I am sharing with you – they are ones I use, too!
Books About Food and Eating
First I will share with you two books available through third party vendors at Amazon. The first is Food Lover’s Companion (A Comprehensive Definition of Over 4000 Food, Wine and Culinary Terms) by Sharon Tyler Herbst, which is available starting at $14.93, and the second is M.F.K Fisher’s The Art of Eating, also available through Amazon at $11.53. The Companion is invaluable when someone uses a term for a cooking technique or ingredient you don’t know; it has words for everything! My husband reads this book sometimes just for fun and is always sharing new information he has learned. The MFK Fisher book is just plain fun reading about food, full of information and anecdotes and stories, written in an enormously readable way.
Beginner Cookbooks
The first cookbook I used was the McCalls Cookbook – no longer in print. It had photos of how do do the things I found so intimidating, and that is where I got my earliers Christmas cookie recipes – the Russian Tea Cakes and the Candy Cane Cookies. The second was The Joy of Cooking, which I mentioned in an earlier blog entry. What is good about these books is that they keep it really simple. In Joy, they give you a long theoretical section, which you can read if you have the time, and which helps, but at the beginning it isn’t always easy to even understand the basics. That takes time. Then you can go back and read later and go “Aha! Now I understand!”
Cookbook Secrets
Actually, I love reading cookbooks. I have a huge collection. And almost all of them are Junior League Cookbooks. So here’s the secret – when you are looking for cookbooks, look for ones where women who contribute have to put their names. If their name is on the recipe, you can trust that the recipe will work, and that it will be one of their best recipes – they don’t want to be embarrassed!
The majority my cookbooks are from the South. And narrowing it down even further, most of my favorites come from Louisiana or Georgia.
The first one I ever bought was Talk About Good! And oh, it WAS good!
These recipes use ingredients like real cream and real butter and lots of salt. Southern people have some of the lowest life-expectancy rates in the United States – I suspect their eating habits have a lot to do with it. But if it isn’t a habit to eat so richly, every now and then it just tastes SO GOOD to use these ingredients. You will also notice that it has what they call a “plastic comb” binding. That means when you open it up to follow a recipe, it will lie flat. That’s a really good thing!
My second favorite is Quail Country, by the Junior League of Albany, Georgia. You would really have to scour the book stores to find this out-of-print classic, because so few people would ever want to part with it. Another gem is The Fort Leavenworth Collection, if you can get your hands on it – again, yard sales, used book stores would be your best bet.
There is a wonderful group of stores in the USA called Half Price Books. If books are not being bought as gifts, if you plan to just read a book and pass it along, or if you like to have a few on hand to pass along because you think they are so great, Half Price Books is a great place. They have the most obscure books, books you never thought you would see again. Many of their books are new, but remaindered (left over from book stores that couldn’t sell the, or from publishers who published too many copies) so they are sold at half price. They will also buy used books from you, but to me, they offer so little that I would just as soon give them away. (No, I don’t own stock in Half Price Books.)
There are some other fabulous Junior League cookbooks – the California Heritage Cookbook, the Seattle Classics, and there are other cookbooks produced by churches and charities that also have “real people” recipes that are drop-dead good. I remember once sharing a recipe for Chocolate Cheesecake from Seattle Classics. My friend told me she made it for Christmas dinner, but everyone was too full to eat dessert. But she said all night she heard doors opening and closing, as people snuck down to the kitchen to slice a little of the cheesecake and eat it, and in the morning, only a fragment was left!
Seeking out the best cookbooks can make every vacation an adventure. I have cookbooks from Kenya and Tunisia, Qatar, Jordan and Saudi Arabia . . . all full of great recipes, recipes with names attatched. I wish you a grand adventure seeking out cookbooks that will thrill your heart. Happy Hunting!
Christmas Cookie Making Photos
This weekend (Thursday and Friday are the week-end in Kuwait) was the big cookie making weekend – the upcoming two weeks are busy with occasions that require plates of cookies. (See cookie recipes in early December/late November).
In military campaigns, in event planning, after scoring a major business coup, there is an event called the “after action report.” Now matter how well you have done, it helps to sit down, right after the event, and brainstorm where you did well and where you could do better.
Here is where I did really well – the cookies taste great. Making the dough ahead of time and then cooking it up when I have time is a good game plan.
Areas where I need improvement. . .
Sugar Cookies
1) When using the food processor to make cookie dough, take off the blade protectors before beginning. Fortunately, I figured out what had happened while the pieces were relatively large, and easy to pick out of the cookie dough.
2) I didn’t realize in my January move that in the two boxes that went missing was my rolling pin. The good news is that a long, smooth sided plastic glass worked just fine. Better, in fact, than any rolling pin, wooden or plastic, I have ever used before.
I forgot what a big mess cookie-making makes . . .
This is what they look like after they have been glazed and green sugar crystals added.
They don’t have to be fancy – just relatively uniform – to make a pretty cookie plate.
