Berry Season

July 26, 2026 //
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I remember my grandmother’s jam. I was too young to know what she put in it, or to ask for the recipe, or to make it with her, but not too young to see and taste it, small jam jars of shiny red-purple fruity sweetness.

Friday evening I went on an internet excursion looking for marionberry jam, or marionberry raspberry jam. I read about quantities of fruit. I fantasized about going to the local general store for fresh canning jars and a small rack to turn a stockpot into a canning kettle.

Saturday I went to the farmers market with a half-flat box, intending to fill it with berries and one pint of tomatoes. I bought one pint of red raspberries and four pints of marionberries, which I have fallen in love with this year. I like all berries except gooseberries, which, admittedly, I have not tasted often. Berries are the first fruit that makes it to our farmers market: this year we had strawberries the last week of May. Raspberries came in three weeks later. And then, surprise, marionberries. I didn’t know they grew here.

I bought my berries from a vendor whom I bought blackberries from last year. Blackberries are beginning to ripen on the Himalayan bushes I pass on my way to and from downtown. I left blackberry canes in my yard this year because they blossomed and I imagined picking ripe fruit at home before cutting the invasive plants back in the winter. Silly me: the birds ate every berry — even pest plants need to be caged or netted to protect the yield. There are Himalayan blackberries all over town and there are enough berries overhanging the streets that I can go out with an empty container and forage for them, but I still buy pints of blackberries in season because I can’t get enough to freeze for the winter and to eat fresh in summer and early fall.

Then I noticed some small jars of jam at another stand, a gleaming purply red. This farmer sold strawberry jam last week. I don’t like strawberry jam: to my mind, strawberries are best eaten raw — cooking changes the flavor and texture, not in a good way. I do make exception for Smitten Kitchen’s Strawberry Cornmeal Griddle Cakes, which I ate for breakfast during much of strawberry season this year. But yesterday the same farmer had jars marked “90% marionberry, 10% raspberry.” Yes! Maybe I wouldn’t have to make jam this weekend after all. One half-pint jar cost ten dollars, far less than I would pay to have another jam I liked shipped from the Midwest. I bought a jar.

This morning, although I have homemade granola in the house, I opted for toast with butter and jam for breakfast, having made bread a couple of days ago so that I would have it on hand for BLTs. The color and flavor of the marionberry jam reminded me of grandma’s jam, and I wondered, not for the first time, if she had made jam out of a combination of raspberries and blackberries. The reddish tint is the give-away: pure blackberry jam is darker in color and it’s good, but it’s not the magic flavor I’m seeking. I like red raspberry jam, too — if I buy commercial jam, raspberry is the one.

I puzzled over what to do with my haul of berries. The jam emergency is over: I now have an open jar in the fridge. I started out by freezing one basket of marionberries on a sheet pan to save some for the winter. It’s hard for me to buy enough berries to freeze because I walk to the market and have to carry them home by hand and I want enough in season to eat fresh every day. Perhaps someday I will buy full flats of berries instead of a near-full half-flat, but if I buy a full flat of berries I have to have a firm plan — no waffling, although waffles are a perfectly good base for fresh berries and I make waffles whenever milk, cream or half and half goes bad before I reach the end of the bottle.

I must ask my older cousins — all but one are older than I — if any of them remember grandma’s jam.

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Categories fruit, home cooking, seasonal recipes, Uncategorized

Monday AM Practice Group Summer Sessions 2026

June 26, 2026 //
1

Dear Readers and Writers,

For those of you who like to jump off the dock or dive in headfirst with no prior thought — “Just get me in that water now” — the first summer session of 2026 starts Monday. Yes, this Monday, June 29.

The five week group looks to be small, as summer sessions often are (People have children at home, family vacations, gardens to tend). It will consist of some long-term students and at least one brand new person.

We begin each class period with ten minutes of zen-style silent meditation. We write for timed periods on suggested topics, but you are always welcome to go rogue and provide your own topic and to go wherever your mind takes you. We read what we write aloud to each other without commenting on the writing, the situation described in the writing, our response to it, etc. There is no “critique” in a classic writing practice group, just the space to explore whatever you need to explore with the freedom to say whatever you need to say again and again.

For those of you who prefer to plan, looking at the weather forecast, the traffic conditions, dipping one toe in the water cautiously, glancing to see if there is in fact, a lifeguard on duty, or for those of you who need to schedule your activities further in advance, the second five-week summer session will take place on the five Mondays of August, beginning August 3 and concluding August 31.

