lemon sandwich cookies

This baking adventure began with a pretty new apron purchased on a whim from the World's Greatest Hardware Store:



Sure, I already had an apron waiting faithfully for me at home. A simple cotton one that had served me well for many years. But this apron wrapped its arms around me and would not let me go.

One might call it a trophy apron.

Baking is an activity I find deeply calming and deeply joyful. It's so simple, yet so mysterious. I still find it surprising that mixing a bunch of ingredients together in a bowl and applying heat to it can yield such an unbelievably delicious payoff.

I also purchased a rolling pin recently, and I wanted to make a cookie with a dough that required rolling.

So I made lemon sandwich cookies. This is a Martha Stewart recipe, laid out in typical Martha fashion. The editorial voice in these recipes is so spartan. There's minimum of direction, and a tacit understanding that you are a cook who owns multiple aprons and thus knows her way around a rolling pin. Martha would never say anything like, "If the dough tears up when you roll it, and sticks like a fiend to the rolling pin, just take a breather and let the dough warm up a little." (I wish she would.)



Once I let the dough warm up a little and tried moving the rolling pin much more slowly over the dough, the cookies came together fine. It really is a joyful thing to use cookie cutters on dough — my interior second grader leaped with glee every time I punched the fluted cutter through the dough.

Lemon Sandwich Cookies

Makes 3 dozen cookies if you're using a 1.5" cutter; less with a larger cutter.

• 16 tablespoons (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 cup confectioners' sugar
• 1 tablespoon finely grated lemon zest (from 1 lemon)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled), plus more for rolling
• 2 tablespoons granulated sugar, for sprinkling
• Creamy Lemon Filling (see below)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl using an electric mixer on high speed, beat butter, confectioners' sugar, lemon zest, and salt until combined. With mixer on low, add flour (dough will still be stiff); finish mixing with a wooden spoon.
2. Turn dough out onto a piece of plastic wrap, pat into a disk about 1/2 inch thick. Wrap, and chill until firm, about 1 hour (and up to 3 days).
3. Unwrap dough; place on a lightly floured piece of parchment or waxed paper. With a lightly floured rolling pin, roll dough about 1/8 inch thick (if dough cracks, let it warm up slightly. If dough sticks like a fiend to the rolling pin, just laugh a little and take a walk around the block).
4. Cut out cookies with a 1 1/2-inch round cutter (reroll scraps once, chilling of too soft). Place 1 inch apart on two baking sheets; sprinkle with granulated sugar. Bake until barely beginning to brown, 15 to 20 minutes; transfer to wire racks to cool completely.
5. Form sandwiches: Place about 1 teaspoon (or more!) Creamy Lemon Filling between two cookies, sugared sides facing out; squeeze gently.

- - - - - - - - -

Creamy Lemon Filling

Makes enough for about 3 dozen sandwich cookies

• 1 package (4 ounces) cream cheese, room temperature
• 1 tablespoon finely grated lemon zest (from 1 lemon)
• 1 to 1 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar

Directions

1. In a small bowl, mix cream cheese and zest until smooth. Gradually add 1 cup confectioners' sugar, mixing until smooth. Mix in remaining sugar as necessary to create a firm but spreadable filling.

— from Martha Stewart

Spring green risotto

Last night Lalah and I made risotto. Risotto, of course, is another one of those Scary Food Things I've always been too intimidated to try. All that stirring! And who's to say what al dente really is? I can't be responsible for judging these things!

But we made risotto, and it turned out beautifully. I pretty much demanded that we try Ina Garten's Spring Green Risotto recipe. The seatback TVs on my long flight back to Atlanta from San Francisco last month featured the Food TV channel with Ina Garten cheerfully making this risotto. People, I hope you will never be strapped into a chair and made to watch Parmesan cheese softening luciously into tender arborio rice in a glorious closeup as you're gnawing on airplane peanuts. It's torture.

I'd been thinking about this risotto for weeks, so I was ready to get to it.

This recipe is particularly enjoyable because it introduces a number of spring vegetables to the line-up. Asparagus, peas, leeks, fennel. Risotto primavera!



Revelations:

First, as expected, risotto is a demanding but extremely pleasurable dish to make. It's not a good idea if you're really hungry, because Lord knows, it takes some time. It's a very good idea if you feel like taking your time, having a cooking experience, sipping some wine while you stir, filling your kitchen with delectable fragrances.



