Let the Cookies Begin - Weekend Cooking

It's a drizzly, foggy, rainy autumn day here in Maine - perfect for baking cookies.  Beth Fish Reads sponsors this weekly meme where we foodies can chat about cookbooks, cooking gadgets, recipes, or anything else gustatory. Be sure to stop over there to find other terrific weekend cooking posts.

Today's post is brought to you by the lowly but luscious persimmon.  Many of you are already puckering up your faces because this gorgeous fruit (or berry) is generally perceived as bitter and un-edible.  Think again.  Here's a quick lesson from Wikipedia:

A persimmon is the edible fruit of a number of species of trees in the genus Diospyros in the ebony wood family (Ebenaceae). The word Diospyros means "the fruit of the gods" in ancient Greek.^[1] As a tree, it is a perennial plant. The word persimmon is derived from putchamin, pasiminan, or pessamin, from Powhatan, an Algonquian language (related to Blackfoot, Cree and Mohican) of the eastern United States, meaning "a dry fruit".^[2] They are high in glucose, with a balanced protein profile, and possess various medicinal and chemical uses.

Now that we have that straight, let's quickly add that for this recipe, I've always used the Japanese Hachiya variety seen here- they are conical in shape as opposed to the Fuyu variety which is more round like an apple. Either variety works, but the Hachiya seems to yield more pulp.
   
40 some years ago, when I first married Mr. Tutu, his mother (may she enjoy eternal happiness in heaven) gave me this recipe indicating it was among her son's favorites.  To this day, neither of us can pass the produce department anyplace and not pick up persimmons if they're available.  They are generally in the stores in Nov-Dec, so these cookies are a notable feature of any Tutu cookie collection.  Earlier this week two of these beauties arrived at our house and have been ripening  ever since. This morning they were pronounced perfect to go, the recipe card was produced, the cookie sheets coated with parchment paper, and the glorious aroma of cloves, freshly grated nutmeg, and cinnamon began wafting through the air.

The hardest part of the whole recipe is keeping our hands off the just baked cookies until they have cooled enough to avoid burning our mouths. I wish there was someway to have this plate send the wonderful aroma out to the blogosphere. I guess you'll just have to make them yourself. They won't win any beauty contests, but they never stay around long enough to be admired.

 

The Recipe

1 C persimmon pulp (remove pit and cap, then peel VERY ripe fruit)

1 egg

Put these in a blender and puree 

.............................

1/2 C butter (1 stick) 

1 C sugar

Cream these in mixing bowl

............................
2 C all-purpose flour
1 Tsp baking SODA
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cloves
Mix dry ingredients together
..........................................
Add puree and dry ingredients to the creamed butter mixture, mix briefly until everything is incorporated.
Stir in
1 C chopped nuts (pecans or walnuts work best)
1C raisins (the golden ones really look great)

Drop by spoonfuls onto greased cookie sheet (I use parchment paper instead of greasing)

Bake 20 minutes at 325°F.  Makes 5 dozen.  Cool on wire rack before eating.  If there are any left on the plate at the end of the day, store in cool, dry cookie jar.  They freeze well also.

Review: The Recipe Club by Andrea Israel

This was quite an interesting read following on the heels of The Christmas Cookie Club. The Recipe Club is a Mercedes compared to Pearlman's Chevy. Recipe Club is a novel about friendship, a cookbook, and a history of the relationship of two women from the time they are in their pre-teens through their mid-twenties; then again after a 20+ year hiatus following "a disagreement", and to the present when they reunite.

The recipes are numerous and diverse, cleverly woven into the story of Lilly and Val, and their parents. The girls form a Recipe Club, correspond via mail, and help each other throughout their lives, up to the time when Val graduates from college.  They are as different as night and day. Neither set of parents would ever be nominated for parents of the year, and the girls help each other relate to the individual parents by seeing them through the other's eyes.

The book is written not just as a series of letters, interspersed with yummy recipes but also as emails (when the relationship takes up again in 2000) and also has a section written in normal fiction format.