Each of the summer sessions is five consecutive Mondays. The group takes place on Zoom from 9:00 to 10:30 AM Pacific time. If you sign up, I expect you to be present all five Mondays: this helps keep the group cohesive.

Each five week session costs $125.00. Fees for Summer Session #1, which starts this Monday, are due as soon as possible and, in any case, before the first class starts on Monday. Fees for Summer Session #2 are due by 5 PM Pacific on July 31, 2026. You may pay via PayPal at PayPal.Me/yourbusker or search sharyndimmick@att.net on PayPal. Or you may mail a check to me (If you want to send a check, email me and I will provide you with my address.

If you want to go wild and sign up for both summer sessions, you have the option of paying for each one separately or paying $250.00 USD in a lump sum, whichever is most convenient for you.

I will send out the Zoom link for class the night before it starts, on June 28 and on August 2.

Questions? Ask away.

Sharyn

P.S. I’ve said this before, but I’ll repeat it. I spent over twenty years studying with Natalie Goldberg in person, generally about four times a year in Taos, New Mexico, Santa Fe, California and Wisconsin. I was later named one of her dharma heirs and have her full blessing to teach writing practice. I have been teaching on Zoom since 2020.

P.P.S. I will be teaching a full twelve-week fall quarter, but due to life’s uncertainties I have not been able to schedule fall dates (I’m dealing with a sick cat and possible pending travel plans). I will make a fall announcement as soon as I know my teaching dates, which may or may not be consecutive Mondays.

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Categories classes

Indian Food at Home

June 21, 2026 //
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I had out of town friends visiting last Sunday and we ended up going to the new Indian restaurant in town for dinner. After a very long wait, we enjoyed chicken vindaloo, Indian eggplant (bartha), channa masala, rice and plain naan. Since my friends were departing on the ferry, I inherited the dinner leftovers — everything but the chicken, which the three of us polished off. I ate Indian food for my next meal and made the leftover rice into rice cakes for breakfasts (My mother made rice cakes like these: leftover rice mixed with beaten egg, nutmeg, vanilla, a little sugar and a few grains of salt, fried like pancakes in butter. I eat them topped with fresh fruit in the late spring and summer).

When I was a senior at university I took a room in a shared apartment with grad students from India and Thailand. We got along well and each of them taught me to make some of the foods from their home countries. I learned to make cucumber raita and a simple potato-coconut curry, a simple version of som tom, made with carrots instead of green papaya and a dish made with minced meat and basil.

As a junior abroad I had eaten a few curries in Indian restaurants in London and my mother made lamb curry over rice from leftover roast lamb, relying on commercial curry powder and lamb gravy, but the South Indian vegetarian cuisine of my roommate was new to me.

I remember that she taught me to remove the seeds from cucumbers and to cut them into small slices with a knife. I asked why we couldn’t grate the cucumber, but she said that the texture would be wrong.

Indeed. All of these years later when summer brings fresh green pickling cucumbers and cilantro to the market at the same time, I buy cukes by the half dozen, stock up on dried coconut and plain yogurt, take home a bunch of cilantro and make raita. Raita is an excellent side dish or salad to eat in warm weather.

I don’t measure anything for raita. Today I used four cucumbers, seeds carefully scraped away with a knife, three large dollops of plain yogurt, a handful of chopped fresh cilantro roots, stalks and leaves and a dash of sea salt. After mixing all of that in a bowl I heated about a teaspoon of peanut oil and added maybe half a teaspoon of mustard seeds, leaving them on the burner until the seeds began to pop. If chilies were in the market, I might have added up to a half of a minced serrano chile; as it is, I added a shake or two of red pepper flakes.

I ate this simple raita with an equally simple potato curry: peeled and boiled potatoes mashed with cumin seeds, coconut, salt and more cilantro, sometimes in a bowl, sometimes rolled up in a heated whole wheat tortilla.

After eating Indian food for a week at home, I am not tired of it, so today I made another bowl of raita, a pot of basmati rice and a simple version of aloo chole. I pored over various Indian and vegetarian cookbooks and looked online a bit before settling on the following method:

Mince one onion and add to one tablespoon of hot oil in a skillet (I use peanut oil for Indian food unless I am cooking with coconut oil). Stir onion until it begins to brown and add three cloves of minced garlic and a small knob of fresh ginger, grated. Add two teaspoons of ground coriander, and one teaspoon each of cumin seeds and tumeric, plus salt to taste. Add a bit of water if the mixture begins sticking to the pan.

