don’t forget about the cookies

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Cookie Swap Reminder, Dinners This Week

Carla and one of her friends and I made So Many Cookies this weekend. Like, a staggering number of cookies. So many cookies that I RAN OUT of regular flour (I had whole wheat flour, almond flour, self rising flour, and bread flour, but no all-purpose flour) and had to borrow some from the neighbors. 

I made three batches of dough (cream cheese sugar cookie, regular sugar cookie, chocolate snickerdoodle) and Carla’s friend’s mom made a batch of gingerbread, and I divided all the dough in half and froze half for later, and we STILL had thousands of cookies.

The kids had a blast, making cut outs and rolling snickerdoodles in cinnamon sugar and smashing Jolly Ranchers into smithereens and decorating baked cookies. And I have plenty of dough leftover to make more cookie plates this weekend. 

Also, after Birchie mentioned saltine toffee, I made a batch of that. Our house is cram jammed with sugar, y’all!

Anyway, this is all to say that if you are baking this week, or have baked recently, and want to be included in the Cookie Swap, send me a) a photo of your baking project(s), plus links to the recipe and/or b) a link to your own blog post about your cookie project. Please send your photos and/or links to  lifeofadoctorswife [at] gmail by midnight Eastern time on 12/20. Then I will assemble all the links and photos in a post this weekend and we can all virtually enjoy one another’s delicious creations. 

Now on to the less festive, more grueling side of food prep and consumption: dinners. I continue to be burnt out on dinners. This week, my husband and I have TWO date nights to look forward to, which will be fun in so many ways, including that we will go OUT to dinner. So I’m on the hook for five dinners and I am taking the easy way out.

Dinners for the Week of December 16

  • My Favorite Fall Salad with Roasted Chicken: My grocery store had giant blueberries on sale, so those are for sure going into this salad along with apples, goat cheese, pecans, and red onion.
  • Ham Sandwich: Heck yeah. Ham sandwich time. (“Ham sandwich” is our family shorthand for “make your own dinner.”) (I did buy some ham for my husband, but I also bought him some roast beef and I got ingredients to make black bean tacos.) 
  • Pizza: I also bought ingredients to make homemade pizza.  

Last week before Christmas! Let’s goooooo!

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The Perfect Fall Cookie

My husband made cookies last weekend. I was skeptical when he showed me the recipe, because they seemed like a cross between a molasses cookie and a chocolate chip cookie, which seemed like an odd amalgam. 

Plus, the recipe specifically doesn’t call for vanilla, which seems like blasphemy. 

But they were perfection. 

The recipe is here. They are supposedly based on cookies sold by Levain bakery. (By the way, Levain bakery is a GREAT source of mail order gifts. A dear friend of mine sent up a package of four cookies a few years ago and I still think of them. They were enormous and thick and chewy and so flavorful. YUM. We have since sent them to a few people as gifts and they are always a hit.)

My husband measured the cookies into four-ounce balls (the recipe gives you options for four-, five-, or six-ounce cookies). He was able to make eight perfect four-ounce cookies (he weighed each one) and one slightly smaller cookie. Four ounces makes an ENORMOUS cookie. They were perfectly round, soft on the inside. And they were exactly like molasses cookies combined with chocolate chip cookies, which – it turns out – is a WONDERFUL amalgam. (If you like molasses cookies, I suppose.) I love that bite of ginger and the smokey undercurrent of molasses, which went perfectly with the creamy sweetness of the chocolate chips. YUM.

The only change my husband made to the recipe was that he refrigerated the balls of dough for 20 minutes before baking them. I think he also cooked them for a total of 12 minutes, turning them halfway through, but that’s because our oven seems to cook more slowly than most. (We discussed adding vanilla, because it seemed so WILD that there was no! vanilla!!!! in the recipe at all, but ended up deciding to stick to the recipe as written, at least for this time. We did not miss the vanilla.)

If you are looking for the perfect fall cookie, look no further. I am certainly bringing these to our next get-together with friends.

Yes, I did a fall photo shoot with the remaining two cookies, and yes, I then immediately ate one of the cookies after I took this picture (it was still soft), and yes, they do look suspiciously similar to regular old chocolate chip cookies but they are so much more.
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Christmas Cookies and Other Holiday Food Plans

In addition to the forced festivities I mentioned the other day, I have been thinking a lot about food. (You: Gasp!) 

