Posts Tagged ‘christmas’

Merry Christmas, everyone!

We celebrate the happiest day of the year with plenty of red meat, traditional English sides, and a froufrou dessert I always like to tackle. Usually I make a cranberry upside down cake, but this year I wanted to try something different so I made a spin on a pear tatin, which was scrumptious to say the least. Plus chruscikis, cookies, hot apple cider, Holiday blend from The Roasterie and plenty of Usinger’s during the day.

Have a holly jolly holiday! I’ll be off in my food coma now, surrounded by DVDs and my family, but here’s a nice large selection of photos from our holiday. Enjoy! (recipes at the bottom if you’d like to scroll past!)

One of my biggest holiday indulgences.

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Here it is. The ultimate. The #1. The quintessential dish that is pure Christmas to me. Chruscikis.

Traditional Polish fried cookies which resemble either a bow-tie or angel’s wings (depending on your heritage/what your grandma says…) which seem simple on the surface, but in the end are some of the messiest, and somewhat labor intensive cookies ever.  Yet they’re worth every drop of splattered oil and puff of powdered sugar that ends up on the floor.

This is probably the oldest recipe we have in our family, which we know goes back to my great-grandma Jean who immigrated to the US when she was about 7 in the late 1800’s, and it probably goes back even farther than that. The ingredients are dead simple (eat your heart out, Martha) and the dough comes together very easily, it’s just all about rolling the dough incredibly thin and working very quickly once you get to the frying part. But they’re just so good warm, I cannot begin to describe it. I mean yes, they are basically fried dough, but come on – we all know how awesome that is.

So Wesolych Swiat! to my fellow Poles, and I hope you all enjoy the  most cherished part of my Polish culinary heritage!

Mommie Dearest on the hunt for the recipe…

Found!

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Get ready folks, I’m about to all Martha Stewart on you.

I’m a huge fan of giving gifts. I’ve always been the type who gets so excited about the presents I’ve picked out, I sometimes forget about the receiving part. And although this year I’m still the same, it’s slightly different. Like a broken record of everyone else I know, money is crazy tight this year and my ability to buy presents has been, well, somewhat hindered. But that doesn’t stop me, oh no.

Baking cookies and goods for people and packaging them yourself is one of the cheapest, easiest, and still thoughtful things to do around the holidays, especially if you have a rather large list of people you’d like to treat. It takes time, effort, and thought – 3 things that can be more meaningful than the ability to swipe your credit card. And come on, who doesn’t love to get a bag of homemade goodies? Especially when they’re cranberry-pistachio biscotti.

I chose these cookies not only for their festive colors and flavors (red cranberries, green pistachios), but also because biscotti are one of the best things to package and hold up for a very long time, which makes them the ideal thing to mail. Plus they’re the perfect thing to accompany coffee or tea, which almost everyone I know enjoys.

So happy (economical) holidays and I hope you all enjoy!

One of my least favorite ingredients in the world, but a necessity for biscotti.

Zest + microplane (one of my all-time favorite tools).

Mmmm, dried cranberries.

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Everyone’s feeling the pressure right now. Your to-do list is a mile long before you have to fly home or plan your holiday party or go to a handful of cookie exchanges. Presents need to be wrapped (or bought – eek), dinners need to be planned, and oh my God is Christmas really less than 2 weeks away? In short, you have no time, but the necessity or urge to have baked goods is still staring you in the face.

Well, fear not! These “turtles” are your savior in their speed, ease, and deliciousness.

I almost balk at calling this a “recipe” because it’s really not – you almost don’t cook anything (it could easily be done in the microwave even) yet it still impresses everyone come dessert time.  My mom gets these every year at her cookie exchange, and although I often giggle at their laziness in comparison to the other froufrou cookies they inevitably are the first thing gone from the tin. Because they’re amazing. Salty and sweet and chocolatey and just perfect. It’s like a chocolate-covered pretzel on crack and every bit as addictive as the analogy says.

Festive wrapping.

All laid out.

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I feel like the Food Network doing “The 12 Days of Cookie Christmas” or something right now. All I want is cookies, peppermint bark, fudge, handfuls of popcorn from those tri-flavor bins… the list goes on and on. Usually I can’t live without fresh produce but right now the only fruit or veg I want is dried and in trail mix. My sweet tooth has been deprived for the past year as I’ve been watching what I eat (despite what you see here I’m actually a super healthy eater 90% of the time!), and now it has woken from its slumber with a vengeance. And it wants cookies. Bad.

I made a sort-of version of these cookies 2 years ago when I was a senior in college. Originally they had peppermint buttercream sandwiched between them with bits of candy cane in the filling, but everyone seemed to agree it was, well, too much. Yes, I found a dessert even I found too rich and sweet to enjoy.  But I had a mad hankering for chocolate-peppermint-cookie goodness, so I decided to just take the great chocolate cookie recipe and toss the crushed candy canes right into the dough instead of putting it in between. And it worked perfectly!

The cookies are light and crisp, yet rich and satisfying since I used hunks of bittersweet chocolate instead of chips, and the candy cane flavor is mild and almost aromatic, but not overpowering since I didn’t use any extract (blech, not a fan anyway). Now excuse me whilst I go feed my sweet tooth some more Dove Peppermint Bark Promises and a few more of these delicious delights.