Swedish Rosettes
3) Where did my big transformer go? The Fry Daddy I use to keep the oil at a steady temperature for the Swedish Rosettes needs 1200 watts, and the biggest transformer I have on hand is 1000 watts. Why on earth am I still using a 110v appliance after 8 years of living in 220v countries?
I ended up using the low-tech solution:
Although I have gas burners as well as electrical burners, I am terrified of the potential for fire using so much hot oil over the course of several hours. I don’t know why, I suppose it is not rational, but it just FEELS safer using the electric burner. It is hard to maintain an even 370 F, and quality control is problematic.
This is one of the first ones, when the oil isn’t quite hot enough. The flavor, however, is awesome! That’s the good thing about the rejects.
You can see the variation in color below. Save the darker ones for the last. You can still serve them with enough powdered sugar.
Ready to serve:
Russian Tea Cakes
These were a piece of cake. SOOOOOO easy. The ones on the right, are fresh out of the oven. The ones on the left have been rolled in powdered sugar, and are ready to eat. Yummmmm.
I buy my sparkling crystal sugars at Market Spice, in the Seattle Pike Place Market, but when I checked, they no longer sell online, and refer us instead to Amazon where they have a truly astonishing variety of sugar decorations available through the mail.
Evening out: Learning to be Flexible
A post from Little Diamond on having passport photos taken in Lebanon reminds me of how differently we live in our foreign adventures. She tells how patiently the photographer dealt with her, encouraging her to comb her hair, and finally, after showing the first photos, convinced her to clean up her act for a second, more glamorous, round.
I read a book Almost French by Sarah Turnbull, in which she describes her arrival in Paris, dressed in typical Outback Australian style, and her adventures learning that in Paris, you don’t even leave the apartment in sweatpants to run to the baker because “it might hurt his eyes.”
I remember returning home from life in Germany and thinking “the women here are so COMFORTABLE in their own skin. They wear jeans, even into their 80’s, they go hiking, they go without makeup, and they look happy!” and I wanted that for myself. In my neck of the woods, too much make-up is a big no-no. And too much is anything beyond mascara.
Identity photos in the USA are simply expected to be awful, so no one thinks too much about it, and we all just avoid showing our ID’s if we can help it (maybe that’s why we drive so lawfully, so that we don’t have to show our dismal drivers’ licenses?)
So when I had to have my first residence card done in Saudi Arabia, I didn’t go to a lot of effort. I cleaned up, combed my hair, put on my abaya and scarf around the neck, and went to the local photo guy and got the photo taken. It happened to fall on the day of a significant birthday, you know, one of those with a zero in it. Later that day, when we picked up the photos from the beaming photographer, I looked, and I mentally gasped. The photo looked fabulous.
What to do? I know the law says photos are to be unretouched, but this photo is clearly a little doctored. As any woman would, I decided to just go with the local customs. I even bought a few more enlarged versions to sent to my family. I still grin when I look at that photo. Yes, I even framed one for myself.
Here in Kuwait, I have had to had these photos taken several times, I don’t know why, for several different cards, and then the cards take time and someone loses the photos and I have to have them taken again. There is a very nice man, he takes them and I can get them almost instantly from him. I even got to pick out the one I wanted, and then, he started airbrushing.
“What are you doing??” I exclaimed, as he brushed broad strokes across my face.
“Oh Madam, I am just evening out your makeup a little bit,” he said, as freckles, crow’s feet, shadows, and any blemish totally disappeared. I wasn’t wearing any makeup, only mascara.
Hypocrite and vain as I am, I just rolled with it. It’s another culture, and I know, because I asked, that everyone gets the same treatment, the re-touch, so all the ID photos look pretty good. Mine would draw attention if it weren’t retouched, I tell myself.
Cross Cultural Flummox
Scanning through the blogs yesterday, I saw one I almost didn’t check. It seemed to be a no-brainer. LaialyQ8 asked if you would share your password with your husband/wife.
Sheerly out of idle curiousity, I checked. And I was stunned to see the responses. Almost every person said they WOULD.
I’ve thought about it all day. It has to be a cultural difference. Hands down, I bet most of my friends would say “no way!” It isn’t a question of how much you love someone, to me, I just need some areas of my life that are private. I don’t keep secrets from my husband – I share things with him gladly.
But do I think he needs access to my correspondence with old girlfriends, friends I knew before I knew him? If they confide details of some crisis to me, does he need access to that information?
He trusts me. He should! And he would never, never ask me for my password, and I wouldn’t ask for his. Of course we share passwords for financial records and access, but not for our e-mail accounts.
It never for a heartbeat occurred to me there was another way of thinking about it. I was flummoxed (that’s for you, Zin!) And it is good information; I need to think about this and integrate it and try to understand it. That’s one of the things I love about living in a foreign country; challenges my assumptions and forces me to think differently, outside the box.
St. Nicklaus Day
In Germany, where we have lived, off and on, many years, December 6th is the day that St. Nicklaus comes, not Christmas. Saint Nicklaus, as opposed to Santa Clause, wears a long red robe with white trim, more like a coat, and it comes down past his knees. He often has a shepherd’s crook in one hand, and is sometimes pictured riding on a horse.
