sugar cookies

growing up i made rolled sugar cookies out of the Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook, but i was never satisfied with the flavor. they seemed too floury or too eggy or too bready.

but a few weeks ago i made these sugar cookies with the girls and they are the BEST sugar cookies i have ever made. they are thin and tender-yet-crunchy and intensely sweet without tasting bready. we made them again today in heart shapes with pink and red sprinkles for February.

the original recipe came from Martha Stewart's website and called for icing. i omit the icing and have made other small alterations and am thrilled with this recipe. it's ideal for small children to help with and very simple to put together.

Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened

1 cup sugar

1 egg, lightly beaten

2 tablespoons Grand Marnier (or substitute milk)

1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

sprinkles (optional)

Instructions

preheat oven to 350'. in a medium bowl, combine flour, salt, and baking powder. separately in a mixing bowl or stand mixer, cream together butter and sugar until fluffy. add egg, vanilla, and Grand Marnier to butter mixture and stir until combined. slowly add flour mixture and stir until just combined.

form into a ball and roll out on lightly floured surface to 1/4 to 1/8 inch thick. cut into shapes with cookie cutters and place on lightly greased cookie sheets. add sprinkles.

bake ONLY ten minutes. do not let them brown. they will be slighly soft when you remove them from the oven, but they will crisp up as they cool.

yields about 4 cookie sheets full of cookies.

the purpose driven life

today i let kitten skip her nap because we have to get up early tomorrow and her schedule is FUBAR due to the snow days. normally i allow unlimited sleeping in when we don't have plans because i think children in general are majorly sleep deprived. i'm thirty years old and i myself like a good ten hours. so tonight when i put her to bed early, she was extra tired. we read her book and then while we rocked, her eyes started to flutter. normally this would be my cue to lay her down in bed, but tonight i couldn't resist. i rocked her to sleep in the dark silent nursery and stared at her and smelled her hair like i did when she was a newborn. bliss.

before i had children i was adamant that people who chose to not have children led lives that were just as full as people who did have children. i bristled at the implication that i hadn't fully experienced love because i hadn't had children.

then i had a child. and guess what happened?

nothing. i still feel the same way. if i had chosen to not have children, my life would still be full and wonderful and full of purpose. but i chose to have a child, and it's delightful in exactly the way that i'd hoped.

i think the difference isn't that you have any less joy or any less purpose when you're childless; it's just that you have the luxury and time to have multiple purposes. friends, restaurants, hobbies, travel, work - you can spend unlimited time on these pursuits. but when you have a child, your child becomes your purpose, and you struggle to make time for those other things. you have the same level of joy in your life, it's just that your focus is much more singular, and your happiness is wrapped up into one grubby, cuddly, snotty, brilliant little package. i think that's why some people mistakenly think their children made their lives happier. but i disagree. it's not a sudden bright star illuminating your life--it's just all the smaller stars condensed. same amount of light.

when i had kitten, i hadn't talked to a lot of my high school friends in years. most of them had no idea who i'd become as an adult. they assumed that i was a person very different from the one that i am. i've been blessed to get to know these women all over again, mainly because they are also mothers, and most of my college and law school friends are not. i was shocked and surprised when some of them expressed shock and surprise at my total delight in motherhood, my dedication to breastfeeding, my complete adoration of my child. it wasn't compatible with who they thought i was, which still leaves me with questions about what sort of perceptions they developed during the ten years in between - and why, how. did i seem too feminist, too political, too anti-traditional? yet when i decided to have a child, i knew ahead of time that i had changed my purpose, that being a mother would now be it for me. i don't do anything half way, especially not something as important as this. i give it everything i have or i don't do it at all. my eggs are in one basket now and i couldn't be happier.

