Hamantaschen

  

Sick of the cabbage yet? Yeah, me too. Have a cookie.

Cookies with stuff in them usually look too fiddly for me to bother with. I think that after my xiao long bao experiment, my idea of what constitutes 'fiddly' underwent a change. I read this recipe in the paper and thought it looked remarkably simple. The photos in the paper looked really good too, maybe I hadn't brought enough snacks with me to work that day. So here they are.

2 sticks (1 cup) butter
1, 8-oz brick cream cheese
6 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 1/2 cups AP flour
1/2 teaspoon salt- you will want this if you use unsalted butter. I don't.

later you will need about 2 cups of jam and an egg for egg wash

I got 46, 2" cookies out of this.

Soften the cheese & butter to room temperature, then beat them together until they are well combined. Beat in the sugar and vanilla. You can use a spatula for this part. Then switch to your trusty pastry tool, and cut in the flour. As soon as all the flour is taken up, scrape down the bowl one last time and put the dough in tupperware to chill overnight. The next day, roll out the dough until it's between 1/4 and 1/8 inch thick. I have no cookie cutters, but the lip of a red wine glass is just the right size.













Each cookie will need about 1/2 teaspoon of jam. Fold up the cookies and put them on sheets in the freezer. Preheat the oven to 350. Once the cookies are frozen hard,  you can put an egg wash on their outsides and sprinkle them with a bit of sugar. I did this on my second tray, and it does make them look much nicer. Bake them for about 30 minutes.









Notes!

1. It doesn't seem to be very important that the butter/cream cheese mixture is "fluffy" as stated in the original recipe.
2. But it is important that when you add the flour, you don't over-work the dough. That's why I strongly recommend the pastry cutter- it will quickly incorporate the flour without causing the gluten in it to sieze up and get rubbery.
3. A pastry cloth helps a lot.
4. Try to cut the circles as efficiently as possible, because while you can squash the leftover dough together and roll it again, each time you do that you will loose some of the tenderness in the finished cookie. 2 squashings and re-rollings is the maximum I would recommend.
5. Also, chilling the dough is indispensable. The first time because it is too gooey to manage otherwise, the second time because freezing will allow the cookies to retain their shape in the oven.
6. The original recipe says to paint a little egg wash around the edge of each dough circle before  folding them up. I didn't do that, and as a consequence, some of my cookies unfolded while baking. If you are picky, or if your jam is a rather moist variety, I would say that you should take the trouble to do the egg wash. I'm lazy, and my jam was very sticky, so I decided to live with some amorphous cookies.
7. I made my own jam. It's just about 2/3 of a bag of prunes simmered until they're falling apart and then bashed up with a spoon. This sounds less appealing than it really is, but I did it because a) it allowed me to control exactly how much sugar, moisture, and texture was in the jam, b) plum filling is traditional, c) I like the caramelized bits that you end up with. They're chewy.

These are very, VERY hard to stop eating. The cookie part is really just an amazingly good pie crust, and if I want to make any sweet pies in the future, I'll have to think about using this recipe. It is tender, yet holds its shape, it puffs ever so slightly as it cooks, and it has a hint of flakiness. These are phenomenal while they are hot out of the oven, but once they cool, the cream cheese flavor in the crust comes back out, and the jam filling gets extra chewy.

I had to give 3/4 of the recipe to my siblings immediately. Even so, I caught myself thinking "So you ate 6 cookies earlier. That's not much different than say, a PBJ, right? And there are 6 cookies left. I could have those for dessert. That's like, one slice of pie...

Happy National Pie Day!

In honor of the occasion, I made mine like this:

1 recipe of pastry for a double crust pie. Mine is usually

2 cups all purpose flour
2/3 cups butter
3/4 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons cold water, more or less

But, I ran out of a.p. and had to sub in 1/3 cup whole wheat flour. Otherwise, made as I usually do.

