Ma’amoul (Date & Walnuts filled Semolina Shortbread)

Aieeee! It’s another dried fruit cookie recipe in a row! I love them crazy though.

Sometimes I have the urge to root my body tableside, legs curled up not moving.  Fingers forming little identical packets, moving of their own wisdom, wet with water, sticky with grain.  Morsels of ripe dates and pale fine semolina, perfumed with orange flower and rose.  I feel time rest and swell and move slower, and maybe it’s just because I’m used to cooking on my feet, but the act of sitting down feels defiant.  Time is a tricky thing that runs out of your fingers like rice when you try to catch it, but will expand to fill every space when you decide to stop treating it like currency, to stop bargaining with it.   It’s an odd fluid thing not to be coldly bartered with.  It really hates that, I think.

Garibaldi Biscuits… “Squashed Fly Cookies”

I am feeling wiiiiiissttfulllll.   (Weestfool?  Rested.  Covered in flour.  Ahem.)

So I begin a long absence by writing about nostalgia cookies.  Biscuits even.  Little dry pastry rectangles made chewy with squishy squashy fat currant middles.  Garibaldis!  Britishisms!  Victoriana at it’s best and ongoing fuel for my current tea cookie obsession.   This isn’t my first attempt at recreating them, either.  (Yon!   A light over yonder window into Liz-face’s ickle-baby vegan scientist proto-cookhood links!).  I think they were my favourite when I was a kid.  Way up there, somewhere between gingersnaps and box brownies and thin mints™.  And they are full of flies.  So, grossness bonus.

Strawberry Orange Blossom Jam

Jam blobs to make your carefully carved mini toast made from a bigger hot dog bun look verrrry cute, like anime cute.

I almost didn’t make jam this month, which is a little crazy.  Jam is my thing, and I’ve been doing something for every month of the Food In Jars monthly challenge so far. Maybe I was testing the limits of obligation, maybe it was just the business of summer and summer being busy.

At any rate, I couldn’t walk past these strawberries, lined up like juicy rubies in their clamshells, outside the metro, where the fruit is cheap but not usually this memorable.  Yesterday.  Yes, this jam is just 1 day old.  I’m screeching into the finish line with this one, and in the midst of packing to go celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary in Ottawa this weekend no less.  Oh look!  It’s red and white!  Like I PLANNED it or something (I did not, but maybe the strawberries did O_O).  Much better than a poutine donut (those fries are all wrong), this quasi-intentional celebration of Canada’s being a thing is made with the flesh and souls of hundreds of perfect tiny redolent blushing local Quebec strawberries, with a little splash of orange blossom water to make it something special.

Apple Rose Pie

On the heels of Father’s Day, comes a feminine pie I made for Mother’s Day way back in May (although wtf is that, attributing genders to food?  I think my husband-guy liked this pie the most out of all of us).  I pulled it from the spring section of the Four & Twenty Blackbirds cookbook, because though apples aren’t technically the most in season of spring fruits, the roses bring the warm weather perfume of flowers busting their pretty fug all over the greening world.  And of course it’s summer now.  It’s still awesome.  And kinda different?  I’d never made a rosewater pie before (oh snap, not technically true!) and weird is the call of inspiration sometimes, especially when I’m not on the clock.

Minimalist Chocolate Mousse

There’s a wicked good friperie / thrift store near-ish to my house, with four floors of treasures, much turnover, fancy fresh curios, big city-level castoff fashion, (bakeware!), AND lots of books, which is important.  I’ve slowed down a bit recently, but I spent a lot of the last year snorkelling for excellent children’s literature one dog-eared retro Seuss-ible at a time.  And every trip there, on the way out, I would cast an eye toward the adult books and every single time I would find something interesting in seconds with magnet-sense.  Like buying a little impulse candy bar, except something for my grownup brain to nosh on in the endless hours of nursing small baby life.