The overall texture and vibe of this dish was just what we wanted. It was creamy and comforting and filling and rich. You'll taste many layers of flavor in this dish. They all play beautifully together. Creamy rice, earthily sweet asparagus, savory broth, the bright blanket of lemon tying everything together.




This recipe makes a lot. Invite a crowd over for this one. A crowd that's not in a hurry.

Spring Green Risotto

nocoupons1 1/2 tablespoons good olive oil
1 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 cups chopped leeks, white and light green parts (2 leeks)
1 cup chopped fennel
1 1/2 cups Arborio rice
2/3 cup dry white wine
4 to 5 cups simmering chicken stock, preferably homemade
1 pound thin asparagus
10 ounces frozen peas, defrosted, or 1 1/2 cups shelled fresh peas
1 tablespoon freshly grated lemon zest (2 lemons)
* Note: This is a lot of lemon zest. Lalah and I both loved the prominence of the lemon flavor in the finished dish, but if you are not nutty about lemon, you may want to start with the zest from one lemon, taste, and work up from there. *
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice (ditto on the mention of zest above)
1/3 cup mascarpone cheese, preferably Italian
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan, plus extra for serving
3 tablespoons minced fresh chives, plus extra for serving

Directions:
Heat the olive oil and butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the leeks and fennel and saute for 5 to 7 minutes, until tender. Add the rice and stir for a minute to coat with the vegetables, oil, and butter. Add the white wine and simmer over low heat, stirring constantly, until most of the wine has been absorbed. Add the chicken stock, 2 ladles at a time, stirring almost constantly and waiting for the stock to be absorbed before adding more. This process should take 25 to 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, cut the asparagus diagonally in 1 1/2-inch lengths and discard the tough ends. Blanch in boiling salted water for 4 to 5 minutes, until al dente. Drain and cool immediately in ice water. (If using fresh peas, blanch them in boiling water for a few minutes until the starchiness is gone.)

When the risotto has been cooking for 15 minutes, drain the asparagus and add it to the risotto with the peas, lemon zest, 2 teaspoons salt, and 1 teaspoon pepper. ( * Note: 2 teaspoons of salt felt like a lot. We added one and found it to be sufficient.)

Continue cooking and adding stock, stirring almost constantly, until the rice is tender but still firm.

Whisk the lemon juice and mascarpone together in a small bowl. When the risotto is done, turn off the heat and stir in the mascarpone mixture plus the Parmesan cheese and chives. Set aside, off the heat, for a few minutes, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and serve hot with a sprinkling of chives and more Parmesan cheese.

— from Food Network's Barefoot Contessa

About eating

From California last week, my friend Amy sent a postcard with a quote on it. The quote has everything to do with what I've been thinking about lately in relation to food. Also, Wendell Berry is pretty much completely right about everything, all the time. I love that guy.

"Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend." — Wendell Berry

Mustard-maple salmon with hollandaise sauce

Sauces are one of those "scary food things" that have long intimidated me.

When I saw a "cooking class" article in this month's Cooking Light about sauces, I felt newly inspired to get over my anxiety and try making a sauce from scratch.

Lalah and I decided to try preparing a simple piece of salmon and making a hollandaise sauce to accompany it.

Step 1 was going to Whole Foods and picking out a really beautiful piece of wild caught walleye salmon. Behold:



Step 2 was buying the ingredients for the hollandaise. Hollandaise is basically a warm, buttery version of mayonnaise. It's one of the French mother sauces. (Frankly, just the phrase "mother sauces" makes me want to attempt cooking all of them. Either that, or take a bath in them.) Hollandaise known for its rich, silky texture and its versatility.

Because the hollandaise was going to require a lot of attention, we selected an exceedingly simple recipe for the salmon, something that would require us only to place it in a glass pan and put it in the oven.

A couple of hours before dinner, I marinated the fish in dijon mustard, maple syrup, and balsamic vinegar (recipe below). That was the most complex part of the salmon preparation.

Over at Lalah's house, we rolled up our sleeves and got into the hollandiase. The timing of this meal was tricker than most meals we've prepared. Because we wanted to have the salmon coming out of the oven at the same time that the hollandaise was ready, and also at the same time that we had fresh asparagus and broccoli emerging from steam, we had to be on our toes. We adopted the phrase "gazelle-like intensity" to explain our mindset for preparing the sauce. We did a little fist-bump and then donned our aprons.

