A Sheep-Friendly Shepherd’s Pie

Those of you in the southern latitudes might be sick of wintry food and have probably already moved on to mircrogreens and asparagus, but up here it’s still freezing and miserable and there’s still need for comfort. I can think of few dishes more comforting when the weather’s horrid than shepherd’s pie, and this one has the additional benefit of being kind to the sheep.

Yes, once again, it’s a recipe based on lentils. Don’t knock them. Lentils are cheap, delicious, nutritious, and cook quickly. Here they make a perfect stand-in for the usual beef or lamb, since they have a similar texture and a deep and substantial savoriness that’s perfect against the fluffy starchiness of the potatoes.

If it’s more than nominally spring where you are, you can tuck this away for six or seven months. Otherwise, please give this one a try now, especially if you’re having a bunch of guests over, since it can be assembled well ahead and baked when they arrive in need of warmth and welcome.

Vegetarian Shepherd’s Pie
Serves 6-8

1 cup lentils
1 large bay leaf
2-3 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2 cups each finely diced onion, celery and carrots
2 cups diced cremini or white button mushrooms
1/4 cup tomato sauce
1 large sprig fresh sage
1 large handful fresh parsley
1/2 bag frozen peas
Salt, pepper, and splashes of soy sauce to taste
5-6 medium Russet or Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and diced
3 tablespoons butter, plus additional for dotting the top

In a medium pot, boil the lentils with the bay leaf in just enough liquid to keep them covered until just tender, adding more boiling water if necessary. Be sure not to drain the lentils once they’re cooked.

Saute the onion, celery, carrots and mushrooms in the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat until the vegetables just begin to caramelize. Add the tomato sauce, the lentils with their liquid, and the fresh herbs, leaves torn roughly by hand. Simmer until the liquid has mostly evaporated, then season with salt, pepper, and soy. Stir in the frozen peas and turn off the heat.

Bring a large pot of water to the boil, and salt well. Boil the potatoes until tender, then drain and mash or put through a ricer. Stir in the butter.

Butter a 9 x 13 glass baking dish. Decant the lentil filling into the dish, then spread the mashed potatoes over the top evenly. Create ridges or swirls in the mashed potatoes and dot the top with tiny bits of butter to promote browning.

Place the pie on a baking sheet to catch any drips, and bake the pie at 375 F until the potatoes are browning nicely and the filling is just starting to bubble, 20-30 minutes.

Let sit for a couple of minutes, then serve.

Notes:

You can cut the recipe back at will, by half or even thirds. This just happens to be the amount that fits in my baking dish, and I like the leftovers so much that I don’t mind eating this for several days, which is contrary to my usual low tolerance.

The lentil variety doesn’t matter as much as in some other recipes. You can use whatever you have and prefer. In fact, I often mix brown lentils with French green or black beluga, since the brown ones will break down more and stick the filling together, while the firmer lentils will provide extra texture.

This recipe is easy to make vegan, since the only dairy is the butter in the mashed potato topping, which could be replaced with olive oil.

Merci, Maman

I have been madly in love with Jacques Pepin’s mother, and more importantly with her reckless ingenuity, ever since I read The Apprentice.  I immediately knew I’d have to try her every-known-rule-breaking cheese souffle, and it was everything I had hoped and more.  I have made all kinds of variations on it since, and it has become a favorite dinner with a simple salad. Naturally, it’s a perfect brunch dish as well.

It’s flatter than a traditional souffle and just a smidge heavier, somewhere between a traditional souffle and a frittata, but it’s so beautifully, perfectly eyes-closed easy and no-compromises delicious that nothing whatsoever is lost.  For all its luxuriousness, it’s also quite a recession-friendly dish, since eggs are cheap and while it’s amazing with imported Gruyere, it’s also great with less exalted domestic cheeses.

It’s the most sublime way of using up all kinds of leftovers, too.  Previous incarnations have included pepper jack with green onion, and aged gouda with cremini mushrooms sauteed in Marsala.

Cheese and Asparagus Souffle
(adapted from Maman’s Cheese Souffle, in Jacques Pepin’s The Apprentice)
Serves 4-6

6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing the dish
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups milk
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
7 large eggs, well beaten
2 1/2 cups (approximately 6 ounces) grated cheese, preferably Gruyere
1 bunch fresh asparagus, roasted or steamed

Butter a 6-cup gratin dish and set aside.

