saturday, one january: lo siento, no estamos disponibles esta semana
I have, from time to time, gotten all spun up in my head about “begin as you mean to go on” and all that; in that sense, maybe it’s not great that we all stayed in our pajamas today. I have no regrets. (Besides, it was raining basically all day.) I did not eat cookies for breakfast, so that’s a big step towards resetting after winter break.
No really, I made so many cookies; mostly I made four different batches of peanut butter blossoms over the course of a week, some for us and some to give away, but I also tried out some new recipes. The checkerboard cookies from Smitten Kitchen were good but I think not worth the effort. (Also, the dough had two entire sticks of butter for a cup and a half of flour? It felt weird.) The chewy gingerbread cookies from NYT Cooking were absolutely worth the effort, even though I had to brown butter for the first time in my life, but I’m the only person in the house who was interested in them, so I don’t know that they’re going into the regular rotation. The other cookie experiment was orange-cardamom sugar cookies from King Arthur, and I thought the flavor on those was excellent, and they had a spot-on airy-light sugar-cookie texture. (That texture is not my favorite cookie texture? The chewy gingerbread cookies are more my ideal, but the orange cookies really did what they were trying to do, and I respect that.)
Anyway, of all the eight million cookies in our house this winter break (the ones I baked, plus the plate my Aunt Karen sent over, which included pignoli cookies and mini chocolate chip cookies and classic spritz cookies and itsy-bitsy little meringue cookies), Declan will only touch the peanut butter blossoms. That said, he eats them in quantity, as many as we’ll let him eat, so it’s not like my work is totally unappreciated.
I do not think this is what I intended to write about today? But I’m still working on more communication and less self-censorship, so cookie babble is what you get.
There’s something sort of fascinating about just taking school vacations actually as vacations. It’s a new thing for me. After the long Thanksgiving weekend, I described myself as “very behind on my grading, but very well rested.” I’ve done a little work over this winter break, but really not much, and there’s a part of me that feels guilty. There’s another part of me, a much bigger part, that really needs the rest.