Fill with

Most of a butternut squash, sliced 1/4" thick

a small thing of button mushrooms, sliced
the whites and a good bit of the green parts of some scallions, cut fine

some fresh rosemary, sage, salt, pepper, olive oil
about 3 oz. gouda
a big handful of fresh baby spinach


Heat the oven to 425

Toss the squash in a sprinkle of salt & pepper and a generous slosh of oil. Get a heavy bottomed skillet medium hot, put in the squash and a little water and cover for about  5 minutes. They'll cook surprisingly fast. Uncover and add the onions and herbs and a bit more oil if they're sticking a lot. You want to stir enough to get them cooked evenly but not so much that the squash mushes up or fails to brown a bit. When the squash is tender, put it in a bowl, scrape out the pan and add a little more oil and the sliced mushrooms. Let them brown, stir to turn them over, then add them to the bowl with the squash. Roll out your pastry and heap about 1/2 the filling in the middle. Put a generous handful of spinach on top and press it down gently, then slice or grate on a layer of cheese. Repeat, with a somewhat less generous heap of spinach and cheese, then loosely fold up the sides of the pastry. An egg wash is optional, but nice. Bake at 425 for 30-40 minutes, depending on your oven and desired level of brownness. My oven is a bit cool, I think, so it takes around 40 min, especially if I keep popping the door open to fiddle with things.

2 things to keep in mind- go easy on the sage, it can be overpoweringly bitter, and remmember that spinach will loose about 85% of its volume once cooked. I think that a little sauteed mustard or chard would have a better texture.

More about pastry tools

I've made more pies this year than at any time before in my life. Maybe more than the previous lifetime total. It's the crust. I have a new favorite tool:

it's a really fancy pastry cutter. It's made out of a solid piece of really heavy stainless steel, and the handle is stuck onto the blade with these big screws and rubber gaskets. It cost me a whole $1.99 at Goodwill.

I have another one, the usual sort. Wooden handle, a bunch of curvey wire loops. Also $1.99 at Goodwill. It's perfectly adequate, I recommend one for occasional or desultory pastry-makers, because it beats the heck out of a fork. I almost passed up my fancy one, because I had one of the regular kind already, but I picked it up and went oooOOo...

The handle doesn't swivel, for one thing, so when you're bashing away at a pile of hard butter and flour, the blades never flip out sideways. And the blades are rigid. They don't spread apart, leaving unevenly large chunks of fat. And the solid parts of the blade above the cutters make a nice ergonomic grippy place for your thumb to go.

Since I got this thing last month or so, it has chewed through 2 big batches of chocolate shortbread cookies, and 2 pie crusts with incredible ease. I love it. Now all I need is a french rolling pin. My current one got called out yesterday morning.

"Was your rolling pin part of a broom handle?"  uh, mm-hm. I think Dad made it...

Mushroom and Potato Pie

Giant Gallete v.2! The other day Pete called me up and said "Do you want any chanterelles? I traded a set of snow tires for 2 pounds of chanterelles and some money."  Hm. Why, yes, some mushrooms of questionable provenance would be very nice. So here is what I made. Incidentally, this is an easily veganizable recipe, just use an appropriate pastry recipe.

1 recipe of savory pastry, enough for a double crust.

3 medium-small yellow potatoes.
1 medium yellow onion
2 sprigs rosemary, or other woody herbs, like thyme or something
1 lb chanterelles (or other interesting mushrooms)
olive oil, salt and pepper

First, decide if you are going to make this from start to finish, or begin on one day and finish some other time. I did the latter, because I was tired the day I brought the mushrooms home, so that is how my directions will go.

Cut the butter and salt into the flour for the crust and put it in a sealed container in the fridge.

Slice the taters and boil in salted water until they are about 3/4 done, drain and refrigerate.

