An orange and yellow winter afternoon.

Let me show you an afternoon full of homework, friends, and a spare pie crust.

 
It's rather glorious, and tastes like lemons.

The hare that lost.

Have you ever had an ex-boyfriend who, it turns out, was sort of an embarrassment, a less-informed decision than you thought at the time, perhaps missing some crucial traits that would be deal breakers now? And you're glad the relationship is over without much heartbreak on either side, and while it was a learning experience, you're not in a hurry to repeat it. Or even think much about it. But there's all these photographs lying around, and you don't want to get rid of them, because they show part of your life, and parts of it were really fun despite being sort of awkward, and some of them are really pretty, and you just don't know what exactly to do with them?

That's how I feel about the time I made rabbit.

I bought a beautiful, fresh, organic rabbit from one of my favorite butchers in the Italian Market to celebrate the year of the rabbit, and also to experiment a little bit. I was able to watch as he skinned and chopped the hare for me. To prepare, I looked up a lot of rabbit recipes in cookbooks and internets, and found that, while they differed a lot, most of them agreed that browning the rabbit and then slow-cooking it in liquid was the way to go. So I got together some wine and a small group of people that are particularly good-natured about my cooking experiments, and went to town on my rabbit pieces.

Using another purchase from the butcher's - a container of duck fat - I browned the rabbit nicely. It already smelled good (and the duck fat smelled excellent) and looked pretty.

 

I added shallots, fennel, herbs, wine, and rabbit broth, and slowly simmered the rabbit for forty minutes or so. It still smelled good. 

While it cooked, everyone relearned bridge.

We made roasted vegetables, mushroom gravy, and Barbara's fresh bread to accompany the rabbit.

And then we ate it. And it was way too dry. I'm not sure whether it should have been browned more, cooked less, or both, but something terrible had happened in the hour it took to cook. The gravy was the only redeeming factor at all.

It was sort of devastating. A disappointing end to a relationship I'd been a little wary about, but had had such high hopes for.

At least in the end, unlike ex-boyfriends, dry rabbit can be put to another use:

Happy Valentine's Day!

And in celebration, we have a dinosaur spewing sprinkles. Because, why not?

Like Easter eggs, but brown and boiled in soy sauce.

I like the idea of taking stock of life, of looking around and seeing what's been good, what's getting better, and what ought to go take a hike. This may account for the abundance of new years that I celebrate - my year starts a minimum of three times each 365 day period. Jewish and Gregorian are rather implicit, given my background, but I always celebrate Chinese new year as well.

This undoubtedly started with the huge parade in San Francisco that we would go to every year as children, or at least every year my parents felt up to it. Since becoming an adult, less willing to brave the chilly wind and the huge crowds, I've started celebrating the same way my mother always preferred - with a few branches of tree blossoms.

But I've had to adjust, because Philadelphia doesn't have flowering trees in early February, and if you're lucky enough to find a florist with some branches, they'll charge some rather outrageous prices - the only branches I could find last year were in the three digit range. Seriously. I bought some moon cakes instead, which aren't actually meant for the new year, but there's a little shop in Chinatown that makes them fresh, and all the gweilo people I had class with didn't know the difference.

A fresh batch of mooncakes, as far as you know.

So this year, looking around for something easy, fun, and new years-y to do, I came across this recipe for tea eggs.

They're cracked, hard-boiled eggs cooked in tea, star anise, cinnamon, a tiny bit of sugar, and soy sauce which flavors and dyes the eggs through the cracked shell, giving them a beautiful, patterned appearance when peeled. The flavor is complicated -  the licorice, soy sauce, and black tea are all very evident - and the only way I can really describe it is to say that it tastes Chinese. The combination of tastes isn't replicated in Western food, but it's very familiar to the flavors found in Chinese food - and I'm not talking the sweet-and-sour, egg roll, General Tsao, fortune cookie sort of food. It's a much more traditional balance of sweet and salty, with a twist of licorice and a lot of hard boiled egg.

I really enjoy them, although I suspect they're a bit weird to people who are more familiar with putting their fried eggs on toast, rather than rice. And luckily they're really easy to make. You just boil everything together, and let it sit overnight. The smell from the pot as it's boiling is really wonderful too, something about hot soy sauce and tea makes a really comforting aroma.

One note: Do be sure to really crack the egg very hard, and all over before putting it in the pot though. I felt like I was cracking my eggs too much, I was sure they'd be totally black in the morning, and they turned out just fine.

In fact, I like the way they look so much that the hardest part of the whole process was choosing between all the photographs I took.

Happy New Year!

Oatmeal isn't health food in this house.

One of my favorite, simple, everyday cookie recipes is an adaptation from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters, one of my regular kitchen references that I highly recommend. The recipe is her Oatmeal Currant Cookies, a grainy, crispy cookie with, I imagine, chewy, wet currants to set off the texture. Probably. But I've never actually made the recipe as it's set down on paper - partly because I've never had dried currants around, and partly because the minute I made it with semisweet/bittersweet chocolate chips (just no milk chocolate please) in place of the currants I realized that I'd found the ideal oatmeal chocolate chip cookie.

 

The trick to getting that oatmeal flavor without the chewy, dense chunks of oatmeal that so many people (although not me!) eschew is simple: Waters puts the oats in a blender to make a grainy oat flour.

But that isn't the only think that makes these cookies the perfect vehicle for chocolate chips. Blending the oats allows Waters to make a crispy oatmeal cookie by mixing baking soda with boiling water in equal proportions to act as a leavening agent. I'm rather deficient in my knowledge of food chemistry, but somehow it's this step that results in the extreme crispiness of the cookie.

There's probably a lot of debate in kitchens, internet forums, and playgrounds everywhere over whether chocolate chip cookies should be crispy or chewy, but I'll always side with the crisp in nearly any dessert, and especially a chocolate chip cookie. The balance of crunchy cookie and melted chocolate is pure baking zen.

And the dough is such a lovely, textured, grainy brown.

I made these cookies for the first monthly soup club (spearheaded by Dan) as a basic, easy, no-supermarket-trip-necessary contribution. Digging around the shelves of my kitchen to figure out what I had on hand turned up a jar of sour cherries, bought in a moment of grief and desperation last year after Purim, when I'd so much wanted to make hamantaschen with sour cherry filling and hadn't been able to find any form of the fruits, and then a month later come across a jar in a Polish market I happened to be eating kielbasa in. The jar had sat through the summer months when fresh sour cherries had made a big show at the farmers' markets, and, with Purim coming around again soon, its presence in my cupboard was tickling at the back of my mind. Plus it's huge and takes up a lot of room.

So, since I'd never made the original currant cookie, I decided I might as well add some cherries to the recipe.

And they were fine. Not dried, as the currants are, so the flavor didn't come through the cookie very strongly (note to self: find dried sour cherries before Purim) and the wetness of the fruit made the cookies behave a little strangely: they spread more and the texture was a little off. So I think in the future I'll stick with using just chocolate chips.

But they did all get eaten.