In a saucepan, melt the 6 tablespoons butter over medium heat, then add flour and whisk over the heat until fully absorbed and starting to simmer. Whisk in the milk, and continue stirring until the sauce is thick and smooth and comes to a boil, 1-2 minutes.

Pour into a large bowl and allow to cool for 10 minutes.  In the meantime, preheat the oven to 400F.

When the sauce has cooled, fold in the eggs and cheese. Slice the lower stalks of the asparagus thinly and stir into the egg mixture, reserving the tips for garnish.

Pour the mixture into the buttered dish and bake until puffy and well browned on top, 30-40 minutes.  Serve immediately, garnished with the reserved asparagus tips and accompanied by a simply dressed green salad.

The deflated leftovers are delicious cold or reheated the next day.

Notes:

The original recipe called for five extra-large eggs, but the time I mistakenly made it with an extra egg, I preferred the additional lightness.  Since I  have to make a special point of buying extra-large but always have large on hand, I’ve scaled the recipe for the equivalent of six extra-large eggs.

I had milder Madrigal instead of Gruyere on hand, so I substituted Parmesan for the last half-cup to add sharpness.  Do the same if you’re using standard American swiss or cheddar.

On not judging books by their covers

If you saw these lumpy, fuzzy, brown-splotched things in the bargain bin of your local market for $1.50 a bag, you’d think their next stop was the compost heap and you’d walk right past, wouldn’t you?

Oh, but you’d be wrong.  Sadly, sadly wrong, since these less-than-beauteous things are quinces, and pretty is utterly irrelevant when it comes to quinces.

What you would have walked past, my friend, is the bargain of the year, because fresh quinces are usually upwards of a buck apiece, assuming you can even find them.  When I saw these, I squealed like a schoolgirl presented with a new pony, took advantage of the produce staff’s ignorance, and snapped up five pounds for the laughable total of three dollars.  I haven’t been able to find them this cheap in years, which is why I haven’t, until now, been able to make preserves to ease my often-unrequited longing for this headily-perfumed rosy fruit.

Why would you want to go to the trouble of making preserves in the dead of winter, when you’re all burned out from the holiday baking push?  For one thing, quinces are so high in natural pectin that you can get a wonderfully thick, versatile jam for barely more work than making applesauce.  Besides being a lovely spread redolent of sultry nights at the Alhambra, it can be added by the spoonful to lend its hint of mystery to your apple, pear or berry desserts for the rest of the year.

Even better, turning the jam into the toothsome paste traditionally served with Manchego is simply a matter of letting it dry out in a flat vessel, and it keeps for ages in the fridge. Make your own, and the next time you want to put together a schmancy cheese plate, you can tell Whole Paycheck to shove the insane prices they charge for imported dulce de membrillo.

Let us, then, take a delicious lesson from the humble quince, and remember that is not the surface that matters, but the true beauty that is found within.

Quince Preserves

Makes 4 cups jam and one quarter-sheet pan of dulce de membrillo

10 quinces (around 5 pounds)
4 cups granulated sugar (approximately; see instructions below)
Half of a large vanilla bean, split
1 lemon

Wash, peel and core the quinces, chopping roughly. Remove the zest of the lemon in long strips with a peeler, and place with the quinces and vanilla bean in a large pot. Pour over enough water to just cover the fruit, and bring to a boil.  Cover the pot, lower the heat to a simmer, and cook until the fruit is tender, around 45 minutes.  Remove the vanilla bean, but don’t worry about the lemon strips.

Drain the quinces and puree in a food processor or with an immersion blender until smooth, or run them through a food mill if you have one. Measure into a large pan, adding 1 cup sugar for every 1 1/4 cups puree.

Heat on low, stirring, until sugar dissolves, then add the juice of the lemon.  Increase the heat just enough to barely sustain a simmer (more of a blorp, really) and cook for 60-90 minutes, stirring frequently, until very thick and salmon-colored.  If you find that you’re getting a lot of splatter, you can lay two chopsticks or wooden spoons across the top of the pot and setting a lid loosely over it, which should help minimize the mess while leaving room for evaporation.

Spoon the finished jam into clean, sterilized jars.  At this point, you can heat-seal the jars for shelf stability, or simply refrigerate them.

To set as dulce de membrillo, pour into a small, shallow, parchment-lined pan and leave in an oven at the lowest setting for 1-2 hours, or as long as it takes to solidify all the way through. Cut into squares, dust with granulated sugar and store in an covered container in the refrigerator.

