I am sitting here, in a friend’s apartment in Berlin with snow falling outside and fireworks going off, thinking of an appropriate way to sum up the past year. It was hard, it was a struggle, it was difficult and heartbreaking on so many levels for so many different people. In a year of hardship there were also a lot of wonderful things that happened: I started grad school and found a career that I truly love, my boyfriend completed his Masters degree and created a beautiful thesis project and, perhaps best of all, my grandmother survived her hip replacement and a heart attack and is up and walking and laughing again. It only feels appropriate to end this year with something a tart, and a little sweet, and hope that next year (and the next decade) will be a better.
I first made this cookies over ten years ago and I have made them every Christmas since. I usually create a sort of gingerbread UN, with gingerbread men from all around the world: a Scottish guy with a kilt, a Japanese woman wearing an elaborately decorated kimono, a French man with a striped shirt and a cigarette hanging from his mouth.
These are hands-down one of my favorite, and one of my most popular cookies. When my mom’s godson was smaller, we used to make these together and he’d always ask for them when he came to visit. One of my uncles always takes home three or four to eat with coffee. Because of all the molasses and spices, my college roommate used to call these the “bully of the cookie jar.” He meant that in the best of possible ways.
As I sit here eating barley soup I would like to focus on what I’m not doing:
I am not writing a research paper
I am not cobbling together a portfolio
I am not getting high on Sharpie fumes while making a picture book
I am not even lesson planning
I am just sitting here enjoying the quiet in my head. And the barley soup.
Last night I had my last class of the year. Our final project was creating a “big book”, essentially a very large picture book (mine was 13″ x 19″), and an accompanying lesson plan. It was so much fun to see the books my classmates had made, they were so beautiful and creative, and some were just awe-inspiring. Everyone also brought in food and drinks to share. I had been wanting to make these tarts even since Ashley wrote about them on Not Without Salt. I’m so glad I did. Warm and spicy, tart and creamy, light and fluffy, they were a wonderful winter treat*. I had one for breakfast this morning.
“the pure luxury of a cloudless sky, designed not to please the flesh but solely to please the eye;”- Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Let me tell you a story:
Once there was this girl who really liked this boy so she thought she’d make him bread pudding. Not just any bread pudding, but a chai bread pudding, where the milk is steeped with spices and tea and the final dish is rich, flavorful and complex. She looked through her cupboards and was happy to discover that she had most of the ingredients on hand, which was good because spices like cardamom can be expensive. She went over to his apartment to make this bread pudding in his (and what is now their) tiny kitchen. She warmed the milk, mixed in the whole spices and tea and let it all steep for an hour. She mixed the milk with eggs, and added the bread and let it soak for a half an hour. She put it in a big pan and put that in an even bigger pan and put all those pans in the oven (along with some hot water to make the bain marie) for fifty minutes. She pulled the bread pudding out of the oven, perfectly browned and beautiful and it tasted. . . . awful. One thing this …]
I may be a nerd, but I love this:
“The metaphor of the cookbook was long the pet metaphor of the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott in his assault on the futility of thinking that something learned by rote was as good as what was learned by ritual. Oakeshott’s much repeated point was that one could no more learn how to make good government from a set of rules than one could learn how to bake a cake by reading recipe books. The cookbook, like the constitution, was only the residue of a practice. Even the most grammatical of cookbooks dies without living cooks to illuminate its principles. The history of post-independence African republics exists to prove the first point; that Chocolate Nemesis cake that always fails but your friends keep serving anyway exists to prove the second. Unsupported by your mom, the cookbook is the model of empty knowledge.
“All this is true, and yet the real surprise of the cookbook, as of the constitution, is that it sometimes makes something better in the space between what’s promised and what’s made. You can follow the recipe for the exotic thing- green curry or paella- and though what you end …]
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