******
some january/february pictures for you:

in the spirit of thanks giving

a couple of evenings ago i was sitting on my couch, mindlessly surfing facebook and drinking white zinfandel like any self-respecting middle-class mother. i got a pop-up notification that i had been tagged in a photo by my sister and i clicked through to the picture. when i realized it was from the mid 90s i fell out into full on panic.

every time someone gets a scanner i know right away, because they start posting pictures on freaking facebook that are better left to the decoupaged photo albums of the past. some things are just not meant to be digital. specifically, ALL of my college experience. my MOM is on facebook, mkay -- AND my GRANDMA. the thought of someone coming across a bunch of university of tulsa sigma chi auction afterparty pics circa 2000 fills me with terror. problem is, deactivating my facebook account still won't stop people from tagging me.

so i start frantically instant messaging my sister. STOP TAGGING ME! WHAT ARE YOU DOING??? STOP TAGGING MEEEEEEEEEE!!! i had no idea what sort of arsenal she had up her sleeve. she was all, "geez, what's the big deal?" the picture she posted wasn't as incriminating as some of my other nerd-era pics, but the fear of what might be in her upload queue right that minute was paralyzing.

luckily my sister is understanding and not at all vindictive, even though i did once slap her across the face for hiding my Care-Bear in the laundry hamper. i'm touchy; she's a punk. we have an understanding.

she said she wouldn't post any more pictures of me without my express prior approval.

*****

yesterday i took another look at the picture:

[yes, blogger's bad formatting is driving me crazy, too. i don't have the time or patience to sort it out.]

this was 1996. mom and dad were 38. erin was 14, and i was weeks shy of 16. we were in florida at disney world. according to my sister (who had the photo album in her lap when she was scanning this picture), this is the only picture from the whole trip where i wasn't scowling into the camera. i wasn't exactly a peach to raise through adolescence. ironically my sister got away with a lot more stuff - she just learned from my poor example to keep her mouth shut.

four months before this picture was taken, our house burned down in a grassfire. two months after this picture was taken, my dad died suddenly. i'm not going to blog about that, but it was the defining, awfulest, most wretched moment of my life and totally changed where i was going and who i became.

*****

last week i was in mediation training wednesday, thursday, and friday. when you're a self-employed lawyer, it's pretty damn hard to be out of the office for three days in a row. especially when the next week is a holiday week and you're going to be out even more.

i think i'm coming down with something. tonight i feel like crap. i've been so stressed about being out of the office and getting behind that i've been waking up in a cold sweat at 5:00 a.m. now i'm getting sick. this is a self-fulfilling, circular problem. for the last ten days i've been trying to figure out how to take off as little time possible for thanksgiving. i can take off all day wednesday if jake stays home with kitten, and i can probably get away with working all day friday as well if i pick up a pre-made pecan pie to take to a second gathering on saturday, and maybe i can come in for a few hours on sunday as well.....

i mentioned this to a co-worker today who looked at me like i was mad and told me to appreciate what i've got while i've still got it. i blew it off at the time, but then i came home tonight and ran across that picture on facebook again.

*****

i struggle to balance the needs of my clients with the needs of my family. i'm a divorce attorney which ranks pretty much in the lowest of the low when it comes to other people's perceptions of my ethics. but i represent real people with real, urgent needs - and more importantly, who have real, vulnerable children. i have peers who seem to leave work at the office with ease, but it is a huge struggle for me to leave work everyday knowing that things are left unfinished. on the other hand, it is also a huge struggle for me to take my child to daycare everyday to go solve the problems of other parents while my daughter is cared for by someone else. it's a no-win situation and a zero-sum game: i want to protect other children/i want to be with my daughter all the time/i want to provide for my daughter and send her to college/i don't want to pawn her off on childcare providers because raising her is my privilege and my responsibility. it's stereophonic mommy guilt: i get it coming and going.

*****

i have made a decision. i am taking off work tomorrow at noon. while my daughter naps, i am going to bake two pecan pies with vanilla bean cream anglaise, a nantucket cranberry pie, and a huge batch of cranberry sauce. i am going to wrap my mother's birthday present and watch tv with my husband in front of the fire that he builds. i am going to take some vitamin c and go to bed early.

on thursday i am going to spend time with J's family and be thankful for the great cousins and wonderful grandparents that kitten and princess have. i am going to spend time with my mom and stepdad and be thankful that she has found love again with a wonderful man and that her home is full of their grandchildren, my stepsiblings, and laughter.

and then on saturday i'm going to spend time with my dad's family, because Thanksgiving spent in Tahlequah is the closest to his spirit that i get all year. the air will be crisp and the leaves will crunch brown under my shoes and it will remind me of being a kid, runny-nosed and freezing playing in the creek with blueish fingertips, the men shooting guns and watching football and the women fussing in the kitchen over pies, and it's a stereotype and i don't care, with venison and turkey both on the table, and my grandma's glass candy jar shaped like a pumpkin full of candy corn pumpkins and chewy orange slices, just like 1989, when life was good and everyone was still alive.