For one thing, I am thinking ahead to Christmas dinner. My husband and I have settled on beef tenderloin, I think. This will be the second time we’ll be alone, just the three of us, on Christmas and we made beef tenderloin the last time and it was delicious. I also want to make Caesar salad, which is a tradition on my side of the family. Maybe some sort of potatoes, as well? Normally I’d make the goat cheese garlic mashers we have on Thanksgiving, but… I may be sated on potatoes? Maybe I will feel ready for them again when it gets to be Christmas. For dessert, we’ll have our now-traditional sticky toffee pudding cake.

Last year, when my parents were here, I made a big snack platter for us to graze on during the day. That was fun and I can definitely do a more pared-down version for just the three of us. I’m thinking olives for me and Carla, definitely several cheeses (brie, cheddar, something fancy like a truffle cheese or a Cotswald?) and crackers (easy crowd pleasers like Triscuits and Ritz, plus maybe one fancy cracker), some sort of fruit (blueberries or grapes if they still look good? dried apricots? goat cheese stuffed figs? clementines?), and something fun (marcona almonds? giant Peruvian corn?), maybe some charcuterie (pepperoni and salami, probably), possibly some dips and/or spreads. This is now sounding enormous. Or, PRACTICAL, because we could do multiple snack trays over multiple days. I am a genius.

What is a snack-tray essential in your mind?

Right now it’s the fun thinking-about-possibilities stage of planning that I enjoy the most. 

I am also thinking A LOT about cookies. Cookies are not really my thing. I mean, I make them occasionally; I’m not opposed to cookies. Usually, my holiday tradition is to make chocolates – but right now, it sounds like Too Much. (Maybe these Chai chocolate truffles would be a good compromise?) But maybe I could do some holiday cookies? I am not thinking about replacing the chocolates with cookies. The mom of one of Carla’s classmates does a whole big cookie tray, and I have neither the energy nor the creativity to undertake that kind of thing, but maybe a cookie or two, just for the three of us and maybe a few of the neighbors, would be doable?

To further reinforce my cookie urge, one of Carla’s Christmas reading calendar activities is to make cookies and eat them while reading a book. So baking cookies is really a necessity. And I love the easy anticipation of thinking about WHAT TO MAKE.

Some of my favorites are zimtsterne, which are delicious and lovely (and gluten free, if that matters to you). Carla voted for snickerdoodles, which are always good. And some months ago I made chocolate snickerdoodles that were delicious and fudgy and worth making again. (Why doesn’t fudgy have an E in it? WHY?) 

But, while these are perfectly GOOD options, I kind of want to do something else? Something I haven’t tried before?

What are YOUR favorite cookies? To make and to eat?

These krembos look very similar to one of the challenges on the latest season of Great British Baking Show, plus chocolate and marshmallow is a classic combo. Plus they look very charming. I don’t know if I’m crazy about the coconut element, but they might still be fun. (And they are gluten free, which means we could share them with a family friend who has celiac.)

I’m a sucker for a big, chewy molasses cookie. You can’t really go wrong with those.

A batch of chocolate and peppermint cookies would be perfectly festive.

We happen to have a madeleine pan, and yet we have never once made madeleines… maybe that would be fun to try? They are certainly very pretty.

I absolutely LOVE millionaire’s shortbread. Or, along similar flavor/texture lines, this saltine cracker toffee is easy and super craveable. (Or there’s always regular toffee!)

There are too many options! I can’t decide! (And Carla is no help: “I just want to make cookies, Mommy. ANY cookies!” she said when I asked her what she wanted to bake.) (She has clearly not inherited the gene that accounts for endless agonizing over small, insignificant decisions.) (Sometimes the endless agonizing is ENJOYABLE, Carla.) (I do have a package of sugar cookie mix in the pantry; we could make those and cut them out in festive shapes and then I could save other cookies for later in the month.)

On a non-cookie note, I am strongly considering making these air fryer sufganiyot for Hanukkah. Maybe those will scratch the cookie itch? Possibly they will only scratch the donut itch, leaving the cookie itch as strong as ever.

What are you baking this month?