When all of that smells toasty, but not burnt, add a can of tomato sauce (you can use chopped fresh tomatoes in tomato season), two cans of garbanzo beans — aka chick peas — and a dollop of tamarind paste. Cover and cook while you peel and chop three medium-sized potatoes. Add the potatoes and cook covered until the potatoes are done. Although the chick peas are already cooked, cooking them allows them to absorb some of the sauce and allows the sauce to develop flavor. While the aloo chole simmers, chop another handful of fresh cilantro to sprinkle on top after the cooking is done. One online cook suggested I add a squeeze of lemon and/or some garam masala. I did add the squeeze of lemon, but I was too lazy to make up garam masala today.

As of this writing, I have had two bowls of rice, aloo chole and raita, one for lunch and one for dinner. I am not tired of eating them yet. When I run out of whole wheat tortillas, I might make an Indian flat bread: rotis are pretty easy, made with whole wheat flour.

I have more complex Indian dishes in my repertory: long-simmered carrot halwa, bengan bartha, black-eyed peas cooked with mushrooms. I have the cookbook written by the original chef of Ajanta restaurant in Berkeley, which specializes in regional Indian foods. But on the cusp of summer I want simple recipes that do not take much time to prepare, especially because I am currently caring for a semi-invalid formerly feral cat with a seizure disorder. Onyx does not let me sleep many hours a night and I don’t like to leave her alone for more than two hours at a stretch. But even when Onyx was well I used the warmer weather to combat the weeds in my yards, leaving less time for meal preparation.

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Categories home cooking, Indian food, seasonal recipes, Uncategorized

Making the Best of What You Have

May 17, 2026 //
2

I recently made homemade phyllo (or filo) for the first time, following instructions I found on YouTube. Every stage was easy until I got to dealing with the stacked sheets of thin dough rolled out to size. There was some sticking and crumpling, but I managed to use the phyllo to make eight triangles of spanakopita, following this recipe.

It is spring here in western Washington state and the local farmers market has had beautiful spinach. I was later than usual getting out the door yesterday because I had an episode of vertigo. I stopped at the health food store for feta and lemons, dreaming of the spanakopita I would eat this week.

Alas, when I got to the market, the farmer I like to patronize most had sold out of everything but dill and turnips. I scavenged around the market and loaded up on salad greens and radishes, a bunch of green onions.

On the walk home I began thinking about what I had in the house. I had andouille and chicken apple sausage and corn in the freezer. I had a small jar of sun-dried tomatoes. I had green onions, cilantro, a lime wedge and the feta I had just bought. I could make a respectable skillet of pasta with those things.

Tonight I did, and I’m eating bites of it between typing this up.

Amounts are loose when I cook pasta. I get out a big skillet with a glass top and start sautéing things in olive oil while the water heats for pasta. I cut two andouille sausages into half moons and added a few half moons of chicken-apple sausage that had been sitting in the refrigerator. I chopped up the white parts of two green onions, saving the green parts for later. When the sausage and onion were in the pan, I shook frozen corn over that layer and snipped four or five dried tomatoes into bite-sized pieces. When the pan started to get dry I poured a bit of water from my boiling pasta into it. I added crumbled feta — I had about three ounces. More pasta water, plus the al dente pasta. Then, at the end, I added the onion greens and some cilantro leaves, squeezed the lime wedge over it all and stirred.

It was a tasty dinner and there is enough left in the skillet for at least two more meals.

What else will I eat this week? Plenty of salads (I had salad for lunch). I’ve got at least one salmon fillet in the freezer. I can have that with a baked potato and some stir-fried bok choy. Or another salad. One of my students sent me her recipe for homemade granola and I made up a batch last week. That and yogurt or milk and dried fruit takes care of breakfast. I’ve got half a dozen eggs and frozen half bagels from the local shop.

I’ll make it through the week and hope to get up early enough to catch the beginning of the farmers market next weekend for more spinach. I found a couple of blocks of feta in the back of the freezer and one vendor has green onions each week right now. Fresh dill is in season and I always have radish greens (I chop them and mix them with spinach, a nod to frugality with no significant alteration in taste).

