Do I Repeat Myself?

Very well then, I repeat myself.

I just love the combination of rosemary and lemon so much that I never get sick of it. I’ve done it in shortbread, which is sublime; I’ve done it in flavored salt, which is handy; and now I’ve done it in these semolina cookies, which are humble and unassuming. They’re all different and they’re all good, so I don’t see a particular need to make apologies for a little bit of a recurring theme.

I bought the semolina some weeks back with the intention of using it in bread, since I’ve been doing more bread baking. Late last week, though, I had an urge to come up with a sweet application for semolina, and I specifically wanted a not-too-sweet, toothy cookie to make a change from the very sweet and decadent cookies I took to the office the past two Mondays. Surprisingly enough, there’s a dearth of semolina-based cookies in my ridiculous cookbook collection, and nothing I found online quite fit the bill, so I decided to adapt a recipe for a polenta-based cookie from Babbo instead.

Unlike my shortbread recipe, which has neon-bright lemon and rosemary flavor, these have just a charming hint, embedded in a tender cookie with just a bit of gritty edge. They’re perfect with an afternoon cup of tea, or if you want to be really Italian about it, with a glass of wine.

Semolina Cookies with Lemon and Rosemary
(Adapted from Polenta Shortbread in Mario Batali’s The Babbo Cookbook)
Makes approximately 4 dozen cookies

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup semolina
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1 whole egg plus 1 yolk
Zest of one lemon
1 large sprig fresh rosemary, minced (around 2 teaspoons)

Additional granulated sugar for rolling

Combine the flour, semolina, sugar, baking powder and salt in the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Run the mixer briefly to stir the dry ingredients together.

Sir the egg and yolk, lemon zest and rosemary into the butter. Pour the mixture over the dry ingredients and run the mixer until a crumbly dough forms. Spoon the dough into a zip-top bag and chill for at least an hour.

Preheat the oven to 325F and line multiple baking sheets with parchment paper. Pour a good amount of sugar into a shallow dish.

Scoop out tablespoons of the dough and roll into balls the size of unshelled hazelnuts. (You may have to squish and pinch a bit to get the dough to hold together.) Roll the balls of dough in the sugar until well-coated, place on the lined sheets, and use the bottom of a glass to press into cookies 1/4 inch thick. Sprinkle the tops with additional sugar.

Bake the cookies until firm and turning golden around the edges, approximately 12-15 minutes. Cool on the sheets briefly, then move to a rack to finish cooling. Store in airtight containers to maintain crispness.

Notes:

You could leave out either the lemon or the rosemary or both if they’re not to your liking. Lime or orange zest, or a combination of the two, would be quite nice. Crushed anise seeds would also be good.

If you don’t have semolina on hand, you could substitute quick-cooking polenta, as in the original recipe, or finely ground cornmeal.

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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.

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Holiday Cookie Blogging, Part I

I’m in the middle of the holiday cookie baking frenzy, having already made three kinds of cookies in the past week. One was an experimental batch to use the snowflake cookie cutters I bought in a holiday-induced bout of temporary insanity which made me forget that I have insufficient patience for cookie cutter cookies. The other two are going to be mailed out as holiday gifts, so I’m not going to post the recipe yet, so as not to spoil the surprise.

In the meantime, there has been some demand for the recipe for the cookies I sent out last year, an almost laughably Californified but still addictively yummy shortbread that combined two wonderful flavors abundantly found in California gardens: rosemary, which grows like kudzu and is used as cheap ground cover, and Meyer lemons, which are intoxicatingly floral and aromatic, but often difficult and expensive to find if you don’t grow them yourself. Since I had to leave my beloved Meyer tree behind (along with my kaffir lime, which I miss nearly as much) when we switched coasts, I have to make do by mixing some orange zest in with ordinary lemon zest, which evokes some of the same magic and is far better than lemon zest alone.

Rosemary-Meyer Lemon Shortbread
Makes about 4 dozen

1 1/2 cups butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons very finely chopped fresh rosemary
3 tablespoons freshly grated Meyer lemon zest (or 2 tablespoons regular lemon zest and 1 tablespoon orange zest)
2 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon salt

Cream together the butter, sugar, rosemary and zest in a mixer until very light and fluffy. Add the dry ingredients and mix until incorporated, taking care not to over-mix, which would make the cookies tough.

Divide the dough into two equal blocks, wrap tightly in plastic wrap, and refrigerate until firm, at least 1-2 hours.

Preheat the oven to 325.

On a lightly floured surface, roll out each block to a thickness of 1/4 inch. Cut the dough, using square or round fluted-edged cookie cutters approximately 2 inches across, and place the cookies on parchment-lined cookie sheets. Place the cookie sheets in the freezer or refrigerator briefly to firm and cool the dough again and avoid spreading in the oven.

Bake in the center of the oven for 12-14 minutes, or until pale gold but not browned. Let the cookies cool on the sheets for 5 minutes, then transfer to a rack to cool completely.

Notes: The amounts of rosemary and zest can be varied according to your tastes. I wouldn’t add much more of the rosemary, but you can decrease it at will, and you can also increase the amount of zest if you prefer even more lemony cookies. Also, you can gather the scraps after the first cutting and roll out another batch, although the quality will decrease a bit from the first. They will still taste lovely, but the texture won’t be quite as meltingly delicate.

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