It is an elegant, thoughtful, delicious book. You have to love the two characters, although you also want to smack them. You have to wonder how two people who are so different in so many ways, can stay such good friends. And then you wonder as you work your way through the book, what caused the estrangement.

The ending of the book was quite surprising to me, but I think I should have seen it coming. It's a well-written, well-planned book that will be enjoyed by women of all ages.

The characters have so much more depth than Pearlman's women, while dealing with many of the same real life issues.  It's amazing to read them back to back and compare.  There truly is no comparison.  If you have to read only one, pick The Recipe Club  You won't be disappointed.

Edited to add:  One of my LT buddies asked if I had tried any of the recipes yet.  Short answer: No, but.....I'm on the road and have marked a couple to try when I get back.  I realize people will want to know about the recipes, but this book stands alone as a novel....the recipes are frosting on the cake. (Pardon the pun.)

Review: The Christmas Cookie Club

This book was part of the BEA Atrium Galley Grab earlier this summer, but I just couldn't bring myself to read about Christmas cookies in the heat.  I grabbed it earlier this week, and can't say I missed too much by waiting. It has good recipes, great little non-fiction essays on the history of various ingredients, like flour, butter, almonds, chocolate, vanilla, etc, loosely tied together by the stories of the 12 women who form the Christmas cookie club.

They meet the first Monday of December to exchange cookies and catch up for the year. Their stories are wooden, formulaic, and re-hash many of today's "women's" issues (sex, divorce, pregnancy, widowhood, money, sullen teenagers, aging parents, etc etc) with nothing much new to say about them. The author could have done a much better job of building some character into these women. They all seem like wax figures from a museum who spit out their stories when someone winds them up and it's their turn.

There seems to be a glut of these women's support group books being published, and it really is going to take some effort to come up with an angle that allows the group to present something fresh. This just didn't work for me. I enjoyed the food parts, but could have easily skipped the soap opera.

Friday's Favorites from the Past: Betty Crocker's Cooky Book

Oh Christmas Cookies...


Every Friday, Alyce At Home With Books features this meme inviting us to look back at a favorite book from the past.



I come from a family that loves Christmas cookies.
Each mother, grandmother, aunt, sister, niece, daughter, grand-daughter has a special recipe that is a favorite.  Even when we were overseas for years, we baked, and mailed, and shared and gathered even more new cookie recipes.  We go to cookie exchanges, we call each other every year to verify the ingredients for grandma Nona's "Fraguna".  We even published little mini-cookbooks ----like we typed and xeroxed and hole punched and put little ribbons thru the pages --even put a construction paper cover on them with stencilled designs on the cover.

Last weekend, in preparation for a trip to my hometown late this month, I was browsing thru all my cookie recipes and cookbooks--they are kept in a slipcase just for Christmas baking--trying to figure out how many pounds of flour, sugar, butter, raisins, nuts, etc., I might need.  The list of possibilities grows every year (as do the hips!!!), but I always come back to this book--Betty Crocker's Cooky Book-- which I got for a wedding present in 1967.  The pages are caked with batter droppings, stained with green food coloring for the spritz trees, stuck together with candy cane chips, and literally falling out of the spiral binding.  But that Spritz cookie recipe is the only one that works in my cookie gun.

I had a chance to buy one of these books in excellent shape at a used book sale last year, but passed on the opportunity.  It had no character.  Whoever had owned it had obviously never baked anything from it.  The pages were CLEAN.

So in honor of the kickoff of the baking season (rumballs have to 'stew' for at least 6 weeks) I look to Betty Crocker as my favorite from the past.

Do you have a favorite cookbook? cookie book? recipe?

I've been thumbing through Ann Pearlman's Christmas Cookie Club ARC which has been sitting here for weeks, and have decided to add a Christmas category to my 2nd 999 challenge.  I've gotten several holiday themed books in the past couple weeks, so I'm going to settle down in November and really enjoy my favorite holiday.

Stay tuned for Holiday Ho Ho Ho Reviews and Happy Baking...