nothavanas

I'm just leaving this here until certain bacon-eating parties return from Points Abroad. It would be a terrible idea to make these without help around to eat them.

http://jenni-the-cook.livejournal.com/6107.html

My kitchen smells like Gargoyles Statuary right now, thanks to the massive amounts of clove in these cookies. Lebkuchen are great because they are dairy-free, honey-based bar cookies you can make way ahead. They're unusual in that you make them by hand in a saucepot. Really.

You boil the honey, let it cool, and add brown sugar, lemon juice and zest, and one egg. Then you add the dry ingredients to that and bake in a 9x13 pan.
This is Joy of Cooking 1997's recipe. I used TJ's Mesquite Honey, and weighed out the flour as per Alton Brown's conversion (2 1/2 c = 337 g). I sifted everything together in the food processor, including a ton of cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. The dough ends up very crumbly, kind of like cheesecake crust might. The gooey ingredients measure (another AB rec) is a total lifesaver when measuring honey. What I don't recommend is grating your finger while zesting a lemon. Ow.

The frosting is powdered sugar, lemon juice, and vanilla. Easiest frosting in the world to make and to spread, especially over hot bar cookies. Now they cool, and I seal them off from air until Monday morning. They're to thank my students for putting up with a new teacher.

Tayberry-Oatmeal Bars
Mary Beckstrom's raspberry bar recipe. I used an entire jar of tayberry jam from Woodring Orchards. They're a bit gooey and perhaps I would bake them another three or four minutes, but they are delicious!

Maple Fudge
Same Joy recipe as before. Still meltingly fabulous.

English Toffee
A soft crumbly finely crystallyzed candy, coated in 71% cacao chocolate and topped with toasted pecans. Yum. (It's not what I think of as toffee, but it's ubertasty so I don't care.)

Grandma Morton's Ginger Cookies
I always roll them much thicker than 1/8 inch, and they are as always spectacular. They are also awesome cut in half and stuck into vanilla ice cream.

Grilled cheese sandwiches with the perfect ratios of homemade sourdough bread, Beecher's Flagship cheese, and Zeke and Zach's Honey-Jalapeño Hot Sauce, melted in the toaster oven. So good.

Saffron-Pistachio Cookies. They have a beautiful saffron flavor, probably from extracting the threads in melted butter rather than hot water, and are very buttery and delicious.

White Winter Vegetables baked in Cream, from Greens. I used cauliflower, parsnips, fennel, and leeks, and 2 cups heavy cream, plus a buttered breadcrumb topping. It was pretty popular at Pumpkin Fest. I'm going to mix the last of my butter-sauteed chanterelles into this for tonight's dinner.

White Bean and (Winter Squash) Soup, also from Greens. This is a lovely hearty winter soup, and the Delicata and acorn squashes I used are slightly sweet and very nice. You make a stock from the pumpkin seeds and some other detritus, and use the bean cooking liquid as well. I threw in 2 cups of my vegetable stock from last year's CSA to make volume, which added a nice complexity.

one from 1997 JOY with melted chocolate, cocoa, and cinammon, frosted with mocha icing from the same edition. The rocketship cookie cutters work best with slightly thicker dough, and chilling it helps.
one made at 4:30 in the morning without mechanical assistance. I’m doing it with a  mixer next time, if I get that recipe.