Music and Cats

Sergei McKitten, a.k.a. Mighty Hunter, sits proudly before the pile of furry toys he has bagged. Any cat can catch a fur weasel, but it takes special prowess to capture the elusive green-black koosh.

You can bag all sort of animals on the Friday Ark. Be sure to hunt down Weekend Cat Blogging at the House of the (Mostly) Black Cats, and the Carnival of the Cats on Sunday.

Well, of course I like ginger, but I’m not referring to myself. Nor am I thinking of Paul, who was the happy beneficiary of someone’s love for ginger, nor Janeen, who cheerily extracted this ‘kitchen tax’ from the ginger cookies that I baked at her place.

These cookies, along with a few other goodies, arrived recently at the home of my Buffalo-based Blogging by Mail buddy, Erin. (Blogging by Mail is the brainchild of Nic, and is hosted this round by Stephanie.) When I was matched with Erin, one of the few things that I was told was that she loved ginger. I knew I could work with that.

Erin proclaimed the ginger cookies on the right to be “the best ginger snaps ever.” She is not alone in making that assessment; Janeen and Paul felt the same way about them. These are also my favorite ginger cookies that I’ve ever eaten, and I’ve sampled quite a few ginger cookies. The bar cookies on the left combine chewy dried fruit, nuts, marmalade and ginger in a matrix of not-too-sweet batter. You might find that these are just as good for breakfast as for dessert.

Ginger and Marmalade Bars adapted from Maida Heatter’s Best Dessert Book Ever
makes 32 bar cookies

1 cup dark raisins
1 cup dried pineapple, coarsely chopped (the recipe calls for white raisins, but someone likes pineapple, too)
1 cup (loosely packed) dried apricots, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup crystallized ginger, finely chopped (the recipe calls for stem ginger in syrup, which none of our neighborhood stores stock)
1 cup orange marmalade (I used my own homemade, very thick cut Seville)
2 large eggs
1/2 cup (firmly packed) brown sugar
1 cup unblanched whole almonds
1 cup walnut pieces
2 cups unbleached flour, sifted

Set oven rack 1/3 up from bottom of oven; preheat oven to 400 degrees. Butter a 13×9x2 baking pan.

Place fruit in the top of a vegetable steamer over hot water. Cover, bring to a boil, and steam fruit for 5 minutes, or until very moist. Turn the fruit out into a large bowl to cool. Pretty, isn’t it?

Stir the ginger, almonds and walnuts into the fruit. In a small bowl, lightly beat the eggs, then mix in the sugar and marmalade. Add this mixture to the fruit and nuts; stir well. (The large oblong orange bits are the seville orange peel. I was experimenting with the outer limits of “thick cut.”)

Add half the flour to the fruit mixture. Stir until almost completely absorbed, then add the remaining flour and stir some more…. no, more… until flour has been completely incorporated. (Yes, it will be very thick.)

Spoon the mixture into the buttered pan. It will stay in large lumps, exactly where you place it. To form it into an even layer, cover with a length of plastic wrap, and use your hands to compact and smooth it. Then remove the plastic wrap. (You can do this without the plastic wrap, but believe me, it will be messy.)

Bake for 35-40 minutes, until the top is golden brown. Watch carefully; do not overbake. (With Janeen’s stove, 35 minutes was almost too much; the edges of the cake were beginning to blacken.)

Remove from the oven, and let stand for 5 minutes. Cover with a cookie sheet, and turn the pan and the sheet upside down together. The cake will drop right out of the pan. Replace the pan with a large rack; turn the cookie sheet and rack upside down. Let the cake cook completely, then slide onto a cutting board. Using a sharp, heavy knife, cut cake into quarters, then cut each quarter into 8 bars.

Ginger Spice Cookies (a.k.a. the best ginger cookies evah) adapted from Epicurious.com
makes about 30 cookies

2 cups all purpose flour
1 tablespoon ground ginger
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3/4 cup crystallized ginger
1 cup (packed) dark brown sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 large egg
1/4 cup mild-flavored (light) molasses

Turbinado sugar

(Sorry, no process pictures. These were less visually interesting than the bars.)

