A Slightly Different Take on Holiday Goodies

Every year, I participate in a Secret Santa exchange. Every year before this one, I have sent my giftee whichever cookies are in that year’s repertoire, but this year there was a hitch: I drew a giftee who can’t have sweets.

What to do? Simple enough: switch to crackers. I hadn’t made them before because I’ve always considered crackers to be a quick convenience, to be bought for having with cheese or butter and jam when a full meal isn’t called for. With cookie energy that needed repurposing, though, I went scavenging through my cookbooks for non-sugary equivalents that would demonstrate the same degree of care and cheer that I’d like to think my holiday cookies show. Knowing that the recipient likes cheese, I concentrated my search on cheese crackers, and got exceptionally lucky on the very first go.

Now, I will grant you that these cheddar crackers, spiked with chipotle and given extra depth with some whole wheat flour, don’t look all that exciting. The first one or two may not even seem very exciting. Tasty, crispy, and finally a little bit zippy, yes, but exciting? Except…

Except that you will rapidly find yourself compulsively popping one after another until half the batch is gone, because the heat is seductively cumulative and the crunch is thoroughly addictive. If you’re looking for snacks to go along with your New Year’s Eve cocktails, you can’t go wrong with this grown-up version of the goldfish crackers children devour with similarly insatiable greed.

I’m delighted the challenge could be met so easily. I think these crackers are every bit as special as a holiday cookie, and I’m pleased to report that my Secret Santa giftee thought so too!

Spicy Cheddar Crackers
(Adapted from Cheddar Cheese Crackers in Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads)
Makes around four dozen teeny nibbles

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
1/4 teaspoon salt, plus extra for sprinkling
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon chipotle chile powder
1 1/2 ounces very sharp Cheddar cheese, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons boiling water
1/2 teaspoon molasses
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
Additional room-temperature water as needed

Whisk together all the dry ingredients until the chipotle is evenly distributed, then place in the bowl of a food processor. Add the cheese cubes and pulse until finely ground.

Stir the boiling water, molasses and butter together in a glass measuring cup until the butter has melted. With the processor running, pour the mixture through the feed tube. If the dough doesn’t come together, add more water, a tablespoon at a time. Once the dough forms a ball, process for an additional 20 seconds to knead. Tip the ball onto a sheet of plastic wrap, form into a flat disk, and refrigerate at least 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 400F and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Divide dough into four equal pieces. Leaving the other three wrapped while you work, shape the first piece into a cylinder and then flatten it out on a work surface. Roll out to a rectangle 14-18 inches long and around 6 inches wide, and 1/16 inch thick. Fold into thirds, turn a quarter-turn, and roll back out to a rectangle 1/16 inch thick. Transfer to one-half of one of the prepared baking sheets, and repeat the process with a second piece of dough, setting it on the sheet beside the first.

Dock each sheet of dough thoroughly with a fork, then use a pizza cutter or sharp knife to trim any scraggly edges in order to get a neat rectangle. Cut each sheet lengthwise into quarters, then divide each crosswise into an even number of small inch-long squares or rectangles. Sprinkle with the additional salt.

Bake until well browned and crisp, 10-12 minutes depending on the thickness of the dough. Place the sheet on a rack and cool completely. Repeat with the final two pieces of dough.

The crackers will theoretically stay fresh for weeks in an airtight container, but I really wouldn’t plan on them lasting out a single week.

Notes:

It occurred to me as I was rolling out the third of the four pieces that this dough is more than resilient enough to stand up to the pasta machine, which would make the rolling out much, much faster.

Should you be so inspired, you could find tiny little fish-shaped cookie cutters and make your very own goldfish for grown-ups.

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Psst! Wanna Know a Secret?

About a year ago, I finally cracked the elusive secret to His Lordship’s favorite cookies, the honey, apricot and pecan ones I blogged about a few years before that. At the time, I was celebrating the fact that I was just this-close to perfection, but frankly, that last little inch of close-but-no-cigar continued to drive me insane for quite some time after.

It turns out that I was just one tiny tweak away from the goal, one change so simple it was practically staring me in the face every time I opened the cupboard. The solution was so obvious yet so cunning that I felt both dense and smug when I tried it and it worked.

Ready? Here it is:

That’s right, bread flour. All the cookies needed were a tiny bit more structure, and using a slightly higher-protein flour was all it took to achieve it. No fiddling with the formula, no experiments with adding more flour in tiny increments, just one simple substitution. With that one change, I stopped the spreading and eliminated the need for all that guesswork about exactly when to take them out of the oven. I got all the puff, body and reliability I’d been after all along, and they received His Lordship’s full, effusive, grinning stamp of approval.

I know some might be looking at this recipe and thinking, “Yeah, sure, those sound yummy enough, but they can’t really be special enough for the holidays. And are they really THAT good?”