As it turns out, preparing hollandaise sauce does indeed require gazelle-like intensity. This is not the meal for a lazy cook, or for a Sunday afternoon when you just want something nourishing and simple. This is a great dinner to prepare with a two-person cooking team interested in exploring a somewhat technical meal. The preparations basically required full attention from both of us.

Having had no previous experience clarifying butter, Lalah and I worked together to make judgment calls about separating the solids from the butterfat. That was really helpful.

It was really useful to have one person focus on the sauce while someone else watched the vegetables and salmon and managed the plating. (Sorry, I just said "plating." Someone shoot me.)

Yes, we melted and whisked and clarified and blended and by the time we were done, we had something approximating hollandaise sauce. I even pulled out my grandmother's old gravy boat so we could serve it properly. It was the first time I've ever employed that particular piece of china.



Conclusion: the salmon was excellent, and made even more excellent with the addition of the sauce. The sauce itself was a little grainy and not quite as velvety as the sauce in the beautifully art-directed photo in the magazine. It would never have made it into service at a mid-level French restaurant. But it had terrific flavor, and was a delightful addition to the meal. Two thumbs up for a challenging and spirited cooking adventure.

Mustard-Maple Salmon
3 T Dijon mustard
3 T maple syrup
1 T balsamic vinegar
1/4 t salt
1/8 t freshly ground black pepper
4 (6-ounce) salmon fillets (about 1" thick)
Cooking spray

1. Combine first 5 ingredients in a large zip-top plastic bag; add salmon. Seal and marinate in refrigerator for 20 minutes.
2. Preheat oven to 400º.
3. Remove fish from bag; discard marinade. Place fish in 11 x 7 baking dish coated with cooking spray. Bake at 400º for 12 minutes, or until fish flakes easily when tested with a fork.
— adapted from Cooking Light


Hollandaise Sauce
1/2 cup unsalted butter
2 large egg yolks
2 T cold water
1 T fresh lemon juice
1/8 t salt
Additional equipment: cheesecloth

Editorial note: I'm transcribing this recipe exactly as we prepared it, and exactly as it appeared in the magazine. Some other recipes for hollandaise call for straining the melted butter through cheesecloth at the end of step 1. I think this is probably the traditional way of clarifying butter. I wish we'd had cheesecloth; it definitely would've helped us separate the butterfat from the solids. Also, some other recipes involve vinegar and peppercorns. Although this recipe worked well enough, I can see myself trying a different hollandaise recipe later.

1. Place butter in a small saucepan over medium-low heat; cook 5 minutes or until completely melted. Carefully skim solids off the top with a spoon; discard solids. Slowly pour remaining butter out of pan, leaving remaining solids in pan; discard solids.
2. Combine egg yolks and 2 T water in a small saucepan, stirring with a whisk until foamy. Place pan over medium heat, stirring constantly until mixture thickens slightly. Gradually add 1/4 c clarified butter, about 1 T at a time, stirring with a whisk until each addition is incorporated and mixture is thick. Reserve remaining clarified butter for another use.
3. Stir juice and salt into butter mixture, whisking until blended. Yield: About 2/3 c (serving size: about 1 tablespoon).
— from Cooking Light

Top 75 awesome things about Flashdance

Well, this entry doesn't have much to do with cooking, but I just had to write about Flashdance after seeing it for the first time today.

I actually own a copy of this movie. It's one of about 10 DVDs I own. Yep — Howards End and Flashdance are the bookends of my DVD collection. (My ex-boyfriend gave Flashdance to me when we were together, for reasons I won't go into here.)

This DVD has been sitting on the shelf for more than two years. Today was finally the day when I thought, "Yes. Today is Flashdance day."

