Hot Cookie - the Archive

Fall has colored my days especially well this year, but they tell me that winter is on its way. Seattle maples held fast to their leaves until a couple of wind storms, and now a drenching rain blasts the color onto lawns awaiting my rake. The last of the summer veggies on my window sill, like me, prefer to be inside. The winter Delicata squash I dragged home on a trip through Eastern Washington are a dinner vegetable staple twice a week. More pears and apples than cereal grace my breakfast bowl. But as a child in Oakland, California, I best remember fall for the figs and persimmons. The last fruits harvested prefer a long, warm summer. So do I. I have that in common with figs and persimmons. Even now, the small display of orange and purple at my local grocery store turns my head. But $7 for a basket of figs? And only Fuyu persimmons - the hard, crispy kind. Where are the Hachiyas I'm used to? The kind that feel like a sack of mush before you can eat them. California persi...

Steve Hartman's remembrance of Andy Rooney this week would have been unmemorable, at least for me, except for Rooney's comment about -- ginger snaps: I like ginger snaps with milk.  But it's always hard to come out even. You either need one more ginger snap or another swallow of milk. It's just as hard to imagine the mountains Andy Rooney would make of such molehills. Why were his many essays at the end of each 60 Minutes episode so appealing? Perhaps he'd find the crucial pet peeve for some segment of the audience. Maybe his musings endeared us to him in the same way Uncle Les's "quirky" outbursts did at holiday gatherings. Maybe it was the way Rooney could make a story out of nearly nothing. Rooney was easily irked. And easily amused. And he found just a different enough perspective about things we so easily take for granted that we were forced to think about them all over again. Now, where did I put those ginger snaps? I like 'em with o...

Sandwich cookies with more oats than Irish. What makes an Irish coffee cookie? Coffee, Irish whiskey and cream would be my guess. They are all ingredients in this cookie's sandwich layers and in the filling. Sounds like the start of a creamy-smooth coffee dessert with a kick, right? You'd be wrong. This was the '70's, remember. Back to nature. Granola reached the mainstream. Whole grains were worshiped. These cookies were victims of the era. The first problem is the heavy dough. It contains twice as much oats as flour. Doesn't that take you back? I really should have stopped right there, thrown in some raisins and nuts, and let them be the oatmeal cookies they longed to be. But no, I trudged on. Is it dough or continental drift?  Oh, there go Iceland and Greenland. Or is that Australia and New Zealand? I dutifully rolled out the dough. It became a lesson in continental drift on my counter. I massaged it back together and tried to cut entertaining shapes...

Light, lemony, and hardly any calories per cookie. My dad planted a Meyer lemon bush in our back yard before I was old enough to notice that it didn't always grace the northwest corner. Each time I have visited, I have filled empty space in my suitcase with as many lemons as would fit. Thank you, Southwest, for letting me check that heavy bag! At home I would wash the best ones to keep for zesting and to cut slices for iced tea, whiskey sours and the like. The big ones, with less than beautiful skin, I'd squeeze, then freeze the juice in ice cube trays. I'd have the best acidic flavoring for soups, sauces, pies, seafood. Really, almost anything tastes better with lemon juice. Not much batter means really thin cookies. Lemon Thins are cookies pretty much made of lemon zest. OK, there is sugar and flour and butter, but not much. Notice that the batter, with all ingredients added, doesn't reach the widest part of the mixing bowl. Yet, the recipe makes four (count...

Three almond balls ( bolas ) in a row. "This one is good," my sister-in-law Jill told me. She tried not to express too much surprise, but I have regaled her with too many tales of failed cookies. And forced her to eat a few duds. I was glad this one made the grade. I liked it, too. You might think I am a hopeless romantic to fall for another almond cookie. (Italy, almond cookies. Almond cookies, Italy.) The fact is every country that can grow almonds has its special recipes for almond cookies. Portugal is no exception. The ground blanched almonds combine with dry bread crumbs, then the usual sugar, egg whites and almond extract. The dry bread crumbs are key. When the cookies are fresh from the oven, the bread crumbs add a perfect crunch to their rustic, nutty texture. Holes in the center ready for filling. These cookies don't "drop." You roll them in a ball ( bola ) and press a hole in the center, as for jelly-filled thumbprint cookies. Egg yolk ...

The past three weeks have posed many emotional challenges. The most recent and personal involved a search for the best assisted living situation for my mom. She is 99, in a wheel chair, and the 24-hour care she has received in her home for the past 18 months is prohibitively expensive. What to do? I recently realized that letting her run out of money and going on state Medicaid was not an option. In that case, she could only choose among skilled nursing facilities with available "medicaid beds," but not among the many assisted living homes she can choose as a private-pay patient. I needed to find care for her before her savings was depleted and use her home as a rental toward her expenses. I have spent the last month doing just that. I met with placement specialists who have shown me adult family homes in Seattle and equivalent homes in the Bay Area, where Mom has always lived. I selected one, and moved my mom there last week. All a very difficult process, my mom is griev...

"I have to say..." Susan paused with her hand stuck in grasp position as she gazed down at my most recent offering at knitting group. "They look a lot like breasts." The rest of us stared at the sugar-dusted mounds with a whole clove in the center of each one. Sure enough. Recalling my August 22 rant about crumbly, fragile cookies, here is a case in point. Although the editors call them "tender" and "buttery," the less flowery term is "fall-apart." Maybe I don't know how to eat a "delicate" cookie delicately. These make either a mess or a hazard. If you bite in, the crumbs go down your shirt. If you pop the whole thing in the mouth at once, the crumbs stick to every moist surface. Don't breathe in, whatever you do. The crumbs could choke you! What makes this cookie too much to bear, though, is the whole clove that is placed in the center of each one. The recipe says to remove it before eating the cookie! I re...