sweet and simple success

So, despite last night's relative failure (not really, but it didn't live up to my hopeless perfectionism, so...) I strapped on my holiday-appropriate red-n-white striped apron again.  I guess it's kind of like getting right back in the saddle after being thrown?

Well, maybe not as painful, although you may find it painful to observe my "clashing" stripes.  By pure lucky coincidence, I happened to be wearing horizontally-striped socks and I thought it was a funny combination with the vertical stripes of the apron.  If you disagree, remember what your mother taught you about what to do if you don't have anything nice to say.

I have plenty of nice things to say tonight - we'll start with the cookies.

My first "nice" statement is to point out how lucky my colleagues are that I am a woman of my word (and that by telling them I was baking I created built-in accountability).  Mister and I each had one small cookie to test their quality and were completely impressed.

In addition to being attractive on the outside, these cookies are "charming and delightful" and a pleasure to be around.  I do not expect them to last very long tomorrow - they are just the right amount of sweet, aided, in part, by the cinnamon sugar in which I rolled them before plunking them down on the baking sheets.  However, the generous amount of Earth Balance that began the batter contributed to an incredibly buttery taste and texture - you could liken these to a combination of those Dutch butter cookies so much like shortbread, and honest to goodness sugar cookies.

They are, in a way, sugar cookies - The recipe, filched gracefully from realsimple.com is for Brown Sugar Drop Cookies but my increasingly OCD self couldn't deal with the ugly little deposits of dough on the sheets, so I rolled them into buttery little balls and then dunked them into cinnamon sugar before pressing the down a little onto the sheet.

Time to pack them up! Before Mister and I eat them all...

too much is never enough

I have eaten waaaayyy too many cookies in the past 24 hours.  They are just so good - I swear, these are absolutely the best oatmeal cookies I have ever made or eaten (although Kylie at Cups & Chairs makes an awfully good oatmeal cookie, too).  I'm pretty sure it's the brown sugar - I don't think I've ever used that as the sole sugar, sole sweetener in a cookie before. 

By the way - I have come to the conclusion (in my vast understanding of brown sugar and how to keep it) that Gladware is the best possible vessel for brown sugar.  I can't remember how long ago I exposed my brown sugar to oxygen, but it's been tucked away in its little Gladware vacuum, kept from sunlight in a dark corner of my cupboard, and when I opened it to scoop out the 2/3 cup for this recipe, it was as soft as it was the first day it tasted air.

Anyway, by sheer force of will (and general lack of other options) I made it through today.  It actually passed quite quickly, to my bemused horror - I keep running out of time!  I already have less than an hour until I start pretending to get ready for bed and I haven't...

• cleaned up dinner
• changed the sheets on the bed (time for the warmer ones - we won't see 40 degrees again until Friday)
• changed the bathroom towels
• put up my Christmas tree (although Mister did point out when I forgot to do it last night that the fewer nights the tree is up, the fewer nights Angst has to try to destroy it, so this one might wait until the weekend when I can also start gift shopping and wrapping...at which point I'll need something to place my pretty gifts beneath!)

So, without further ado, tonight's dinner was Moroccan Chickpeas with Couscous from Vegan on the Cheap.

It's so pretty and colorful!  Apparently, no one (including me) can write a recipe involving chickpeas, tomatoes, and raisins (cranberries) without plunking the word "Moroccan" in front of it.  Someday, I would like to go to Morocco and see if everything involves chickpeas, tomatoes, and raisins.  Actually, for bizarre, wanderlust reasons I'll probably never know, I've actually wanted to visit Morocco since I was a child.  There's something about the festiveness of the colors, the passion of the firey reds and burnt oranges that just seems regal and outlandishly extravagant to me.  In fact, while dinner was simmering, I was so taken by how opulent the colors of my simmer were, I had to snap a picture:

The broth/sauce was a rusty color that augmented the brilliant beige (find someone else who can say that and mean it) of the chickpeas, while little, barely noticeable green flecks of chives and pepper litter the pot.  I was about to dump some frozen peas in there for a little nutrition and I was irrationally worried it would mar the beauty of my chickpeas.

As you can see, I need not have worried.