Month: December 2022

Cooking With Christie! Sour Cream Lemon Cookies

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Inspiration: Thanks to a sale on lemons a few weeks back, our fridge’s fruit drawer overflowed with this citrus staple, which is all well and good until you need to start using them up! So with that in mind, I made one of my husband’s all-time faves — Lemon Sour Cream Cookies.

With a subtle tang from the sour cream and an acidic hit of the lemons, this recipe is excellent. This particular one comes from America’s Test Kitchen’s The Perfect Cookie cookbook. (If you like making cookies, this book is well worth the money as I’ve never had a recipe of theirs fail — despite my best efforts. And no this is not a sponsored post, I just love this book.)

And I didn’t tweak a single thing!

Christie: These aren’t fancy cookies per se, but if the icing was piped on with care or sprinkles added on artfully, I can see Poirot indulging in one or two of these cookies as they aren’t overly sweet, and the sour cream is just unusual enough to make them interesting!

True Crime Book Review!

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Quackery: A Brief History Of The Worst Ways To Cure Everything

by Lydia Kang, M.D. & Nate Pedersen

Ever wondered where the saying ‘blowing smoke up your a**’ came from? Or the origins of the insulting nickname ‘Snake Oil Salesman’? Or perhaps you wondered about the healing properties of melted human fat, ground-up mummies, and moss cultivated on human skulls. If you did, I’ve found the book for you!

Macabre without being gross. Irreverent without being disrespectful. Filled with all kinds of cures, one ardently wishes the medical community never thought to prescribe to anyone ever. Quackery is a riveting read.

Even better, the book is sensibly and well-organized. So if you ever want to find a brief and horrifying history of lobotomies or the terrible fate of Rosemary Kennedy — you can do so in seconds.

Admittedly, Quackery only gives brief accounts of the world’s worst cures. However, the authors do an excellent job filling each section with rich detail and salient facts. So should you ever want to learn more about, say, the Bureau of Cosmotherapy, you possess more than enough information to do so.’

Quackery also exponentially increases empathy for those who got sick in centuries past and those with epilepsy. (The “cures” for this neurological disorder were particularly dodgy. And that’s saying something.)

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Fascinating, funny, without ever inducing a squeamish flip-flop of my stomach — I would recommend this book to anyone who loves listening to podcasts like The Poisoner’s Cabinet or Sidedoor by the Smithsonian. (And if you haven’t checked these two podcasts out, you should — they are excellent!)

Cooking With Christie! Cherry Christmas Cookies

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Inspiration: I adore making things — whether it’s baked goods, crocheting scarves, sewing pillowcases, or quilting. But weirdly enough, other than photographing the results (so I can figure out how to do it better next time), I rarely keep the fruits of my labor.

It’s the making process I enjoy.

Hence how I can bake cookies, I can’t actually eat.

The true inspiration for this week’s baking adventure comes courtesy of those brightly colored tubs of candied cherries, citrus rinds, and pineapple bits in the produce section. I’ve seen them displayed every holiday for decades and always wondered how they tasted.

So I decided this was the year I was going to find out!

Scouring the internet, I found this recipe for Cherry Christmas Cookies. As it’s a derivation of a sliced refrigerator cookie I’ve been baking for my mom for years, so I decided to give it a go.

Now, let us address the flies in the batter: the candied cherries and pecans.

One makes me itchy (due to sulfites, which keep those little orbs brightly colored for an eternity), and the nut will land me in the hospital in a pair of seconds. So I subbed the pecans for pumpkin seeds — since they have similar-ish texture. And due to cherries being out-of-season, I failed to find fresh ones I could candy myself. So I stuck with the sulfite-ladened ones since their presence in my kitchen won’t kill me. Then followed the recipe mostly to the letter. Adding the zest of two lemons to the dough since it pairs well with cherries.

The results? Meh.

They were perfectly fine cookies, but not spectacular ones. (I tried a small piece for scientific purposes.) The problem is the candied cherries don’t have a ton of flavor on their own, so they dull the overall taste of the cookie — that’s our working theory.

Next time, to punch up the flavor, I’m going to toast the pumpkin seeds, brown the butter, and use a vanilla bean rather than an extract. If I’m feeling really fearless, I’ll add 1 to 2 tsps of Kirsch (a cherry brandy) as well since it will help cut the sweetness of the rest of the cookie whilst adding extra depth of flavor….Hopefully.

Wish me luck!

Christie: Just as Mr. Satterthwaite looks back on the golden glow of his one love affair — I believe these cookies, in their original form, benefit from the halo of nostalgia. Something you savor eating because of the memories they conjure in your mind’s eye rather than the flavor itself.