Notes:

Should you not be so fortunate as to find quite this many cheap quinces, the recipe can be scaled according to however many you do have.

If you’re not in a rush and want to cut back on the stirring, you can cook down the puree in your slow cooker over several hours, or even overnight.  If His Lordship hadn’t already been using the slow cooker for a pork roast, I would have done so, in order to free up the big stock pot for dinner prep.

Don’t throw away the vanilla bean after you’ve fished it out; dry it and bury it in a container of sugar to scent the sugar, or if you’re feeling really ambitious, make your own vanilla extract by covering it in vodka — or better yet, bourbon — in a small glass bottle.

New Year, New Lentil Recipe

I no more hold with New Year’s resolutions than I do with the stupid, pointless holiday itself, but I do find myself wanting to eat slightly healthier this time of year purely out of fat and sugar fatigue.  The impulse will wear off by the next major holiday (either my birthday or Chinese New Year, depending on the year), I assure you.

Until then, this is one of my favorite dinners, just right for these post-holiday, undo-the-damage, back-to-work busy days. Lentils are healthy and frugal, so if you are the sort who makes resolutions about either diet or finances, this fits both bills. If you’re also of a superstitious bent, Italians eat lentils in order to attract prosperity in the new year, and since all the economic signs point to a crappy 2009, it might not hurt to try observing the tradition.

This is a lazy modification of mujaddarah, a lentil, rice and caramelized onion dish found around the Levant. To save time, and also because I utterly adore and completely depend on it, I cook the rice separately in the rice cooker while I make the lentils and onions on the stove, then I mix the two together in roughly equal proportions.  Doing it this way also means that any extra rice is plain and therefore suitable for other uses — say, rice pudding, if your holiday crapulence recovery time is quicker than mine.

This is a wonderfully satisfying main course with or without the optional garnish of hard boiled eggs, and it also makes a great side dish for a simply roasted chicken, fish, or other protein if you’re not a vegetarian.

Cheater’s Mujaddarah
Serves 4 as a main dish, or 6 as a side dish

2 cups basmati rice
3 whole allspice berries
1 cup lentils, preferably green or black
2 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled
1 large bay leaf
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 large onions or 4-6 large shallots, sliced as thinly as possible
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1-2 teaspoons soy sauce
Salt and pepper to taste
Hard boiled eggs for garnish (optional)

Cook the rice with several pinches of salt and the allspice berries in a rice cooker or on the stove, as you prefer.

Combine the lentils with the garlic and bay leaf in a medium pot. Cover with water, bring to a boil.  Reduce heat to a vigorous simmer and cook until tender, 20-30 minutes.  Remove the garlic and bay leaf but do not drain, since the lentil liquid will be used for flavoring and moistening the rice later.

In a large skillet, cook the onions in the olive oil over medium-high heat until completely browned and beginning to crisp at the edges.  Set aside a few tablespoons of onions for garnishing the final dish, and add the ground allspice to the remainder.  Deglaze the pan with 1 to 1 1/2 cups of the lentil cooking liquid, then drain the lentils and add to the pan with 1 teaspoon of soy sauce and several grinds of pepper.

Turn off the heat and stir in half to all of the rice, depending on your prefered proportions.  Add additional soy and/or pepper to taste.

Serve topped with the reserved onions and quartered hard boiled eggs, if desired.

Notes:

Soy is not at all customary in this dish, but it adds depths of flavor salt alone does not, and compensates for the fact that the lentils and rice didn’t cook together.

No matter how many onions I caramelize for this dish, it never seems like too much, so if you’d like to up the quantity, you have my wholehearted blessing.  Red onions or shallots will produce an even sweeter, darker garnish, but plain old yellow onions work fine.

If you want to be exhaustively virtuous, you could use brown rice in place of the basmati.

A Few of My Favorite Things

I am, as you might have guessed, not much of a moderate person. What I love, I love with consuming passion, and what I hate, I loathe.

In the latter category is New Year’s Eve, concerning which I’ve made my views amply clear.  And no, I haven’t changed my mind.  There’s not enough sparkly alcoholic beverage in the universe to quiet my inner grinch on this or any other December 31st.