P.S. For those of you who followed the orange syrup chronicles, the latest thing I made with reserved orange syrup was baked rice pudding, using the orange syrup instead of adding sugar to the cooked rice, milk, eggs, raisins and orange peel. I seasoned it with cardamom — both fresh ground seeds and a dash of cardamom bitters to give it an Indian dessert vibe. It was utterly delicious, if a bit sweet — it’s hard to judge the sweetness before the pudding is baked. Next time I might add some chopped blanched almonds, furthering the Indian profile: for now I just toss a few raw almonds into each bowl of rice pudding. Using sugar syrup instead of granulated sugar means that the pudding takes longer to cook, perhaps twice as long. You want it to be firm before you take it out of the oven and I like to see some browning on the top.

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Categories baking, frugal eating, fruit syrups, fruit syrups, home cooking, pasta dishes, philosophy, savory pastries, Uncategorized

All Things Orange Syrup

May 7, 2026 //
0

On May Day when we were all boycotting spending and staying home I took the time to candy all of the orange peels I had saved in the freezer. I had enough to fill a stock pot.

After you blanche orange peel and scrape off the pith, you simmer it in simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water). When you remove the peel from the syrup, you have sweet, orange-flavored syrup left: I had about three pint jars full, which I stored in the fridge.

Now I get to play with orange syrup. The first thing I did was substitute orange syrup for maple syrup in my morning oatmeal. My current choice is oats cooked in milk flavored with dried cranberries, chopped candied orange peel and chopped almonds. A generous teaspoon of orange syrup sweetens a portion.

Last night I made a cup of cocoa. Instead of sweetening the cocoa powder with salt and sugar and adding milk, I covered the layer of cocoa powder with orange syrup and just a bit of milk to blend it into a paste before I filled my mug with milk. The cocoa was perfectly sweetened with just a faint taste of orange.

That got me thinking. I used to occasionally order a cafe borgia in a Taos cafe: espresso, orange and hot chocolate. What if I made eight ounces of my morning coffee and mixed it into pre-stirred cocoa powder and orange syrup? I made it for breakfast this morning and it was delicious. The proportion is eight ounces of coffee to six ounces of cocoa-orange syrup. Yum.

In the works are some sourdough scones, probably orange-rosemary. I plan to use orange syrup as at least part of the sweetener in the scones in addition to using candied orange peel and chopped fresh rosemary. I’m also going to try to titrate an orange glaze with orange syrup and powdered sugar, perhaps with sharp Eureka lemon juice added to cut the sweetness. I’m thinking a thinly drizzled glaze, rather than a coating (I don’t usually glaze or frost my scones).

When the current cut on my left middle finger heals completely and I can knead bread again, I will make some orange rolls, spread with butter and candied orange peel. I’ll put some butter and orange syrup in the bottom of the baking tray and add more syrup when the warm rolls emerge from the oven.

If I had any seltzer in the fridge, I would surely try the orange syrup in that. And if it gets hot enough for iced tea, I will sweeten glasses of it with orange syrup, rather than the plain sugar syrup I usually use. I am thinking of making iced chai tea instead of regular black tea, thinking the orange and the spices might play well together.

Do you ever candy citrus peel? If so, what is your favorite? And what is your favorite thing to do with orange syrup?

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Categories candied citrus peel, cooking, frugal eating, fruit syrups, home cooking, Uncategorized

In Search of Bright Things

January 17, 2026 //
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I have not taken my Christmas tree down, nor put away my Christmas tins. Christmas was over on January 7th, even for those of us who celebrate it as a season rather than a day.

Last week I washed the Christmas guest towels that had been in the powder room and I took the red, green and white swirled candles from the candle holders on the table and substituted white tapers. But I’ve realized that I don’t want to take down the bright and cheerful Christmas decor until I have a plan to replace it with something bright and cheerful. I looked through a box of matted paintings, pulled some to consider, remembered I had framed paintings somewhere still in boxes.

I went out last weekend to buy a 2026 calendar. I am getting a slow start on the new year. As I walked toward town I looked for bright things in the landscape. In midafternoon the sky was a soft gray, the green grass was bright. I saw an occasional red leaf.

By the time I left the bookstore it was drizzling. The sky was no darker in color, but less light was coming through. The only bright colors were the red, green and yellow of traffic lights, yellow mats at intersections, the odd neon sign, an orange peel on the pavement.

Yesterday and today we have had two bright sunny days, although there was frost on the grass this morning. Yesterday Safeway had bunches of lavender tulips for $5.99. I bought one and swapped my red and white checked tablecloth for a blue, green and white floral on a black background.

