Tonight has passed in a frenzy of food preparation.
Well, okay, if I count up the hours I've spent tonight, probably more of them have passed sitting at the computer while I half-watch Stargate episodes I've already seen than have passed with me in the kitchen, but I have made a bunch of stuff.
And while cooking, I've come to the realization that I really don't like following recipes. It's always better if I just sort of make things up as I go. The downside to this is that when I make something really delicious, it's often hard to repeat.
Tonight called for making a pot of soup and two kinds of dessert. Soup is easy, especially shopping at Trader Joe's, where they have so much good stuff pre-chopped and ready to go that the soup practically makes itself.
Next on my list was gingerbread shortbread. Two things I love, and as I was planning on making plain shortbread, when I stumbled across a recipe for gingerbread shortbread, I couldn't resist. I mixed it up, put it in the oven, and waited eagerly for it to be done.
Unfortunately, it was sort of speckled, and while the recipe called for it to be taken out when it was brown around the edges, it wasn't apparent to me that it was brown around the edges until it was almost black around the edges. When I took it out and my sharpest knife wouldn't cut it, I knew that there was no way that this gingerbread shortbread was going anywhere but down the garbage disposal. I did taste a bit from the center, where it was the least hard, and decided that while gingerbread and shortbread are two great things, they are not two great things that go great together.
I mixed up the brownies, which was easy, as I made the same brownies earlier in the week. (Not following the recipe. The recipe for these brownies is called 'triple chocolate brownies' but I only had one kind of chocolate the other day, so now they are 'a whole lot of one kind of chocolate brownies'.) While I'm doing this, I'm trying to find a different shortbread recipe, but am not coming up with anything that seems appropriate.
I page through my Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, and see a recipe for lemon bars, but I'm not happy with the pan size, so I pass on it. Then I remember the fancy Williams Sonoma lemon dessert cookbook I got over the summer and while I've spent much time drooling over the pictures, have never actually made anything from it.
I find a recipe for lemon shortbread. Undeterred by my previous failure with flavored shortbread, I pull out the bag of lemons I handily have in the fridge and start grating lemon zest. I need a quarter cup of lemon zest, which is really quite a lot. After making four lemons all naked and white, I decide I'm tired of grating lemon zest, and figure that what I have will do. It's not quite to the top of the measuring cup, but it's not too far off, either.
The recipe calls for processing the sugar and lemon zest in a food processor, to more finely shred the zest. I decide this step can be easily skipped, and also decide to skip the step where the butter gets whipped up separately. That sounds too hard, and would require moving too many things and plugging things in and I have my pastry cutter right here, which seems like it will do just fine. This is what I get for making recipes from a fancy cookbook. They want you to use fourteen different appliances! (Probably all conveniently available at Williams Sonoma.)
I throw in my unfood-processed lemon zest, and am pleased to realize that while the recipe calls for 1/4 cup, I've actually been measuring it into a 1/3 cup measuring cup, so being a bit short is just perfect! I blithely substitute a few squeezes of lemon juice for the teaspoon of lemon oil the recipe calls for, and mix everything together with my pastry cutter. Which works great, by the way.
The book says that I am supposed to form the dough into four five-inch rounds and put them on two cookie sheets, but what I really want to do is put them in two 9" round pans. I do some quick mental math, after spending a little bit trying to remember the formula for the area of a circle, and decide that the difference between four 5" circles and two 9" circles is too great, and that I have tempted the kitchen gods enough for one recipe.
I did consider that my burnt offering of gingerbread shortbread might appease them, but by this point, I'd tasted the lemon shortbread dough and I knew I didn't want to mess the baking part up. Yum.
They are now in the oven, and I'm carefully watching the clock, so that I don't burn two things in one night.
One other kitchen related tidbit: I asked the girls the other night if they missed having a microwave, as I am now at the point where I never even think about it. Abby said she didn't at all, but Katrina said she did miss it. When I poked a little further and asked her why, she said that she didn't have anything to use as a timer now. I guess we need a kitchen stopwatch! That would sure take up less counter space than a microwave would.
Posted by Rachel at November 21, 2003 11:10 PM