Combine first 7 ingredients in medium bowl; whisk to blend. Chop the crystallized ginger finely; mix into dry ingredients. (To keep the ginger from clumping together, sprinkle pieces across the top of the flour mixture, then fold in.) With an electric mixer, beat brown sugar and butter in large bowl until fluffy. Add egg and molasses and beat until blended. Add flour mixture; stir just until blended. Cover and refrigerate at least 1 hour.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly butter baking sheet. Pour turbinado sugar into a thick layer on a small plate. (Regular granulated sugar will work for this, too, though the larger crystals of the turbinado add an extra crunch to the cookie.) Using wet hands, form dough into 1 1/4-inch balls; roll in sugar to coat completely. Place dough balls on cookie sheet, about 2 inches apart. (Yes, I could’ve taken pictures of the dough balls, but my hands were such a mess.)

Bake cookies until tops are cracked but still soft to the touch, 11-12 minutes. Cool on sheets for a minute or two, then transfer to racks and cool. Store in airtight container to maintain outer shell’s crunch… if they last that long.

Tags: BBM+Blogging by Mail+ginger

A few weeks ago, I discovered that Stephanie at Dispensing Happiness was resurrecting Blogging by Mail, the bloggers’ food exchange started by Nic of Baking Sheet. So what that I didn’t have a kitchen; I wanted to play. So I signed up, and got the name of the blogger to whom I’d be sending treats, and planned what to send her, and where to bake… (more on that later)…

In the midst of my thinking about the contents of the package I was sending out, a package arrived at my front door from Pam of Pam’s Pantry. Silly me! I didn’t photograph the package, though that appears to be part and parcel (as it were) for these posts. Nor did I manage to photograph some of the contents… specifically the yummy peanut butter brownies (of which Pam has a nice photo) and the spicy Cajun plantain chips. (The package arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and I hadn’t eaten lunch, and those darn chips just kept calling my name in their Caribbean-meets-Bayou accent.)

I did, however, manage to take pictures of the crunchy, cinnamon-and- clove-scented cappuccino-hazelnut biscotti, chewy savory-sweet sesame candies, and jar of crabapple jelly (from her local farmers’ market!) that Pam also included in my package. That jelly will be sampled as soon as we make our way through the other open preserves in our fridge.

The enclosed card describing my treats had on its cover a beautiful photo that Pam took of a waterfall in eastern Tennessee where she hiked last year. Sadly, my photo of Pam’s pic didn’t begin to do it justice. And, in reading my blog, Pam discovered some interesting serendipity: we both went to architecture school, and we’re both in the middle of big, dusty home remodeling projects! It is indeed a small world.

Thank you, Pam, for a lovely BBM package. And thank you, Stephanie, for doing all the work. When can I sign up for the next one?

Tags: BBM+Blogging by Mail

This morning, as Paul and I wandered around the market, I was enchanted by the light. Lower and softer than the sunlight of summer, this morning’s autumnal light enveloped the market in a warm glow. New crops of winter squashes, potatoes, apples and pears shone beside the last of the summer’s beans, tomatoes and berries.

Around the fall equinox, the days shorten more quickly than nearer to the solstices. The angle of the sun relative to this patch of earth, and the corresponding quality of the sunlight that reaches it, also change more quickly from day to day at this time of year. The light was different two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, it was still summer.

Most days, I am taken by the beauty of the produce at the market. Today, however, I was smitten with burnished highlights and longer shadows. I kept exclaiming, as I pointed out a pyramid of pumpkins or a stack of striped eggplants, “Oh, look at the light!”

Goodbye, summer, until next year.

When we brought him home with us four years ago, we knew him only as Sasha. His foster mom gave him that name, and his brother another Russian name, Sergei.

Thanks to TS Elliott, we know that Sasha, like all cats, has a couple of names to which we’ll never be privy. That doesn’t stop us from guessing, and giving him lots of nicknames in the process: Mr. Stripe. Bearface. Rufty Tufty. Fluffhead. Mrrrrup (for the trilling sound he makes). Tufty-toes. Captain McKitten (for the superhero tabby M on his forehead). Sasha Bear Stripey Hair Fuzziest Kitty Anywhere. Oh, and Fang.

Do you give your cat(s) nicknames? Do you think they know?

The McKittens don’t care what we call them, as long as we take them for a ride on the Friday Ark. They might share their names with the felines at the House of Chaos, which hosts the Carnival of the Cats on Sunday. Weekend Cat Blogging #68 is at ChefSarahJane this weekend.