and i am not going to think about work again until monday.

i am NOT not not not.

but i will.

cringeworthy

a few days ago i wrote the last check in my checkbook. that evening i took the empty book of duplicate checks out of my purse and replaced it with a new book. i left the old book of duplicates sitting on the side table in the living room.

this evening kitten picked it up and started reading it, upright (sideways), like a book. she started talking to me, and this is the lecture that i got:

i weed dis book, mama? okay, i weed it MY-self. MY-self. O-kay.

then she sees my handwriting.

you color on dis, mama? you color on paper! uh-HUH. O-kay, that NO NO NO. mama, you don't color on dis paper. that NO NO NO.

*****

a few weekends ago she was at my mom's house, and mom showed her a bunch of daddy longlegs on the front porch. the following weekend we were there again, and she raced to the front porch and exclaimed, "where all the babydaddys??"

*****

like many families in our demographic, we are big Yo Gabba Gabba fans. they have a recurring segment where a puppet eats a bunch of sweets, and then there's a close-up of the sweets having a party in the puppet's tummy. then the broccoli and the carrots and the other vegetables start singing about wanting to go to the party. the tagline is, "there's a party in my tummy!"

every morning i sit at the kitchen table and put on my makeup while she eats her breakfast. this morning, spontaneously, she pulled up her shirt and said, "there's a party in my tummy!" i nodded and kept applying my mascara. she looked down at her tummy again, then tugged at the waistband of her pajamas and said, "there a party in my pants??"

cranberry sauce

because you asked...

1 (16-oz) bag of fresh cranberries

1 c. water

1 c. sugar

1 c. chopped walnuts or pecans

1 apple, chopped

1/4 cup Grand Marnier

1 orange

1 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. nutmeg

rinse the cranberries in a colander and throw them into a large saucepan. add the 1 cup water and 1 cup sugar. turn on med-low and start simmering.

meanwhile, chop the apple and throw in with the cranberries. then take the orange and get a good tablespoons of zest off it and throw the zest in the saucepan, too. then cut the orange in half, juice it, and add the juice to the pan. finally, add the walnuts, cinnamon, nutmeg, and Grand Marnier.

once all ingredients are added, simmer for a total of about 15 more minutes, being careful not to let the bottom of the pan scorch due to the high sugar content of the dish. the sauce will be finished when the cranberries have released their red color and have "popped"/collapsed and the apples have soaked up some of the red.

pour into a glass Pyrex bowl and cover. let chill overnight - this is definitely a make-ahead dish. the pectin released from the cranberries in the boiling process will set as it chills, so don't worry if it's a little runny when you take it off the stove.

this makes enough for two Thanksgiving dinners, or one me. when ready to serve, spoon into a pretty glass dish, still slightly chilled.

cranberries are great sources of antioxidants and vitamin c. for the record, i didn't even google that. like most berries, they also freeze very well - so take advantage of the after-thanksgiving clearance at your grocery store. buy a few bags and throw them directly into your freezer. then when you're craving them in march, you can open the bag and dump it directly into the colander to rinse.

speaking of rinsing, i've started using a vegetable wash and i really like it. especially for fruits like berries and apples where we eat the peel, it does a good job of removing wax and pesticides (i'm not so worried about dirt or germs). it's reasonably priced and i've started spraying down every bunch of grapes, rinsing them, then just storing them in a paper-towel-lined colander in the fridge. seems to work well, and they don't go bad because they've been forgotten in a refrigerator drawer.

happy thanksgiving!

i need two or three strapping teenage boys...

...because my little family doesn't have a big enough appetite to satisfy my need to cook.

i LOVE to cook, and honestly there isn't a lot of cooking that needs to be done in our house these days. on an average weeknight, two chicken breasts and a vegetable will feed us all. cooking any more will result in a snowball effect of leftovers.

that's why i love days like today, when i know i'm having a few people over to watch the game and i can make a Big Pot of Something and probably not have to freeze half of it afterward.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAY.

fact: i have at least three gallon-size ziplock freezer bags of vegetable beef stew (home-grown pasture-fed beef and organic veggies! says this kate gosselin fan!) from three separate cooking sessions in my deep freeze. and i'd rather make a fresh batch on any given sunday than thaw one out. not because it tastes better, but just because I WIKE IT. (kitten's burgeoning language skills are a[e]ffecting my annunciation, even in print.)

i'd make and donate LOADS of food if i had an appropriate outlet, but a) it's understandable that a food bank is probably going to toss a random freezer bag of homemade stew; and b) i'm a frugal cook. i try to use ALL of what we buy, often by reinventing last night's dish into a new dish. i really despise waste. do you even REALIZE how easily any cut of leftover meat becomes an amazing shredded barbecue sandwich? maybe not fish, but chicken/beef/pork for sure.

