My friend Gitte brought along a batch of Chocolate Ginger Shortbread. These refrigerator cookies needed several hours of chilling, so she made them up the night before. It is a handy thing to do when you know you are expecting company and want to have some fresh cookies to serve. They roll into a tube shape and you can cut as many as you need from the roll, saving the rest for another time. Gitte's Chocolate Ginger Shortbread Never mind the cookies. Gitte gave me the best kitchen tip of the day. She reuses butter wrappers whenever she can. When the piece of parchment I cut did not cover the entire baking sheet, she reached for the butter wrappers to fill in the empty spaces. Why didn't I think of that? She was reluctant to have me spill this tip in my blog. "Maybe you'll find it's toxic or something!" It turns out that lots of people keep their butter wrappers and reuse them to butter a pan. And for many other purposes. See the comment...
I began this blog when my mother was ill and needed enough of my attention that I could not concentrate on longer-form works I wanted to write. I set those aside to distract myself with cookie-making and this blog. Please find my new blog (2020) entitled "Time NOT Lost" at karenbrattesani.blogspot.com, where I explore the behavior I see around me -- both my own and that of others -- and what it says about our changing culture during the coronavirus pandemic. And, I hope, beyond.