To that I say it may be difficult to believe given the absence of chocolate, but more than one person has informed me that these are the best cookies in the world. They’re intensely butterscotchy, sweetly multidimensional thanks to the honey, and simultaneously chewy, crispy, fruity and nutty. It’s all the kinds of decadence you’d expect from a holiday cookie, with the bonus of being low-effort enough to make throughout the whole year to come.

You’ll just have to make a batch to see whether you too think these are the best in the world, but even if you ultimately decide another cookie holds first place in your heart, I promise you won’t be sorry to have this one in your repertoire.

Honey Apricot Pecan Cookies, Perfected
Makes 5-6 dozen

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter
1/4 cup honey
1 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups bread flour
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
2 cups pecans, coarsely chopped
2 cups dried apricots, coarsely chopped

Melt the butter and place it and the honey in the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Allow the mixture to cool slightly. In the meantime, whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt and set aside.

Once the butter is at room temperature, add the granulated sugar, egg, and vanilla, and mix well. Add the dry ingredients and stir on low until barely blended, then mix in the pecans and apricots. Cover the bowl and chill thoroughly, preferably overnight.

Preheat the oven to 350 F, and line several baking sheets with parchment paper.

Scoop out the dough with a tablespoon-sized scoop and place two inches apart on the sheets. Bake 10-12 minutes, until golden brown in the middle and a bit darker at the edges. Cool the cookies on their sheets until they’ve firmed up, then slide them onto a rack with their parchment to finish cooling.

Notes:

I made twice this amount this time, because I was snowed into the house and had nothing better to do all day, so I’ll be mailing some out as well as taking them into the office. Apart from losing a few bits of pecan and apricot out the top of the nearly-too-full mixing bowl, it worked perfectly, so feel free to scale up.

Don’t be tempted to skip the refrigeration step, though. The resting period is important for hydrating the flour and developing the full magnificence of the dough, as I’ve pointed out before. You can also scoop out the dough, pop it into bags, and freeze it to have cookies on demand.

The bread flour does an excellent job of firming up the cookie dough, but the dough should still not be allowed to get too warm.  It wouldn’t hurt to put the mixing bowl back in the fridge while waiting for a tray to come out of the oven.

The now-defunct bakery that inspired this cookie also had a variation with dried cranberries and walnuts instead of apricot and pecan. I imagine you could split the batch in half just after mixing in the dry ingredients, and get twice the festive punch out of one dough.

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Easter Pie for Christmas

In keeping with my not-quite-there-yet attitude toward the holidays this year, there is one food that I’ve been craving since my little outburst of decorating two weekends ago. As it happens, it’s a holiday food, yes — but the wrong holiday.

This savory pie filled with spinach, ricotta and parmesan and seasoned with nutmeg is not traditionally a Christmas food. It’s an Easter food, which is why the Italian name for it, Torta Pasqualina, means “Easter Pie”. When I was growing up, we did have it for Easter, but I loved it so much that my mother could be persuaded to make it at other times of the year, and now that I’m a grown-up, I can make it for myself at Christmastime if I want to.

The catch is that it had been so long since I’d watched Mom make it that I pretty much forgot how, and would you believe that scouring through every single Italian cookbook I have, including the supposed bible of Italian cooking, did not turn up a recipe quite like what I was looking for? Oh, there were plenty of pies made with ricotta and greens, but either the dough was wrong (puff pastry? I don’t think so. Sweet pastafrolla? Even worse!) or the filling wasn’t right (prosciutto is definitely out and chard is nice but not what I was looking for here).

In the end, I had to do a lot of remixing, combining of elements, and filling in my own blanks to come up with a recipe closer to what I remembered. It’s not quite 100% there, and I will probably have to consult with Mom to figure out where the ratios were a little off, but it’s really darn close.

If you’ve never had this pie, imagine something a little like Greek spanikopita, except milder and eggier and denser. At least for me, it’s an incredibly comforting flavor, plus it’s green! Green is Christmassy, right? It’s also better cold than fresh out of the oven and will keep for days in the fridge, which makes it an excellent option if you want to make it ahead and devote most of your holiday cooking energy to fussy rolled-out cookies or wassail or what have you.

Torta Pasqualina, or Italian Spinach and Ricotta Pie
Serves 8-10

For pastry:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick) salted butter, cut into 32 pieces
4 tablespoons non-hydrogenated vegetable shortening
3 large eggs
1 tablespoon water

For filling:
2 12-ounce bags frozen spinach
1 16-ounce container part-skim ricotta cheese
1 cup grated Parmigiano Reggiano
2 teaspoons each salt and freshly ground pepper
1 teaspoon grated nutmeg
4 large eggs, beaten

Place the butter and shortening in the freezer for 10-15 minutes to chill thoroughly.

Place dry ingredients in the food processor bowl and pulse several times to combine. Add the butter and shortening and pulse again until sandy, 12-15 times. Beat the water into the eggs and add to the processor, and process until the dough starts to form a ball around the blade. Divide the dough into two pieces, one comprising two-thirds of the dough. Form each piece into a flat disk, wrap tightly with plastic wrap, and refrigerate at least 1 hour.