While I was at Safeway, a $2.99 packet of Thai basil caught my eye in the produce section. Almost nothing at Safeway costs a mere $2.99, so I bought it and immediately began to think of making pad Thai. I have rice noodles in my cupboard, brown sugar, chili sauce. I needed limes. I bought some extra firm tofu. I hesitated about buying wild caught shrimp, but only because they were a larger size than I prefer. I bought some fresh green beans to add to my noodle dish, but refused to buy scallions because they were imported from Mexico. Why, with California two states away, are Washington state grocers buying scallions from Mexico?

I cruised the sauce aisle and found a house brand of “pad Thai sauce.” When I read the ingredients, the first was sugar. I made a mental note to look for tamarind paste at the local health food store instead.

Because I am a former Californian, I must have lemons. We grew Meyer lemons in our front yard on an eight foot “dwarf” shrub. I’m happy enough to buy sharper Eureka lemons before I figure out how and where to grow a lemon tree here and I bought a two-pound bag (about six lemons). I went home and roasted a big pan of Greek potatoes in olive oil, garlic, oregano and lemon juice. Without realizing it consciously, I am in search of bright flavors in January, as well as bright colors and blue skies.

This morning I went out to do my Saturday errands: Atomic Bagel, First Fed, Country Aire, farmers market. I usually buy myself a bagel sandwich on Saturday as a reward for walking to town and carting all my food home on my back. I also like to keep sliced bagels in the freezer for quick meals (toasted and spread with peanut butter, or butter and jam, or?).

At Country Aire, I found a bottle of Thai Kitchen pad Thai sauce. Once again, I stood and read the label before I put it back on the shelf and bought tamarind paste, rice vinegar and fish sauce. I am slowly building a pantry that allows me to cook a variety of dishes in my own kitchen. I also bought some rye flour because I have been wanting to make limpa, or Swedish rye bread flavored with orange and anise.

As I walked to the farmers market I wondered when I might see bok choi there. I think it is a fall crop here. I was pleasantly surprised to see savoy cabbage at today’s market — it will go nicely in a coconut milk-based soup, along with carrots. I was thinking about making such a soup as I walked home. I might even add frozen pork potstickers for an Asian-fusion soup: because I am the resident food critic, my cooking only needs to please me. An egg vendor, who also sells herbs, had a bunch of Vietnamese coriander. I’ve never had it, but it seems like it might fit well with Thai flavors.

This week’s cooking was inspired by the sight of that Thai basil packet at Safeway yesterday. I wasn’t looking for Thai basil — I just happened to see it in the produce section.

I am not, however, inspired by the “meal plan” that the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture put forward, reported to me as “a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla and something else.” First of all, that is not enough food for a meal unless the something else is large, bulky and filling. Can you imagine feeding a hungry teenager just one tortilla? Or someone who does physical labor? Secondly, the cited items do not go well together and are not enough to make a dish. If you want to make Chinese-style chicken and broccoli, you will need rice, ginger, garlic, soy sauce; if you want to make Italian-style chicken and broccoli, you will need Parmesan and cream and red pepper flakes. If you want to make a chicken taco or tostada, you will need onions, peppers, limes, cilantro — and you won’t need broccoli. I think the Secretary should be required to report what she eats to the American public: I’m sure what she eats is not what she is advising all of us to eat.

Do your best to find brightness in your neighborhood, whether it is in the sky, in your landscape, or in the flavors of your food. Or just hibernate until spring.

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Categories seasonal recipes, Uncategorized

12-Week Writing Practice Group Begins on Monday January 5, 2026

January 2, 2026 //
2

Happy New Year everyone.

I love to teach Natalie Goldberg’s writing practice. I hate to market my classes.

Here’s the deal. I am a dharma heir of Natalie’s and studied with her for more than twenty years, mostly in person. I started a writing practice group in response to requests from students in Natalie’s online classes at Shambhala/Prajna.

That group, the Monday AM Practice Group, is still going. We meet once a week at 9 AM Monday morning in the Pacific time zone of the United States on Zoom. Class lasts an hour and a half. We begin with ten minutes of silent, zen-style meditation. Then we practice writing, reading aloud to each other and listening. We often read a work of fiction or a memoir mid-quarter and draw writing topics from it.