Conversely, among the objects of an affection so unrestrained that any other day of the year they’ll put me in a near-narcotic state of bliss are rosemary, and Meyer lemons.  Rosemary I adore so shamelessly that I’ll fondle any rosemary shrub that crosses my path, running my fingers along the aromatic spikes to perfume my hands.  When they started marketing those tree-shaped topiaries, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.  If they made them big enough to use as actual Christmas trees, I would fork over however much money it would take to bring one home, and damn His Lordship’s anti-decorating bah humbuggery. As for Meyers, I still weep over the dwarf tree I had to leave behind with my father-in-law when we moved east, and my heart rejoiced at being briefly reunited with it on Christmas Day and receiving the two little fruits of this season.

Loving, as I do, not wisely but too well, I bought an unadvisable quantity of both this past weekend at one of my very favorite places on earth: the San Francisco Ferry Terminal farmer’s market.  I did manage to restrict myself to two very large bunches of fresh, organic rosemary, but you do not even want to know how much I blew on exotic citrus.  Let’s just say that if it were Schedule II drugs, I’d be in very big trouble with the feds.

So now I’m sitting on a stockpile of lemons and herbs and I’d better start doing something to use or preserve them before all that money and giddiness shrivel up and rot.  I’ve previously paired these two mood-lifting ingredients in an improbable but delectable cookie form, but frankly, I’m cookied out at this point, and I suspect you might be too.

Inspired by another market offering I found intriguing, I’ve decided to experiment with flavored salt instead.  The original product I tried was a lavender salt, and although I quite like lavender, it is nothing like my idolatry of its tiny-blue-flowered cousin.  I googled a few recipes for flavored salt, just to make sure I wasn’t going to risk botulism or anything, and then forged ahead with reckless abandon.  I am already enchanted with the sunny yellow and green glimmer of it in its jars.  I hope that, after a bit of a courtship period, the mature salt will capture and hold fast everything I love about the resinous, powerful punch of rosemary and the otherworldly fragrance of the lemons, and will remind me of home every time I sprinkle it on salad greens or simply-prepared vegetables or oil-drenched bread.

While I was feeling industrious, I also made Meyer-scented sugar, rosemary-scented sugar, and two little jars of preserved lemons.  If any or all of my other endeavors pan out, I’ll be sure to gloat report about it.

Meyer Lemon-Rosemary Salt
Makes slightly over 2 cups

2 cups kosher or coarse sea salt
6-8 large sprigs of rosemary, washed and dried
3 large Meyer lemons, preferably organic, washed and dried

Place the salt in the bowl of a food processor.  Pull the leaves off the rosemary and zest the lemons, and add both to the salt.  Pulse until the rosemary and zest have been minced finely but not pulverized.

Transfer to clean jars with tight-fitting lids.  Give jars away if you’re of a generous spirit, or hoard like a greedy dragon if you’re not.

Notes:

You could use regular lemons if you can’t find Meyers, but if you’d like to try the cheat I’ve used to try to evoke some of their magic, supplement the regular lemons with the zest of one or two mandarin oranges.

More Holiday Cookies

This is the gingerbread recipe I’ve been making since I can’t even remember when, probably college or just after.  Its origin is in a long-gone December issue of Vegetarian Times, but I’ve made so many changes along the way that at this point I think it’s fair to call it mine.

Although there are a lot of spices, the quantities are such that these are just nicely spicy instead of obnoxious.  The addition of the orange zest and ground almonds further mellows things out and sets them a step above your average gingerbread people.

The dough is supple and easy to roll and decorate, if you’re so inclined, but it makes perfectly good plain slice-and-bake cookies as well.  It also freezes beautifully and makes a ton, so if you’d like to stockpile for later use, it’s a great choice.

Hurry Up and Wait

I’m starting to suspect I’m the winter equivalent of Typhoid Mary.  All too often have I moved somewhere and it’s suddenly weather they haven’t seen in over a decade, and I regret to say it’s happened again.  Sorry, Pacific Northwest.

Part of me opens the door to the whole three inches out there and wants to laugh uproariously, since this feeble dusting is not enough to cause so much as a hiccup back east. The rest of me is in a snit because here it’s enough to cripple the infrastructure and set off paroxysms of “We’re all gonna die!” hysterics, and His Lordship, the monster and I need to hit the road tomorrow to spend the holidays down south with our families.  Someone is damn well going to pay if we’re socked in until Monday, I assure you.

I’m also cranky because I actually managed to get organized enough this year to finish up all the cookie baking and card writing, and I can’t get to the post office to mail a single item.  The one year I was planning on not taking advantage of the loosest possible definition of the holiday timetable (I’ve been known to temporarily adopt the Russian Orthodox calendar when necessary), and all my good intentions go to waste.  Sorry, Secret Santa giftees, you’re going to have to wait a little longer.