Defrost the spinach in the microwave, then squeeze bone-dry in a colander or a dish towel. Place in a large bowl and stir in the cheeses, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Taste the filling and correct the seasonings as necessary; it should be slightly over-seasoned since it will be eaten cold. Stir in the eggs. Set aside.

Set the rack at the lower-middle position and heat oven to 350F.

Roll the larger piece of dough into a circle large enough to line a 9-inch springform pan. Tuck the pastry into the pan, letting the excess hang over the sides. Spread the filling onto the pastry, leveling and smoothing the top. Roll out the second piece of dough and set over the filling. Trim the excess, tuck the edges under, and crimp. Cut an X in the center and pull back the corners to leave a vent for the filling as it cooks.

Bake the pie for 60-70 minutes, until the pastry is golden-brown and the filling that peeks through the opening in the crust looks dry and set. Cool completely before eating, and refrigerate any leftovers.

Notes:

I used salted butter because I’m hoarding the unsalted for holiday cookie baking, but if you only have unsalted around, add 1 teaspoon salt to the dry ingredients.

Using lower-fat ricotta is not only fine but even preferable here, since the full-fat kind can make this unpleasantly rich in combination with the eggy pastry.

Many versions of this pie crack additional whole eggs into the filling, which bake to a hard-boiled consistency and make for a pretty presentation when the pie is cut open. If you want to try this, use a big soup spoon to create 4-5 evenly-spaced deep indentations in the filling once you’ve spread it inside the pastry, and carefully crack an egg into each well. Cover the pie with the second layer of pastry and proceed as instructed.

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The Holiday Madness is Upon Us

For a variety of reasons too personal and too mundane to relate, I have had a harder time this year summoning up any holiday spirit. I’m not quite bah-humbugging, but I’ve been decidedly meh about the post-Halloween happenings, and I’m actively participating this time in His Lordship’s annual anti-giftgiving and no-carols grinchery.

That said, something, however limited, did finally awaken over the weekend, because I stayed up on Saturday night turning the overpriced and underwhelming quinces I bought at Thanksgiving into jam, complete with sterilized jars and heat-sealing. I also brought our one box of holiday decorations up from the basement and threw together a minimalist arrangement of blue, silver and white ornaments in our front window, and filled a few vases and bowls full of the remaining ornaments and scattered them around the house.

I can probably attribute it to the fact that we had our first snowfall on Saturday — to be more precise, it was our first encounter with the evil and invasive form of precipitation known as “wintry mix”. The finger-numbing cold and the dusting of white on the ground, however momentary, were enough to flip the switch. I’m also not discounting the effects of peer pressure, since a third of the residents of our very small block had already gone Full Metal Christmas by the time we left the house on Black Friday to catch a noon matinee, and we’re at over half the block lit up and garlanded a week later.

Whatever combination of factors it was, I can’t deny that it’s really and truly happened, because I followed the jam-making and decorating spurt by getting up Sunday morning and kicking off the cookie baking, and I didn’t do it by halves, either. I came up with the most insanely ambitious use I possibly could for the leftover egg whites that had been sitting in my fridge for a week, making my first-ever attempt at a cookie that came out of nowhere a few years back and rapidly become so common on food blogs that it’s practically played out. I speak, of course, of the macaron.

I imagine at least a few people will be shocked to learn that I had never had a macaron before. It is, in fact, possible for me to miss a food fad, although I smugly pride myself on having been-there-done-that with quite a number of things years and even decades ago that people are now acting like they invented, like dulce de leche, Mexican Coca-Cola, Peking duck, panettone, and salads made of fresh fennel, whole milk mozzarella, and/or roasted beets. (Along with the exponentially amplified teen angst and the unrelieved sense of never quite belonging anywhere, there are some advantages to growing up in a peripatetic immigrant household.)

This fad, though, I let totally pass me by. In part this is because my obsession with madeleines has always been too all-consuming to permit any French cookie rivals. The love affair began in Proustian manner when I chose one in a mid-afternoon cafe stop during my first visit to Paris when I was 14, and no tuile or sable has ever been able to turn my head since. I still mourn the loss of the one bakery I ever found in the U.S. that could produce a truly acceptable madeleine, which His Lordship used to bring me during my grad school exams, making regular expeditions for these much-needed fortifications in beribboned cellophane bags. Besides my madeleine monogamy, I also disdained macarons because they seemed like too much bother for not enough payoff, and since I never had one during any of my visits to France, I would have no baseline to tell whether I had succeeded or not.

However. I had this bowlful of egg whites that had been sitting in the fridge since their corresponding yolks had gone into Thanksgiving leftovers quiches, and I had an unexpected burst of energy. I could have wussed out and made plain old macaroons, or even my beloved cacao nib amaretti, but instead my crazy holiday brain said, “Hey, why not finally try macarons?” There was no one to act as the voice of reason, so I charged forward.

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