I open the group to new students once each quarter. Students must commit to being present for all twelve sessions, barring personal emergencies: this is a community of writers, not a drop-in group. Winter Quarter starts January 5th, this coming Monday. Tuition is $300.00 for a 12-week quarter, payable in three installments of $100.00 USD, or as a lump sum of $300 USD.

If you are ready to jump in and join us, or have questions, please use the comment field or contact me via email at sharyndimmick@att.net. Thank you.

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Categories writing practice

Christmas Cookies Redux, Part Five

December 30, 2025 //
1

Today, on December 30, 2025, I frosted my last batch of pfefferneusse for the year. I baked them yesterday right before a guest arrived for tea and cookies (I served her previously baked and frosted cookies). Today’s cookies are sitting in a heated kitchen and I am hoping that the icing will set because I will be mailing out cookies tomorrow morning on the last day of the year. Perhaps some of them will arrive by “old Christmas” on January 6th.

Before I got to the pfefferneusse, I spent yesterday morning rolling and cutting ginger cookies with the usual kinds of trouble, including dough that stuck to my marble slab and cut cookies that wrinkled when I tried to pick them up with a spatula. I was working in an utterly cold kitchen — about 40 F — to minimize difficulties from warming dough.

As I began rolling out the last fresh batch of the last dough, a miracle happened: the dough did not stick to the slab, I could roll it paper-thin and, for the first time in eight days, the cookie cutters lifted the dough rather than leaving it cut in place. Hallelujah. The perfect amount of flour, the perfect room temperature, the drier weather — whatever it was — allowed me to cut out three trays of fresh cookies and do the re-rolling to finish the ginger dough. Whew.

I enjoyed cutting those last batches of cookies. I was on a roll, using up open bowls of lime green and red sugars, ferrying trays to the oven.

I was working on parchment paper and, when I attempted to remove the last baking sheet one-handed, the sheet of parchment slid off the baking sheet. The cookies fell to the oven floor and began turning to charcoal and the edge of the parchment paper burst into flame. I picked it up, dropped it in the sink and splashed dishwater on the burning paper.

My house had smelled lovely, scented with freshly-baked ginger cookies and sugar. Now it smelled like burnt offerings.

I discovered that I cannot reach the lock on the window over the sink — I should add a one-step step-stool to my kitchen equipment, so I pivoted and opened another window. My smoke alarm, which goes off when I fry bacon, remained silent through the entire episode.

With half an hour to go before company, I reduced the oven temperature to 300 F, rolled the pfefferneusse dough into balls and baked them, after scraping black carbon off the oven floor. I began the kitchen clean-up, thinking I was done, when I spotted a small tray of ginger-re-rolls.

Drat. When the pfefferneusse came out in twenty minutes, I cranked the oven back up to 375 F and baked the last ginger cookies of 2025.

This morning I located enough boxes to mail cookies in, found a few boxes and tins that would fit inside them and decided to sacrifice a few tins from my permanent collection to send to some friends. I will get them packed today or tonight and be ready to walk them to the post office tomorrow when it opens.

Next year: start earlier. Maybe collect some new small Christmas tins this week if I can find any.

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Categories baking, Christmas baking, cookies, Uncategorized

Christmas Cookies Redux, Part Four

December 25, 2025 //
0

Today, Christmas Day, I took the day off from baking and cooking. I had planned to cook a roast lamb feast, but had no takers, and I had a last-minute invitation to a turkey and trimmings Christmas dinner, so all I made today was a kale salad for the feast and a bowl of oatmeal with sour cherries and walnuts, which I ate at noon.

Yesterday, however, I combined searching for a red tablecloth, testing tree lights, moving boxes around and making French onion soup and kale salad with baking a few dozen ginger cookies and pfefferneusse, and frosting said pfefferneusse.

I made the onion soup base first, caramelizing sliced onions in butter and olive oil, adding thyme and white pepper, de-glazing the pan with chicken stock. Then I de-stemmed kale for salad. Then I decided to tackle ginger cookies.

Ginger cookies, when you want them wafer-thin and crisp, are difficult — there is no way around it. Lessons learned or remembered this year. 1) Chilling the dough for several days is not enough 2) Kick the silicone mat to the curb — it does not help. 3) Turn off the heat in the kitchen: this dough must be seriously cold to manage (It’s the molasses). 4) When the cut cookies wrinkle when you try to pick them up, give it up, scrape the dough off the marble slab and put the dough in the freezer for a few minutes. 5) While, you are at it, refrigerate the marble slab.