Their loss is your gain, though, since I have nothing to do but blog and pack, probably in vain.  It may ruin the surprise for my giftees, but I’ll share this year’s holiday cookie selection a little early in case anyone’s looking for some inspiration.  Each one is an easy and great last-minute entertaining choice if you’re not already committed to a lineup.  As I said, I know people get touchy about holiday food, so if you absolutely must make Grandma’s pfeffernusse, I totally understand.

More North and South Stories

Cranberry-Quince Pastafrola

Thanks to multiple rounds of entertaining over the Thanksgiving, I only had about a cup of cranberry sauce left this time around. This was just the right quantity to allow me to write a tidy little epilogue to my American story about the melding of my Southern Hemisphere roots, my New England sojourn, and all the years between and since.

As I’ve mentioned before, pastafrola is a typically Argentine afternoon snack and casual dessert, somewhere between a tart and a bar cookie.  It’s composed of a thick layer of quince preserves (membrillo), sandwiched between layers of a slightly eggy pastry used extensively in Italian baking, pasta frolla, whence the name.  If you’d like to see what the real deal looks like, Pip’s and Katy’s are legit.

This, my friends, is not legit, but it’s closer than the bastard cousin deconstructed version I made during my pre-move pantry clearing efforts.  I’d like to think that if my grandmother ever had transplanted to Boston, she would have come up with a cranberry version like this. I rather suspect my mom would approve, too, since she disfavors highly sugary desserts.

I’m not perfectly content with the pastry here, since it was a little bit more biscuity and puffy than it really needed to be, but I do love how the tartness of the cranberries tones down the sweetness of the quince and pear and richness of the pastry, to say nothing of adding a seasonally-appropriate red sparkle.  I’ll definitely be engaging in further experimentation with the Christmas batch of cranberry sauce.

You Can Go Your Own Way

People tend to get touchy about any foods deeply tied to holiday tradition, and the humble cranberry sauce is no exception.  What seems like a simple matter of fruit and sugar has the potential to set off firestorms of difference of opinion.

My mother, for example, is a purist.  She insists on the absolute bare basics: berries, sugar, orange juice.  That’s it; no spices, no weird additions, and do not even think about chutney-izing it.  His Lordship is a fan of the congealed kind that plops out of a can in one tubular, sliceable mass — much to my initial horror, although I’ve since come to accept that we all have our food quirks and you can’t fight them.  You, for all I know, might be of the cabernet and cloves persuasion, or one of those people who blitzes raw berries and whole oranges in the food processor to create a salsa, and that’s okay too.

Me, I’m of a kitchen-sink bent.  I have been known to do all manner of messing with my Thanksgiving condimentation.  For a few years, I was determined to figure out exactly how much of my spice cabinet I could cram into there. (In case you’re curious, allspice and cranberries get along quite nicely together).  Since then, the mania has dampened and I’ve settled on a variant that is neither Mom-simple nor out-of-control wacky, one that is bright and interesting and seasonal and undoubtedly mine.

More than that, it’s me.  In this one ruby concoction is a snapshot of who I am.  Each component offers a fragment of my story and a hint about my experiences and my tastes:  cranberries for the bog obsession I developed in my New England years and quinces for my childhood, orange for my citrus addiction, ginger for all the Asian influences in my California upbringing and adult life, and vanilla bean for my food snobbery.  It all works together and, unlike my earlier spicy pyrotechnics, won’t clash with your turkey.  It’s also versatile enough to spoon over ice cream or use in my favorite post-Thanksgiving leftover application: grilled cheese sandwiches with cranberry sauce.

You’re welcome to try my story, or stick with your own.  Either way, I wish you a rich and vibrant start to your holiday season.

(Unless you’re Canadian, in which case keep up the good work!)

Cranberry Sauce with Quince, Pear and Vanilla
Makes 4 cups

One 12-ounce bag cranberries
2 fresh quinces, peeled, cored and diced OR 1/2 cup quince jam
2 ripe pears, peeled, cored and diced
1 cup granulated sugar
Grated zest of one orange
Juice of one orange, plus enough water to make 1 cup
1 pinkie-sized knob of ginger, grated (approximately 2 teaspoons)
1/2 vanilla bean, split
Pinch of salt

Pick over the cranberries and remove any squishy ones.

