chocolate chip oatmeal zucchini cookies
I didn’t mean for this to happen. I meant to make zucchini bread, though why it’s considered perfectly normal to put zucchini in bread but not in cookies is beyond me. I’d actually already done the whole zucchini in cookies thing, with little success — those cookies turned out fluffy and cakey and sort of slimy because, duh, I put zucchini in them.
So really, I thought this time I’d just put my excess zucchini in bread, where fluffy and cakey are generally welcome. But when I read through my zucchini bread recipe I discovered a tip for maximizing zucchini flavor while minimizing zucchini moisture and I became a teensy bit obsessed with the idea that this also might be the key to non-slimy zucchini cookies.
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lemon lavender cookies
Spring, that elusive little leafy green sprite, is taking her sweet time this year. Oh sure, I suppose you’re already floating through your days in a pollen-induced euphoria, adrift in a sea of daffodils and cherry blossoms and baby bunnies going hop hop hop, but here in northern Michigan it’s still colder (as my Geometry teacher liked to say) than a witch’s tit in a brass bra. I always imagined that must be pretty damn cold — cold enough, at least, to warrant such an expression — and it seems an appropriate way to describe the sort of stubborn, lingering cold that delivers snow in April. When the baby bunnies are supposed to be hop-hop-hopping.
I haven’t noticed any bunnies, but each time I’ve gone to the window to cuss at the snow I’ve been silenced both by its unwillingness to stick and by the cheerful sight of robins flitting from branch to branch and pecking optimistically at the newly thawed ground. On a walk yesterday I discovered tender little shoots of green poking their way up insistently through that same ground, and communion with the trees revealed limbs teeming with softly swelling buds. Spring is quietly transforming brown to green, sneaking up on us like a delightful surprise.
chocolate cutout cookies
Two years ago, when Chris and I still lived nearly a thousand miles apart, I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, chilling and rolling and cutting small hearts out of shortbread dough, dipping freshly-baked cookies into melted chocolate, waiting for the chocolate to harden so I could nestle each little heart into a cocoon of parchment paper and bubble wrap, and generally wishing I’d chosen a slightly less complicated way to express my undying devotion.
Thus a tradition was born, minus the whole overnight shipping thing, of course. (more…)
When Harry Met Salad 