For March 17

Hmmm, well, Happy Saint Patrick's Day!!! I guess I should say that up front, because it doesn't show up in this weeks recipes.  I totally forgot about the holiday, and didn't even wear anything green today!  (sad face here)

Let's start with what we're NOT having this week:  Very Tangy Lime Bars, from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert.  This week, for the first time, I had a recipe failure.  It wasn't me (really!) it was the ingredients.  I was at the farmer's market late last week, and I saw something I'd never seen before, called "sweet limes."  Hmmmm, I thought, interesting.  I had made the very tangy lemon bars a while back and liked them, and had intended to circle back to them to make a recipe variant using limes, and this made me think the time was right.  So I got some (like a dozen of them, and each is the size of a small orange), and had one item for this week on its way.  Well, I don't know if this is the nature of "sweet limes" or what, but they were basically FLAVORLESS, a condition that we really only found out about after baking 2 pans of these bars.  Since I am trying to be all organized these days and to allow me to get to the gym on my regular schedule, I have begun doing either 1 whole cookie or the dough for 1 or 2 cookies on Tuesday night, finishing on Wednesday night.  So we made these Tuesday night, but they had to cool, so we didn't taste them until Wednesday morning (after around 6 hours sleep).  When I cut them and tasted them, they were completely tasteless - great crust, a flavor of a custard topping, but no citrus flavor to be found anywhere, even though we used 4+ teaspoons of zest and 1 1/2 cups of lime juice!  Ack.  So they are going bye-bye.

This left me having to do both cookies on Wednesday night, which I haven't done in quite a while, and I only got home from the gym at 8:45.  So it was a scramble, involving two old favorites, but I think it all worked out in the end (as long as a sleep deficit doesn't bother you too much).  To wit:

Almond Rochers, from Elizabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson, Tartine
Lenox Hill Cornmeal Lemon Almond Biscotti, from Dorie Greenspan, Baking:  From My Home To Yours

Both of these are almond recipes - surprise!  It was a bit of a surprise to me - I must have been thinking of a different meringue recipe when I started down this road, because I had Andrew buy lots of chopped walnuts when he was kind enough to do my shopping, but when I went to start cooking, I realized neither recipe called for them.  Doh!  I was so thrown off by the lime bars fiasco I lost track of my recipe plan.  Anyway, I don't know about your world, but in my world this is National Almond Week.  Let's celebrate!

I first made the Almond Rochers (which means "little rocks") almost exactly a year ago, for March 11, 2010.  These are a gluten-free, almost fat-free meringue, and are apparently very popular at the San Francisco bakery from which the book gets its name.  Here, you toast sliced almonds and then crush them, make a meringue, add the almonds and bake.  Based on a variant in the book, I added a few cacao nibs to the recipe, but I didn't have many in the house so it is not a noticeable amount.  The roasted nuts give this a very rich flavor, even though it is fat free aside from whatever fat is in the nuts - and Andrew's trainer says that almonds are the best nut health-wise, so woohoo.  Anyway, I like this recipe a lot for something that is both fat- and chocolate-free.

I usually make biscotti out of the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion, but I have also made different variations on Dorie Greenspan's biscotti recipe over time.  The basic recipe uses almonds and cornmeal, and this one adds a good dose of lemon zest (and yes, you can actually taste the citrus in these, sigh).  Since this was a last minute add to the list, it had to be relatively easy, and biscotti are a great answer.  My friend Frank told me yesterday that he has never had biscotti he liked.  I hope I'm up to the challenge!  I think that a lot of commercially sold biscotti are way too sweet and have too much fat added to soften the texture up a little.  But generally, biscotti now seem to be a way to add white chocolate or weird flavors to something you put in your mouth but might otherwise not.  (Don't go there!)  Good biscotti are true to their tradition, which comes from the idea of a traveling biscuit that would last for long periods without spoiling.  (Biscotti means "twice baked" in Italian, which is how these are made, and are a relative to the "biscuit" of the English-speaking world.)  Here, the lemon and almond add some flavor and the cornmeal adds some texture.  These are best dunked in something (Andrew recommends hot liquid like coffee), but they are not so hard that they need dunking to "rehydrate" them or anything.  You can just grab one and eat it on its own, and the relatively low fat content means you don't have to feel guilty until the second or third one.  This is a nice recipe with a good flavor!

A note to any of you (hi nephew Dan in Brazil) who may actually try to bake any of these recipes - when making biscotti, this recipe makes a very, very soft dough.  The best way to work with it is to plop large spoonfuls out in a line on the baking sheet.  Then, you can form them together into a log.  The only way to work successfully with this dough is to have your hands wet and cold - get them wet in cold water, and then quickly work to shape your log, which should be compact and tall (it will slump and spread as it bakes).  The difference between dry and wet hands is the difference between a mess on the sheet with half the dough between your fingers and a nicely formed log of biscotti.

Happy eating!  Happy baking!