Beef Biscuit Pie

Our cuisine tends to be fairly eclectic - we make a lot of curries, improvised pasta sauces, pilafs, pulaos, and Peruvian delicacies. Most of these are improvised, and sometimes involve ingredients we've never actually used before. We mix cultures, and sometimes have no particular cultural cuisine in mind while we cook. Sometimes we do this.

But sometimes, you just want some beef and gravy. And biscuits. That was the simple craving that led to us making this particular dish, which is, essentially, a pot pie of sorts. Everybody loves pot pie, right?

Turkeyless Turkey

On Christmas Eve, Mariam and I wanted a nice big Christmas dinner. We wanted a ham, or a leg of lamb - or a turkey. But we weren't entertaining anyone for Christmas, so it was just the two of us. Dressing and preparing an entire bird - or indeed an entire ham or leg of lamb - is a lot of trouble when there are only two people eating, and it's really too much food anyway. The smallest turkey you can typically get is upwards of ten pounds, and even a duck weighs in at five or six. We wanted something like a stuffed bird dinner without stuffing a bird. Now, people say you can't have your cake and eat it, too, but I never quite understood what all the hoohaw was about - if I'm eating cake, I have it. It is had by me. In my hand, and my mouth. And on Christmas Eve, we ate roast turkey with stuffing and mashed potatoes without ever stuffing or roasting a turkey. So take that, ubiquitous-idioms-with-nevertheless-obfuscated-meaning!

Santa's Nutsacks

Ahem. Santa's Nutsacks. Yes, that's what we're calling them.

This is the last cookie recipe we shall post for the 2013 post-holiday season, and it's an experimental cookie that we developed ourselves, though not without a lot of inspiration from existing cookies and pastries. In Persian cuisine, there is a sort of pastry called qottab (قطاب), a deep-fried pastry frequently filled with almonds or walnuts - they are delicious. However, Mariam and I don't really like deep-frying if we can avoid it - it's messy, smelly, and quite honestly, we're fat enough, thanks. We wanted to make something similar as a Christmas cookie, but strictly as a baked item with nut fillings made from pistachios or pecans.

Fred, the fish we stuffed

I tend to meet my meat before I cook it. By meeting my meat I don't actually mean seeing the live animal. That would be creepy. I just try to become close to it by naming it. I only name whole animals, like a whole bird. They are rather cute and I feel a closer connection to them than to chunks of chicken thighs, you know.

Fred

So, meat Fred, the trout. I bought him at a supermarket. At most supermarkets you can ask the butcher to debone it for you. Or like me you can forget to do so and bring Fred back home and ask your husband to do the deboning. It is a surgical procedure and my hands are too shaky for that.

Linzer Augen

Linzer Augen are almond sugar cookie sandwiches with a simple fruit preserve filling, commonly raspberry or apricot, though this year we tried lingonberry to great effect, and we have used barberry in the past. These are probably the most labor intensive cookies we make for Christmas, as each one is actually a sandwich composed of two discrete cookies, each of which needs to be rolled and cut separately. However, they're just too pretty and too delicious not to make them. The name comes from Linz, a city in northern Austria where these cookies ostensibly originate. The word augen is German for "eyes", representative of the appearance of the cookies, thanks to a hole punched through the top cookie of the sandwich to give a tiny window to the fruit filling underneath.

Spritz Cookies

Most of you are probably at least passingly familiar with those brightly decorated butter cookies that always spring up around Christmas. They are simple, sweet and crumbly, and come in a variety of shapes with little sugar sprinkles on them. There are a few different ways to make cookies like this - one way is to make a stiffer dough that rolls out and use shaped cutters to extract cookies in the shapes you please. But that's too much work - much easier is the simple spritz cookie.

A spritz cookie is really just any cookie issuing from a spritz press, or cookie press, a cylindrical extrusion device using perforated disks to create differently shaped cookies. A cookie press can be bought at most department stores or home goods markets like Target or Bed, Bath, and Beyond, but of course, the jungle is also fruitful. There are a number of different doughs that can be pressed through a cookie press to make what would reasonably be called spritz cookies. Some of these include ground nuts or nut pastes, or spices. This recipe, which we make every year, is a simple butter sugar cookie, and it's really more about the process and the shapes than it is about having a sophisticated flavor. Sometimes simple is okay.

Pecan Puffs

We make a lot of Christmas cookies for a couple who do no major holiday entertaining. We do, however, send our cookies through the mail and hand deliver a number of goody boxes around Christmas time to friends and family - at least those family who do not have access to the even greater bounty of baked goods which issues from my mother. Those family members are her responsibility - sorry. These cookies do crumble in their own specific ways, after all.

As it happens anyway, most of the Christmas cookies that Mariam and I make are derived somehow from recipes passed to me by my mother.  Baking is its own special kind of cooking, requiring a skillset that I feel does not really intersect entirely with that afforded by experience in other cooking. My mother is a more sophisticated and better baker than either of us, so as yet, we can mostly do little more than follow directions and hope for the best. The following recipe is a favorite of ours, and also quite easy, so we haven't yet had anything but the best in preparing it.

Always Cut Away

When I was younger, I was a member of the Boy Scouts for some time. I didn't stay on very long, I didn't earn my Eagle badge - the whole thing felt a bit too military for me, and with strong Christian overtones that made me a bit uncomfortable as a nonbeliever. Also, I really like staying indoors, with central air, electricity, and video games, so the whole outdoors survival thing was a bit lost on me. Anyway, I forgot most of what I was taught in the Scouts, but I always remembered one instruction that was passed to me about knives, which was to always cut away from yourself.

I remembered this so well, for two reasons I think. First, is that it just seems reasonable - of course the knife should move away, it's sharp. Cutting towards oneself is absurd. Secondly, I don't deal well with mental imagery of injury and blood, and the potential (wildly exaggerated in my head) injuries that could result from mishandling a knife have, I suppose, scared me into remembering this simple instruction.

When cooking, of course, we make heavy use of very sharp (if you take care of them properly, that is) knives, so it's important to take this bit of Scout advice to the kitchen. It's easy to forget sometimes that the kitchen is full of devices designed expressly to damage meaty tissue (like your body), whether by laceration, abrasion, burning, boiling, or irradiating. Every day, we play with knives over a fire. Proper handling of a knife, then, is essential to good kitchen practice, and so I say, do as the Boy Scouts, and always cut away.

Because if you don't, you might sever a tendon in your thumb, like this fool of a blogger did in late October while trying to carve a pumpkin. When you factor in medical expenses for the emergency sutures and the surgery to repair the tendon, this was easily the most expensive jack-o-lantern I have ever carved. Failure to cut away is also part of the reason there haven't been posts in a while - for a long time, I could only type with one hand, I couldn't really do much of anything in a kitchen, and Mariam was busy doing all the two-handed tasks around the house that I could no longer really help with. You never realize how important your off-hand is until you can't use it anymore.

My hand is more or less in order now, save for some ongoing complications with my skin being irritated and itching around the surgical scar. The tendon is pretty much in full working order now, however, and my hand now need not reside in a ridiculous, cumbersome splint that renders it all but completely useless. Expect soon a number of posts detailing the cookies and dinner we made for Christmas, unfortunately late, but very, very early for next year's preparations.

Cut safe.