*****

all of this cooking nonsense brings me around to this important point: I LOVE CHRISTMAS MUSIC.

when the leaves turn, and jake starts bringing in firewood to take off the evening chill, and i see the first pre-black-friday pre-presale final clearance advertisements, i start thinking about the following things:

1. recipes from last year: which ones to reuse, which ones to improve upon, and if so, how;
2. events: where, when, who, and how to avoid overlapping dishes;
3. ingredients: what dishes require speciality ingredients that i'll never use up before they go bad; what dishes require ingredients that aren't popular*; will there be butter; and
4. friends/family/neighbors: which ones have the largest appetites and/or teenage boys.

*i really, really love cranberry sauce. i'd rather have a bowl full of cranberry sauce than a bowl full of ice cream. so when i show up to seven different thanksgiving events, each time with a gigantic bowl full of cranberry sauce made with fresh cranberries and grand mariner** and garnished with orange peel, and i'm miffed that everyone takes only a spoonful or two--well, i've learned to cut back on my estimated per-person serving. apparently bitter fruits just ain't for everyone.

**grand marnier never goes bad so you should buy the largest bottle available and use it in absolutely everything.

*****

fact: my favorite spices are cinnamon and cumin.

fact: the only time cinnamon and cumin should ever be combined is in lebanese dishes, specifically: cabbage rolls.

fact: cabbage rolls are my FAVORITE FOOD! coincidence? does The Dark Side of the Moon correspond directly with The Wizard of Oz??? i'm just sayin'.

*****

i think i'm close to perfecting my chili recipe.

is it difficult to make good chili? absolutely not - chili should be in everyone's basic kitchen repertoire.

is it difficult to make perfect chili? incredibly.

i got a little closer today by adding a little masa de harina for the first time. thank you, pioneer woman, for that suggestion. but my recipe (yet unperfected) is still better than the one in your cookbook. on the other hand, i won't be able to perfect my recipe until the kids are older, because a truly perfect bowl of chili has just a teensy bit of spiciness, and my kids will tolerate somewhere between .01 and .02 Scoville units of heat before i hear whines of "mama! no wike it dat chili! nee wah-tour!"

*****

last year i gave all my neighbors a pan of homemade cinnamon rolls for christmas, baked from scratch from the pioneer woman's recipe. princess and i walked around with them, still warm, from door to door, and offering "with nuts" and "without nuts" (you must be allergenically conscious, y'know).

upon information and belief, i have an even better recipe coming to me TOP SECRET for use this year.

watch out, pioneer woman. i may be silent for months at a time, but i am deadly.

does this question make me look nerdy?

cloth or disposable? my child is two and i still don't feel like i have a clear answer on this, despite extensive research. and why does her FAV-OR-ITE book have to be, "Everybody Poops?"

can someone please launch a website where i can enter the year, make, model, and mileage of my car against a specific new(er) car, and it can tell me when the cost of making the switch is justified by the increasing cost of maintaining the aging, less earth friendly car? ecobluebook.com, anyone? (carrie, i'm talking to you.)

when i buy used books on amazon.com i feel ecologically superior - but after taking into consideration the energy used to deliver the book to my literal doorstep, would i have been better off going to border's?

why do i google "miniature pinscher life span" once a month even though i know that the first result is always going to be, "miniature pinschers are long-lived dogs. the average lifespan is 14-17 years..." GAH.

when i boil water, which is the bigger energy saver: using hot water from the tap (less energy used on the stove) or cold water from the tap (less energy used from my hot water tank)? and if the answer is that hot water is the better move, how many minerals are being leached from the pipes of my 1970s era house by the hot water as it travels to my sink? is it dangerous to cook with hot water from the tap?

that is all.