I got this wonderful print – one of many from The St. Nicholas Center where you can find many beautiful old postcards portraying the old European precursor to the modern Santa Claus.
Children put out their shoes, and hope that St. Nicholas will come by and fill them with candy, oranges, small goodies, and not with branches (to be used as switches) and coal, which are for bad children. Germans have such a sense of humor that you can also find branches with candies tied to them, and candies that are wrapped to look like coal. Kind of a mixed message, I guess.
The original St. Nicholas, so the legend goes, was a Bishop in Myra, then in Greece, now a part of Turkey near Demre. He threw bags of gold through the window of a poor family with three daughters, who would not marry without dowry. This is the bare bones of the St. Nicholas legend – I learned a lot more from the same site where I got the photo Who Is Saint Nicholas? You can learn so much more by clicking there. He is, to me, so much more lovable than Santa Claus, who commits house invasion on a grand scale once a year!
In the tiny village where we lived in Germany, I would get up early in the morning and put small cakes and candies on the doorsteps of the three women who were particularly good to me. Oh! The looks on their faces later when they spoke to me.
The grandmother would say “What? you think we are children, that St. Nicholas comes to us?” but you could see from the grin that it tickled her.
Aren’t we all still children, deep inside, thrilled when some unexpected blessing comes our way? Isn’t it always fun, child or not, to be surprised by something good?
Rain, Dear
My husband called me this morning from Germany and said “I am so glad we don’t live here anymore, it is all dark and grey and rainy today.”
I laughed and said “That’s the exact weather we are having in Kuwait.”
I have only recently started driving, really driving, the way I used to drive around Qatar. (One time my husband took a day off to take a trip around Qatar. We left early in the morning. We were back in time for lunch.) I was fearless, at least during daylight hours. Traffic was heavy, but much calmer, much tamer than in Kuwait.
When I first got here, I thought I would never drive. Then, little by little, I would drive here, drive there, mostly for groceries or meetings, then, little by little, more. Now, I am actually pretty good, or at least getting pretty good.
Or so I thought until today. I had to drive home in the rain. I am confident and also cautious as a driver. I was surrounded by two kinds of drivers – nervous and UNconfident drivers, and drivers who were totally oblivious to the dangers of a newly slick wet highway and driving their normal fast, weav-y way. That makes for a hair-raising ride, especially when you are caught between the nervous brak-ers and the cavalierly speeding weavers.
Did I mention school had just gotten out, so many of the cars were Mums with children, and the others were young bloods who had been trapped in the classroom and were eager to break loose? Deadly combination.
Made it home, mentally designing a medal. Soldiers get medals just for participating in a campaign and living to tell about it. I think the Kuwait freeways and ring roads should be combat-medal qualified. Maybe black, with a yellow stripe down the middle . . .and you get stars for acts of extraordinary bravery?
Sadu House Opening
The new, serenely beautiful Sadu House re-opened on December 3, with little fanfare, and a lot of treasures. The history of weaving is beautifully displayed, with spindles, floor looms, raw wool, spinning wool, and huge photos and graphic drawings on the walls. The spaces are inviting. There are spaces where women work with floor looms, and other spaces with standing looms.
Best of all, they have preserved the architecture of one of the few remaining truly Gulf-style houses, built around center courtyards. They have covered over one courtyard with glass, protecting it from the elements but allowing the light to flow freely into the surrounding rooms. The doors are all inlaid or carved, the windows deep and inviting . . . it is a beautiful space, welcoming and well arranged. There is an admirable textiles library and a great gift shop with some truly Kuwaiti items.
The Kuwait Beauty Sisterhood
We love the Kuwait Airport. I love it that you can get a cup of coffee and just sit and wait for your arrivals to make that long long walk as you exit customs and head toward the exit. We love watching the families so excited to see one another. We make up stories for ourselves to explain what we are seeing. Sometimes, we cry, too, because it is so moving. We love it when the women ululate on seeing a new arrival, when brides arrive with their husbands, when Moms come back from Hajj.
A few nights ago, my husband was meeting late arrivals at the airport and he saw something we have NEVER seen before. He saw four women, all with identical bandages over their noses. He figures they must have gone somewhere for plastic surgery. All four at the same time? We figure they must be sisters, or cousins, or very very good friends, all having their noses trimmed at the same time. He said they weren’t at all self-conscious about it, rather they were grinning with pride. I think when there are four of you with the same big bandage, it must take the self-conscious factor WAAAAAYYYYY out.
We’re always laughing at what we call “buying hope in a bottle.” For me, it might be the next luxury face cream that promises me “visible results in 7 days”. For my husband, it is always the next super camera. For some, it is the hot motorcycle, or the next hot car. For some, it is the hottest new computer, or the tiniest, biggest gigabyte iPod with all the bells and whistles. We’re all looking for a little hope. It just gives me a big grin thinking of those four brave girls going under the knife together for better noses.
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