If using quince jam, set aside for later addition.  Combine all (remaining) ingredients in a saucepan.

Bring to a boil, then lower heat and simmer until the cranberries have popped and the quinces and pears are tender.  Remove from heat and let cool. If using quince jam, stir into the sauce as soon as it comes off the heat.

Cover and refrigerate or freeze until needed.

Notes:

Dumping the cranberries into a large bowl of cold water will help you sort them, since the really squishy ones will sink to the bottom while the good or mostly-good ones will float on the surface.  I then scoop small handfuls of the floating berries and run them between my fingers to catch the partially-squishy ones.

If you can find fresh quinces, they are absolutely worth buying, but some waste is inevitable because of the toughness of the peel and core.  If necessary, use a paring knife instead of a peeler, and slice as close as you can to the core without cutting into it to get as much of the fruit as possible.

If you can’t find fresh quinces, quince jam or paste can frequently be found at Latin American, Indian, Pakistani, Greek and Middle Eastern groceries.

Since this makes a large amount of sauce and we’re a small household even with holiday guests, I usually freeze half the batch for Christmas.  It will keep perfectly well for even longer than that month in the freezer, and that’s one less thing to do when you’re up to your eyeballs in holiday cookie baking and gift wrapping.

And So It Begins

Well, that didn’t take long.  Despite my good intentions, despite the fact that it’s only been two months, and more importantly, despite my student budget, I bought another cookbook.

Oh, I could protest that it was just a lucky find on the bargain table (always a bane to my willpower), that I’ll stop after just this one more, but we all know that’s classic junkie denial, don’t we?  I’ll do it again. I won’t even feel guilty about it until we’re packing to move back, and then I’ll curse the weight and the extra shipping expense.

Although hey, it’s not just a cookbook.  It’s Sally Schneider’s cool treatise on how to improvise in the kitchen, in which she gives basic recipes and shows how she plays with variations to come up with new and creative dishes.  This is already an approach I’ve been trying to take since making the decision a while ago to be less recipe-bound, but with its pretty pictures and enthusiastic narrative, this book is a great source of fresh inspiration.

Riffing on her basic recipe for brown sugar butter cookies produced a sophisticated and pretty shortbread flavored with lemon and speckles of black tea.  One of the suggested variations used Earl Gray tea, which I actually loathe despite my usual love of citrus in all forms.  Since I liked the idea of fusing my tea and cookies, I put together my own lemony blend and made a few other changes.  The new all-me shortbread has a great up-front citrus hit followed by a low note of smoky floral tea, wrapped in a buttery, crumbly matrix.  They’re perfect for a rainy afternoon snack with more tea or, if you feel like mixing your metaphors, a cup of cocoa.  I’ll definitely be trying this again, since I’m now tempted to try darjeeling and spices for a chai feel.

Lemon Black Tea Shortbread
Makes 3 dozen bite-sized cookies
(Adapted from Sally Schneider’s The Improvisational Cook)

1/2 cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter, cut into 16 pieces
3 tablespoons packed light brown sugar
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon Penzeys dried orange peel, rehydrated in just enough boiling water to cover
Grated zest of one large lemon
Contents of 2 premium black tea bags (approximately 2 teaspoons)
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons cornstarch
Raw sugar for coating

In a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat together the butter, sugars and salt until fluffy.  Beat in the vanilla, orange peel, lemon zest and tea.

Whisk together the flour and cornstarch, and add to the sugar mixture in the mixer.  Stir on low speed until just clumping into a ball, then dump out onto a sheet of parchment paper and shape into a long log 1 1/2 to 2 inches in diameter.  Wrap the log tightly in the parchment and then in plastic wrap.  Refrigerate until firm, at least 1 hour.

Preheat oven to 325 F.  Line baking sheets with additional parchment.

Slice the log into 1/8 inch slices.  Roll the edges in the raw sugar to coat, and set the slices on the baking sheets 1 1/2 inches apart.  Bake until golden in the middle and just browning along the edges, approximately 18 minutes.  Remove to a rack to cool.

Like all shortbread, these will keep for days or even weeks in an airtight container, should you have the willpower to keep your hands off.

Notes:

These are two-bite cookies, just right to rest on a saucer.  You could make the log fatter if you would like fewer but bigger cookies.

Since I’m a citrus freak, next time I would increase the amount of lemon zest, but these are plenty lemony as is if you’re not as crazed as I am.