Clean the mushrooms and slice them into rather big pieces. This is really only to allow them to lay flat in the skillet. Slice the onion quite thinly. Get your skillet pretty hot, add a bit of olive oil and scoot it around with a rosemary sprig. Leave the sprig in the pan and sprinkle a bit of salt in the pan. Put a single sparse layer of shrooms in the pan and let them sear, use tongs to flip them over once and sear the other sides. Repeat until all the mushrooms are done. Set the cooked mushrooms aside and throw out the herb sprigs or you will have a bunch of twigs in your pie...forgot to do that part, myself.

When you get through the whole batch, hopefully the mushroom juices won't have burnt all black and disgusting, and you can just add a good slosh of oil, some salt and the onions. If you have significant blackening rather than a nice brown glaze, rinse the hot pan out first, then put in your oil and onions. Add about 1/2 cup of water to the onions and cover them up. As the water boils out, stir a couple times until the onions are evenly caramelized, then put them with the mushrooms. Dash a bit of water in the pan to get the last bits of yummy out of it, pour that in with the shrooms  and onions, and refrigerate until you want to actually bake and eat your pie.

Let the pastry mix set out for about 20 minutes. If it's too cold, it'll be a pain in the ass. Preheat the oven to 425. I like to heat a large pizza pan in the oven too. A stone would be nice, if you have one, but you don't need anything fancy.

Heat a couple tablespoons of oil in a skillet and lay the potato slices in it. Add a half cup of water and a sprinkle of salt if the pots still taste bland. Cover, let the potatoes develop a nice brown crust. Rough 'em up with a spatula so that more potato surface is exposed to the pan and the slices are a bit smashed. Top with the mushroom and onion mix and let it brown again. Remove from heat, stir to combine.

Meanwhile, add the liquid to the pasty ingredients and mix it up. Roll the dough into a circle almost 18 inches across. I like to use a pastry cloth, for reasons I've mentioned before. Flop the crust onto a sheet of tinfoil, dump the filling in the middle and press it down into a nice compact heap and fold up the edges of the pasty.  Brush with egg or milk, bake on the preheated pan or stone for 1/2 hour or until it's a bit brown.

My conclusion:

Cheese. Gruyere, brie, something mild and nutty. Mushrooms and potatoes are subtle, but they would benefit from a little moisture. Especially after a couple days in the fridge.

Don't burn your mouth.

Why a pastry cloth?

Hmmmm. Well, you know how, when you want to make a pie crust, you have to roll out the dough, and it sticks to the countertop, and it shreds up into a zillion pieces when you go to flip it over or, my god, actually put it into a pie tin? It's really irritating. It is why I have not made many pies. Which is a pity, because I am very fond of pie, and tarts, and quiche, and other things that need rolled pastrycrust.

I needed a pastry cloth. The funny thing is, I knew quite well that it would make my life easier, but I never bothered to get one. I kept thinking "seriously, how often am I gonna want to make pie crust?" Well, lots oftener, now that I have my pastry cloth. I think I was just waiting for the right incentive. I made up all the ingredients for my Farmer's Market Pie, and realized that I could not face the hassle of rolling out a crust on a naked countertop, because I had run out of waxed paper to roll it between.

That was the other thing: I had figured out that rolling the pastry between layers of waxed paper worked just fine, for the most part. But I was out of paper, I had a nice piece of clean cotton sheeting, and I was in a bind. I tore out a generous rectangle of cloth, put a neat hem around it with my trusty treadle sewing machine-hooray, my two favorite hobbies all at once!- and dun-dun-DUN! It was a revelation.

The idea is the same as using waxed paper: you lightly flour the cloth, fold it in half with the pastry between the layers, and roll away. When you want to turn it over, you pick up the whole business and flip the cloth and pastry together, no sticking to the counter. But the best part is that the cloth does not stick to the pastry! Unlike waxed paper, which, after all that rolling and squishing can be a tad reluctant to give up the dough, the cloth whisks away without a hint of resistance. Also unlike paper, which is stiff, and can buckle into pointy shapes which stab holes in your beautiful crust, a nice supple pastry cloth will gracefully yield your pie crust intact.

Amen!