New York to Berlin, New York to Colorado, it's a long trip...
The recipe was chosen by Donna of Spatulas, Corkscrews & Suitcases . I made this on flying trip moving things from the my in-laws, 6 hours west of here, to our apartment by trailer. I did it in a rush, I admit, but I did follow the recipe. When we got home today and tried it, it hadn't jelled properly and it was so rich as to be inedible. I'll be interested to see if others had the same problem.
I'm catching up! I waited to make the Linzer Sables because I was not enamored of the recipe calling for 1 1/2 cups of "finely ground nuts". This recipe was chosen by Noskos of Living the Life.
This is the first time that I have ever had a recipe call for rolling the dough (between wax or parchment paper) and then chilling it before cutting it (rather than chilling it then rolling and cutting it) and it worked very well. I split the recipe in half, rolled each between two sets of parchment paper and then placed the two pieces on a cookie sheet and placed the sheet outside on the balcony to chill: Berlin in December is quite chilly. It's also quite grey and rainy, so luckily I rescued the sheet just after it started drizzling and was able to shift things about in the refrigerator and fit it in there. Things got busy then and I didn't finish the cookies until two days later.
I found that 9 minutes was enough bake time and with the first tray I tried to skip the step of turning the cookies half through and discovered that my oven requires that step to evenly bake the cookies. For the filling I took my favorite seeded raspberry jam, boiled up a bit with a teaspoon of water in the microwave, let it cool and filled the cookies. I had rolled the dough thinner than the suggested 1/4 inch and I still found that the resulting cookie sandwich was too thick. I had 12 filled cookies and with the remaining dough I made 8 single cookies which I dusted heavily with powdered sugar.
The German liked these very much (as did his parents when I brought them over) but the children liked only the powdered sugar and I found the cookies far too heavy. I generally don't like recipes made with nuts and this recipe shows me that I don't like recipes made with ground nuts either. I won't make this recipe again, but I will make a ginger snap to see if the German just likes the cinnmon and the cloves (which I also like very much).
It's my Philips 700watt variable speed with turbo immersion stick blender. My ghod. How have I lived without this?
The strangest thing has happened: when I try to connect to Tuesdays with Dorie, I am not able to access any of the regular pages. 
Then we rolled them out and made some stars: I put colored sugar on them. When I cooked them, at 170C, I set the timer for 5 minutes, rotated them and baked for another 5 minutes. I immediately took them off the cookie sheet because they were already browned and the recipe said that they shouldn't show color.
(edit: I made another batch today with my girls-- I still have two more balls of dough in the refrigerator-- I rolled the dough a bit thicker, I lowered the heat to 165C, and changed the time to 5minutes, turn, 4 minutes. The cookies were very pale but tasted better. Still dry though, and not a sugar cookie recipe I will return to.)
It's strange to think that while I was posting every day last month I didn't have time to write about all the things that were happening. Time just seems to fly. Back on the 25th we had our English test at the "other International School".
I was wandering through my reader when I reached CairoTypeO's "End of NaBloPoMo's post" on Wandering the World. |
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This week's Tuesday with Dorie was chosen by Vibi from La Casserole Caree. She has the recipe here. (I tried to use the Google translator, but it failed for me. I will try again, but she has very kindly run a translation for her Anglophone readers.)
Luckily, I brought the brown
sugar, pie pans and vanilla extract with me (and will make the latter when I run out). So I made the pie crust with all butter (the recipe calls for a bit of shortening as well). I have always previously made my dough with Crisco and I now know that I don't like pie crust made with fat. I do now understand why I have always preferred my mother's pie crust to any that I have eaten out: there is a taste to a butter crust, and a texture, that I now recognize and I prefer Crisco to that.
On the other hand, considering
that I used a pastry cutter (I don't have a food processor here), the actual dough preparation and roll ou went very well. Because butter here has such a high fat content that it remains soft even in the refrigerator, I froze a 250 g bar. I then weighed out 10 oz, cut it into a small dice, and cut the ingredients together. After looking at everyone else's comments, I decided not to pre-bake the shell (and I changed the temperature to 220C for 15 minutes with a foil cover, then 45 minutes at 185C).I had given up on the "pecan brittle"-style mixture that should be poured on top of the pumpkin pie mixture but in the spirit of the Twofer, I studded the top with walnuts. I also used some of the extra dough (and there was almost enough for a whole extra crust) to add some leaf cut-outs to the top.
Here is the pie cooked: it looked great
and my daughter was mad to eat it. It baked up well, but I didn't love it: a mixture of not caring very much for the taste and texture of the crust and not loving the taste of this German pumpkin. I don't think I will make it again, although my husband will probably finish it off. I also think I need to run along to the KaDeWe and find me some Crisco. My daughter was sadly disappointed in the taste as well. I think she will be far more appreciative of the next TwD, the Linzer Sables."Anyone who tars Israel with the Nazi brush by drawing obscene analogies between Israeli policies on the West Bank and the Warsaw Ghetto is wandering into very questionable territory and is legitimately open to strong criticism," Rosenfeld told the Post.
His essay, "'Progressive' Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism," which has been translated into German, asserts that vicious anti-Israeli statements and books from a number of British and American Jews are contributing to modern anti-Semitism.
Further commenting on Hecht-Galinski, Rosenfeld cited
the US State Department report "Contemporary Global anti-Semitism," which defines "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis" as anti-Semitic.
On this side of the Atlantic, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, formerly known as the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, issued a "working definition of Anti-Semitism" that defines "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis" as a manifestation of anti-Semitism.
Once the nation’s largest and mightiest financial company, Citigroup lost half its value in the stock market last week as the bank confronted a crisis of confidence. Although Citigroup executives maintain the bank is sound, investors worry that its finances are deteriorating. Citigroup has suffered staggering losses for a year now, and few analysts think the pain is over. Many investors worry that it needs more capital.
With more than $2 trillion in assets and operations in more than 100 countries, Citigroup is so large and interconnected that its troubles could spill over into other institutions. Citigroup is widely viewed, both in Washington and on Wall Street, as too big to be allowed to fail.
...in the last three months, 36,000 people have come looking for jobs through the one-stop system, an increase of 60 percent over last year, while the number of jobs posted has declined by more than a third.The number of families receiving public assistance has also jumped by 40 percent.