As you might have guessed, I was bowled away by this film and its boatload of awesome '80s movie stereotypes. Here's what I love about this movie:
- The fact that the heroine is a hard-working, cheerful, charming, model-gorgeous welder and exotic dancer
- The fact that the male counterpart is a very attractive single man with no commitment issues
- The fact that the male counterpart drives a Porsche, lives in a gigantic mansion, and is rich
- The fact that the movie is loaded with legwarmers and leotards
- The fact that it involves multiple utterly awesome montage sequences
- The fact that the filmmaker was obsessed with Jennifer Beals' ass (her butt gets almost as much time on screen as her face)
- The fact that the run-down burger shack where our heroine dances apparently sets aside 95% of its annual operating budget to provide dancers with lavish sets, lighting, props and costumes for specific dances (note: YouTube clip involves strobe lights and mime make-up. See also: the first superbly awesome exotic club song and dance, and the later superbly awesome "Man Hunt" song and dance)
- The fact that the heroine has a heart of gold and high moral standards (for example, it's not appropriate for her to date a superior, or for her friends to work at a strip club)
- The fact that choreography for the final dance involves a clever blend of ballet, Jazzercise, club dancing, gymnastics, and hardcore breakdancing
- The fact that the heroine is not classroom trained in any of these dance forms, but nonetheless delivers a flawless performance
- The fact that everything works out perfectly in the end and that the movie ends with a freeze frame. Bonjour, perfection.

So, two thumbs up for Flashdance and everything about it. Why can't life be more like this movie?

the spiritual vibrations of food

I've been wondering for a while about what to do with this website.

I'm past my personal era of confessional blogging. I no longer feel inspired to bare my heart to all who visit this space. But I have enjoyed writing here a lot over the past five or six or seven years — I forget how long it's been — and I don't want to give it up.

This week I'm having an epiphany about how to use this space. Naturally, this epiphany comes with a story. (Epiphanies usually do.)

At the end of December, my good friend Lalah and I went to North Carolina for a women's retreat led by Christine Kane. We had a wonderful weekend, full of laughter and reflection and unusually delicious food. The meals at this weekend were prepared by a local chef, a lovely woman named Deva who served mostly vegetarian fare. Many of the vegetables she used for her dishes came from her own garden. Each meal was colorful, inviting, comforting, and delicious. Almost as an afterthought, I'll add that these dishes were probably pretty nutritious, too.

On the way home from the retreat, Lalah and I stopped to have lunch at the Early Girl Eatery in Asheville. We both had a post-retreat glow — we felt clear and aligned and happy. We had been fed beautiful food for three days. We had been drinking herbal tea and doing yoga. We were feeling pretty zen.

Lalah said, "I loved the food at that retreat. Everything felt totally nutritious and totally yummy at the same time."

"Yeah, it was really nice."

"I really want to learn how to cook," she said. "I've always wanted to feel more comfortable in the kitchen."

"Well, maybe you can take lessons," I said.

"Or maybe we could try cooking together," she said.

Hey. There's an idea.

Since January we've been getting together to cook. It usually happens about once a week, though we took a few weeks off in February when life got in the way. We talk beforehand about what to prepare, and we take turns buying the groceries. Dishes are often vegetarian, but when they're not, we steer toward sustainably harvested seafood or free-range poultry. We go for the good stuff.

The meals are timed carefully after the arrival of Lalah's husband home from work and their 3-year-old son's nightly bedtime routine. They are not elaborate meals, but they are consistently delicious. And the process of cooking with Lalah in this context has been, well, utterly delightful.

Here's what I really want to say in this entry:

As I've been cooking with Lalah, I've been tuning into the many layers of my relationship to food. I've become much more attuned to what I would call the spiritual vibrations of food. Does that phrase sound a little odd to you, or do you instinctively know what I mean? There's a difference between eating a plate of nachos with yellow cheese sauce, and eating a little piece of really good cheddar from the farmer's market with a sliced apple. There's a hell of a difference between eating a Smart Ones® Honey Mango Barbeque Chicken frozen entree (that's part of Weight Watcher's "Fruit Inspirations™" line, FYI), and actually preparing a piece of free-range chicken with a chutney barbeque dressing.

It's not just the nutritional differences between these options that I'm talking about — it's the way you feel as you're preparing the food, how you feel when you're eating it, and how you feel afterwards.

What I'm seeing is that my relationship to food feels like an invitation to something richer, something more sacred.

I think this is something a lot of Americans are waking up to right now. I don't think Michael Pollan's message would have had the same resonance if he'd been writing in the early '80s. But now, his words are like springs of water in the desert.

We're reaching the end of our relationship with un-reality. We're reaching the end of our relationship with fake food. Eating an Egg McMuffin doesn't really fly when we can dine on fresh berries and Greek yogurt instead.

In the coming weeks and months, I'll bring you reports from my cooking dates with Lalah. I'll give you our recipes and a summary of what we loved or didn't love about the recipe. I hope you'll read along, and comment, and even cook along with us.

I'm looking forward to this.