The sweet deliciousness of mass murder

Jews are notorious for kvetching about the trials and tribulations of being Jewish. Everyone is always ostracizing them, banishing them, trying to obliterate them from the face of the earth - it's a rough legacy. Most of the well-known Jewish holidays celebrate situations where one of these scenarios was narrowly avoided - rather solemn occasions that extol the extraordinary survival abilities of the Chosen People.

So it makes sense that a holiday where no Jewish people were harmed in any way is a little less formal. That a holiday where the Jews not only saved themselves from their oppressor, but got to exact revenge as well is a cause for joyous, raucous celebration. That a holiday where the Jews got to turn mass murder around and slaughter someone else for a change demands lots of noise, hundreds of cookies, and copious alcohol consumption. And the Torah itself demands generations of joy and celebration, so much that even most rabbis - even Orthodox rabbis - will allow congregants to dress in drag for one day out of the year.

That day is Purim, and I may have gone a bit overboard on the cookies this year.

When I called my friend Julia to discuss hamantaschen dough, we both managed to recommend the same recipe to each other - one that we'd both made and discussed the year before. We like it because of the butter (many hamantaschen recipes, on account of being kosher, are made with oil which is probably why so many Jews don't like hamantaschen) and also because of the funny little drawing of Haman with the hamantaschen hat. It's unclear how many cookies the dough recipe makes, since they can be different sizes, but I multiplied it by six (the photo below) and then made another double batch, and it made approximately a million cookies.

We made two different sizes of cookies, and forgot to count, so I don't have a very clear estimate. But I had about 17 or 18 people who all ate quite a few cookies, and managed to get through maybe half of them. Maybe. Next time, for the same number of people, I'd quadruple the dough recipe and count on some leftovers.

The cookies are filled - traditionally with fruit or poppy seeds - and there's a lot of lovely recipes floating around. Variety is always good, so we made quite a few.

This prune recipe is filled with additions, making it less like something your grandma might eat to stay regular and more like something delicious.

I used this apricot recipe as a base, and added some raisins and candied ginger (about half a cup of each) for a little kick. Next time I'd skip the raisins and add more ginger, although as someone inclined to eat large chunks of candied ginger on a regular basis, that could be a personal preference.

A lot of people really like chocolate, and if you're someone who finds that a little dull and also has something of a ginger fixation, it's quite easy to add some pieces of candied ginger to this basic chocolate recipe. Or just dip some ginger in the chocolate and eat it without the cookie. That's okay too.

I also cut some apples into slices, covered them in sugar and cinnamon, and then cooked them in a pan. Cut into small pieces (not puréed) they made a nice turn-over sort of cookie

You can also use any sort of premade jam - the apple-beet hamantaschen were surprisingly sweet and delicious. And the lemon curd was my favorite store-bought flavor. 

But perhaps my biggest stroke of genius was picking up a container of dates and a few blood oranges at the store. I didn't have any specific plans for them, but cooked together with a little orange juice and some sugar, they made by far my favorite flavor of the day.

I didn't pay much attention to amounts, but I think it would be hard to go wrong with this combination. The orange balances the sweet of the dates, the juice adds enough liquid to soften everything before it goes in the food processor, and the sugar - well, it may not have even been necessary. Depends on your blood orange. Mine was a little sour, so I added a little sugar.

Cooked together for ten minutes or so, and then puréed, this one almost didn't get turned into cookies. It's one of those flavors that makes you lose track of the world for a second as it hits your tongue - just enough kick to shock your taste buds into action, not enough tart to ever stop eating it.

It's also real pretty.

And then all that's left is to fold the cookies into little triangles (really mash down those tips too - they like to come undone in the oven), bake them until their edges are golden, and eat all your mistakes (and most of the blood orange-date filled ones) to hide the evidence.

Make sure to coerce some friends into helping you fold - particularly if you've vastly overestimated how many cookies you need. Remember to feed them before the party starts. And after forcing 24 cups of flour into the standing mixer, you may need to change your shirt.

Then have a drink and retell the glorious story of Esther, how the Torah asks us to remember with joy and celebration the time the Jewish people triumphed over evil by using the tools of mass murder and sexual coercion, and how an evil man's hat inspired fruit-filled deliciousness for generations and generations of drunken, costumed Jews and their slightly confused goy friends.

There may have been some goyim this year who went home with the idea that Mordecai ordered Esther to organize a ménage â trois with Haman and the king in order to save her people, which isn't quite canon, but these things happen when the Torah tells you to drink yourself to confusion.

Happy Purim!

Happy Valentine's Day!

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

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.

My holidays involve a lot of spice.

 

I really love the colors of the holiday season. Not the gaudy red and green decorations that pop up everywhere, or the desperate blue and white, rather nonsensical Chanukah stars that try to participate in the holiday frenzy. And I'm not talking about the bleak white, grey, and blacks of the winter world as everything outside gets pounded by wind, rain, snow, and that cold winter sunlight. What I really love are the warm browns and tans, the nutty, spicy, crinkled colors of holiday cookies. 

And I love baking them in my parents' kitchen, with the cranky oven that you light with a match and the standing mixer inherited from relatives and the dysfunctional organization system that changes just enough each time I visit so that I have to call my mother to find the powdered sugar and the plastic bowl that survived my childhood baking projects.

Being a family that's rather a-religious, a bit Jewish, and even less Protestant-ish, the holidays are rather half-assed around here. But even heathens like cookies, and I especially like cookies, so I've taken over the cookie baking duties over the past few years. 

This year I made lemon-tangerine sables, which had zest from our lemons from the backyard, meyer lemons, and a tangerine.

And snickerdoodles, the recipe by way of my dear friend Sarah, who (I think) got it from the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. It's super easy and super delicious.

And pfeffernüsse, a peppery German spice cookie (we use the Joy of Cooking recipe) that's a family-favorite in this household. Or my favorite. Hard to tell the difference.

 Happy holidays!