For October 7 (a little late)

Last week we went to NY and CT for a long weekend to celebrate my sister's birthday. But before going, I baked and left some treats behind for the Zen Center! Here were last week's items:

Toasted Walnut Cookies, from Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
Pecan-Maple Shortbread

both from Melissa Clark - Food Writer

I am a big fan of Deborah Madison's, since she was the founding chef of Greens in San Francisco. I took a cooking and writing class with her a few years ago at Tassajara; it was a lot of fun and she is a wonderful woman. She is not a baker by nature, and her cookbooks tend to rely mostly on desserts that are fruit-based. As amazing a cookbook as it is, I don't think I had ever even looked through Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone for cookie recipes, since I don't associate her with such things. But through the seamless web of the Web, I ended up last week on the blog of Melissa Clark, a food writer who contributes a lot to the New York Times, and I saw these two recipes there, one being the walnut cookie recipe of Deborah's, the other being a shortbread with lots and lots of variations. I decided to make them both.

The walnut cookie recipe is, well, good but not great. (It kinda confirmed what I had thought.) It is very straightforward to make, and the flavor is good. I suspect that the cookies would have been better had I cooked them a minute or two more; as it is, they are slightly toothy, when I think that a sandy/crisp texture would have worked better. But they are a nice, basic variation on the butter cookie with nuts.

The shortbread recipe is a "start with this and then add that or that or even that" kind of affair. So I ended up adding pulverized roasted pecans and maple sugar (and a wee bit of pure maple flavoring to kick it up a notch) to announce that autumn has arrived. While I know that maple is usually associated with walnuts, I am very fond of it with pecans, and having already made a walnut cookie I wanted to mix it up. Along the way, I had browsed the recipe for maple shortbread in the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion and made a few adaptations to my recipe based on their ideas (basically sprinkling some maple sugar on the bottom of the pan before pressing in the shortbread, and then sprinkling some on top of the shortbread, to give it a bit of extra crunch and flavor), so this is something of an amalgam recipe. In the end, Andrew raved about it, and I thought it was pretty good, too; I brought some with me to Connecticut and shared with family, and they all liked it, as well. So I recommend it. And some of the variations on Melissa Clark's web site look very intereating - particularly adding rosemary to it!

This week, I am planning on one of my favorite recipes, which is a hallmark of autumn - but the forecast is for weather in the 80s all week, so there is gonna be some cognitive dissonance going on...

Enjoy!