Yesterday I left the marble slab in the refrigerator with rolled out dough on it. I’ll see what happens tomorrow.

After I gave up on ginger cookies, I turned to pfefferneusse, easy to roll into balls and pop onto a sheet of parchment paper when you have used up your supply of butter wrappers. They bake in a nice slow 300-degree oven for twenty minutes. Nothing ever goes wrong with them except the royal icing.

I can’t tell you how many times I have made royal icing that doesn’t want to set. I don’t want it tooth-achingly sweet, so I might use less powdered sugar than some people do. I don’t measure it. I just dump powdered sugar into egg whites and whisk until I like the consistency. I add a generous amount of anise extract — you need to taste it in the frosting.

I hand-dip each cookie in the icing and set it on the cut-open paper bag that I have been using for all of the cookies. The bag catches stray colored sugar and absorbs excess fat from the cooling cookies. Doing pfefferneusse last adds frosting drips to the brown paper.

After I finished with ginger dough for the day, I turned the heat back on in the kitchen. It turns out that a heated kitchen helps icing dry. Who knew? In our Kensington kitchen the only possible heat sources were the ovens, the stove, or the dryer. Here in Washington, my kitchen has a heating vent and thermostat. What luxury.

So, by the end of the day I had some of each of the classic four Dimmick cookies made: cocoa shortbread, maple butter cookies, ginger cookies and pfefferneusse with candied ginger and orange peel.

In times past there were more cookies. Mom would make Russian tea cakes, dream bars, even coconut macaroons. I make Russian tea cakes if I have time and I have experimented with apricot bars but have never found one I like with a serious amount of dried apricots and nuts — I want it to be mostly apricots and nuts on a not-too-sweet base. In times long past there were homemade divinity and caramels, homemade eggnog marinated in whiskey. I can make all of those things, but find it difficult to find the time. There was fruitcake and mince pie, neither of which I miss. Mom made walnut fudge and Grandma made rocky road fudge and sometimes double fudge as well as plain sugar cookies like hockey pucks: dead-white with flour, thick and hard. We liked them when we were kids, but every year Grandma used more flour and less shortening until they resembled sweetened hardtack: you could eat them if you dipped them in tea, coffee, cocoa or milk, but why bother.

Before my neighbor Eileen arrived for Christmas Eve dinner I made lemon-tahini salad dressing with garlic, added artichoke hearts and sliced green olives with pimentos for a festive touch. While she plugged in an extension cord she had brought and strung the lights on the tree, I made Gruyere croutons for the soup.

Eileen opened a bottle of Tempranillo. I routed out some punch cups from a large box of fragile glassware packed by professional movers (I have nowhere to display or store goblets, tea cups and punch cups so they are still in their box). She poured an inch of wine and we drank a Christmas toast.

We ate soup and salad, followed by cookies. We put ornaments on the tree. Eileen dried dishes, stowed leftovers and packed cookies to take home.

My current plan is to finish baking ginger cookies and pfefferneusse on Boxing Day and to box up cookie assortments to send to far-flung friends. If I run low, I will make more of anything except ginger cookies. Enough is enough. I also hope to roast the lamb, fix mashed potatoes, lemon pie, radicchio salad and cinnamon rolls. We’ll see how far I get…

Tell me about the holiday cookies you love. And let me know if you have a wonderful apricot-nut bar.

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Categories baking, Christmas baking, cookies, home cooking, seasonal recipes

Christmas Cookies Redux, Part Three

December 23, 2025 //
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When I walked in the door this evening my house smelled like maple. I spent all day rolling, cutting, decorating and baking batches of Smitten Kitchen’s Nutmeg Maple Butter Cookies. I have to say that this cookie is my favorite variation on a classic Christmas sugar cookie. The dough handles perfectly (Is it the egg yolk that keeps it from drying out or getting too stiff?). And they taste fabulous. Deb makes hers austere, but when I make them I tart them up with colored sugar because, you know, when I make them they are Christmas cookies.

Here’s a secret to Dimmick rolled cookies (You may never look at cookies quite the same way again). My mother taught me to use a sequence of cutters: when the dough is untouched, when it has been chilling in the refrigerator and you pull your first quarter or eighth of dough out to roll, you select the cutters you are going to use. I like to start with six-pointed stars and Christmas trees. Then you use only those cutters every time you select a fresh round of dough. When you roll up the scraps and roll them out, you choose entirely different cutters: I chose a flower that I think of as a poinsettia, but could be a Christmas rose. All second-generation dough (aka re-rolls) is cut with this cutter. And if, God forbid, you have a third generation of dough made from twice re-rolled scraps, you choose yet another cutter.

Why do we do this? The first time you roll out dough it has minimal added flour on your work surface. The cookies that you get from a first dough are more tender and flavorful. By the time you are re-rolling dough, you have incorporated the flour that is on your work surface and you usually have to add a bit more flour when you roll it out so that it does not stick, so second and third-generation cookies have more flour in them and the dough gets worked more: both of those things toughen the cookies slightly. The compensation is that the re-rolled dough is usually a bit easier to work with due to the added flour and sometimes you can get the stiffer cookies quite thin. The second generation cookies may look better than the first generation ones, but the first ones taste better. Switching cutters functions as a code. You can say to those in the know, “The poinsettias are re-rolls,” while you make them attractive for others to grab.

My mother favored delicate, thin cookies and I share that preference. I tend to use small, angular cutters with unfussy shapes. My favorite cutters are just an outline of the shape, as opposed to the kind that have a flat top and a sharp cutting edge — cookies tend to get stuck in overly fancy cutters. I don’t make gingerbread men, although I have the cutters to make them.

As I was throwing red sugar onto the maple poinsettias, I realized that I would run out of red sugar before I had baked all of the ginger cookies (which I haven’t started yet). I also saw that I did not have enough powdered sugar to make royal icing for the pfefferneusse — that recipe makes a lot.

When you make cookies hour after hour by yourself, you get into a rhythm. Take a butter wrapper and use it to grease a baking sheet. Set that on the counter. Add flour to your work surface: I use a silicone mat over a marble slab. Pat the dough into a round as you would for pie crust. Flour your rolling pin. Roll out the dough as thinly as possible. I usually end up with one thick end on the top and am running out of room to roll, so I will break the thick part off and set it aside — it is just like new dough because I haven’t finished rolling it.

Choose your cutters and flour them. Place the cutter as close to the edge of the dough as you can. Then place the next cutter as close to the last place you cut as you can. After awhile, you start to see “If I turn the tree cutter right side up here and upside down there” I can cut very close together.” I imagine someone laying out paper patterns on fabric. I don’t think of myself as having strong spacial abilities, but I am good at placing cookie cutters, probably because I’ve done it a lot.

Pop the filled cookie sheet in the refrigerator to chill while you fill the next one. Transfer the chilled sheet to your work table for decorating. When all your trays are full of cut cookies, preheat the oven. Decorate the cookies while it preheats.

As I cut cookies, I move the scraps off to the side of the marble slab — I will gather them up to re-roll later. Mom sometimes made “scrap cookies” of the odd bits of dough between cookies. I prefer to re-roll the scraps and make cookies with recognizable shapes.

Suddenly I remember the family lexicon: members of my immediate family talked about “crap cookies,” not because there was anything wrong with the Christmas cookies we looked forward to all year but because my younger brother couldn’t say esses when he was little. “Scrap cookies” became “crap cookies.”

Before I decorated the last round of poinsettias, my phone rang. My former next door neighbor from Oberlin Avenue who is one hundred years old now was calling to wish me a merry Christmas. I was touched. I asked her if she would be going out to visit her daughter for Christmas. She was, but she wanted to see if I was home first. I told her I was baking cookies, that that had been one of Madge’s specialties and that I still baked them. She said she’d check up on me from time to time and I told her I had never forgotten how she sent us food when my mother was so ill.

While cookies bake, I mix up new batches of colored sugar. I’ve made light green, turquoise, denim blue, orange and an accidental brown — no matter what the package says you cannot make purple sugar with cheap liquid food coloring.

I do not set a timer. When the cookies are ready I will catch their scent wafting through the air. When cookies smell like cookies they are done.

I baked the last tray of cookies, washed my silicone mat and forced myself out of the house for a Safeway run. Safeway was out of red sugar, but I got powdered sugar and a few treats (coffee yogurt and tapioca pudding) and the thyme leaves I have been eying, outrageously priced at nine dollars, but 33% off this week. The walk stretched out my back a little, compressed from all the standing and sitting.

I fed the cat, had dinner myself (bagel, peanut butter, yogurt, raw carrots) and realized I wasn’t up for a second shift. The ginger dough is the hardest one to handle. Stay tuned.

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Categories Christmas baking, cookies, home cooking
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