blind insight

Yet another food-blogger wannabe post

Once again, Steve and I are hosting a New Year's Eve gathering at our place. This shindig will be smaller than last year's sushi-making extravaganza, because the vast majority of our friends have decided to get out of Dodge for the long weekend. But the 15 or 20 lucky souls who will ring in 2006 with us will reap the fruits of my kitchen-bound labors over the past several days (as if baking 4 kinds of cookies in 6 hours wasn't enough holiday cooking for me):

• ruggelach (because you can never get enough of these babies)
• chocolate raspberry truffle bars (from my new bible, the King Arthur Flour Baking Companion)
• kalamata olive/feta dip with pita chips (To. Die. For.)
• avocado/clementine/pomegranate salsa (ditto)
• spiced mixed nuts
• individual filo cups filled with baked brie and fig spread
• Steve's insanely hot jalapeno salsa with two kinds of tortilla chips

in addition to the things I actually made, above, we'll have a variety of other treats:

• assorted cheeses (mostly from Wisconsin!) and crackers
• smoked salmon pinwheels
• mini-latkes (from mom)
• artichoke dip (also from mom)
• lemon cookies (mom, again)
• grapes and mangos
• mini-eclairs (the frozen kind from the store. Steve loves 'em)

And, of course, plenty to drink. Wanna come?

The family that plays together. . . .

After a truly wonderful week in the Midwest to celebrate Christmas with Steve's family, followed by a most lovely Hanukkah dinner with my parents, I am flush with love and happiness. Several times in the past few days, Steve and I have acknowledged to one another how extraordinarily lucky we are in the family department.

Each of us has two smart, loving, interesting, funny, engaged, mostly healthy parents. Each set of parents is well into its fourth decade of a happy, healthy, loving marriage. Each of us has siblings we like, who married or are dating someone we like. My parents and his get along famously, and our parents have wholeheartedly embraced our marriage and their son- or daughter-in-law. We've each spent a full week in the company of the other's family without going crazy (and while having a rollicking good time).

Which is not to say that everybody loves everybody else every moment of every day, or that there's never a bit of drama in the dynamic. But, mostly, the family thing rocks.

I would not have predicted this ease of familial blending. Steve and I come from very different backgrounds in terms of religion, geography, socio-economic status, education, world-view, cultural exposure, extended family, and more. His family is full of teachers and engineers, while mine is so heavy on lawyers as to be either comical or frightening, depending on your perspective. And yet, the basic values with which we were raised are quite similar, and both of us have developed close, healthy relationships with our parents as adults.

Really, though, the key to our positive family dynamics is simple: we all love to play cards.

With Steve's family, we play Sheepshead. It took me a while to adapt to the counter-intuitive card-strength system of this classic Wisconsin game, but I'm picking it up at last. Steve's octogenarian grandmother paid me an enormous compliment last week, announcing that I played a mean game for a novice. They play for real money in Steve's family, but at only a nickel a point, they haven't bankrupted me yet.

With my family, we play Shanghai, a seven-hand progressive rummy game of unknown origins (but that my dad's family has played for at least three generations). The game can move quickly or go on for hours. The competition often grows heated, leading us to institute a rule prohibiting spouses from sitting next to one another. Marriages have been saved as a result. Steve had played a similar game before he met me, and so picked up Shanghai in no time at all. He has become an even sneakier down-and-out threat than my father, and he's damn lucky my parents had already grown to love him when he started beating us on a regular basis.

Steve and I are hugely competitive with one another over games, deriving no joy from our spouse's success at our own expense. Some might think this a negative, or a relationship red flag. But in each of our families, cards and games provide a healthy outlet for competitiveness and aggression. Our parents have been playing cards against one another for almost 40 years each, taking great pleasure both in winning and in beating their beloved. It has worked for them, it has helped us stay close to them, and we have every intention of carrying on the tradition.

If you aren't hungry now, you will be by the end of this post.

The past few weeks have been plenty busy, with briefs to write and file, trips of various sorts to take, and holiday shopping to accomplish. Suddenly, our Christmas journey to Middle America is but a few days away.

This will be my first Christmas with Steve's family, and my first real Christmas celebration in almost a decade. So there is no way in hell I'm showing up without cookies.

My recent and forthcoming schedule being what it is, I had only today to produce a suitable variety and quantity of sweet treats. I started early with the ruggelach (having made the dough at midnight last night, after returning from a most excellent evening with friends).

I grew up making my mother's (and grandmother's) recipe for these classic Jewish cookies, and hers are mighty delicious. But a year or two ago, I discovered Ina Garten's version (in the Barefoot Contessa Parties cookbook, should you wonder). As sacrilegious as it may sound to say so, they are better than mom's (though she disagrees), absolutely To Die For. I tweak them a bit here and there - soaking the raisins in wine to plump them, substituting fig spread for the apricot jam and pecans for walnuts in half the batch - but for the most part, I follow Ina's excellent advice.

While my little rolled-up yummies were chilling, I began preparing my famous Chocolate Crinkle Cookies.

These are utterly decadent - Scharffenberger's dark chocolate, melted with a bit of butter, then added to a batter including both cocoa powder and semi-sweet chocolate chips. And eggs, and sugar, and flour, and . . . yep, they're tasty (and I don't even like chocolate!). This dough, too, needs to chill before the cookies can be made, so I transferred the gooey stuff to a bowl and handed the KitchenAid bowl, the beater, and my spatula to Steve, who pre-cleaned them with his tongue.

While the chocolate was melting for the crinkle cookies, I toasted sliced almonds for the Almond Butter Wafers. Then, when the chocolate dough was chilling, the ruggelach safely out of the oven and cooling, and the KitchenAid clean, I started all over.

Again, I mixed flour, butter, sugar, eggs, this time with almond extract and the toasted nuts. I then rolled the sweet-almond-smelling dough into a log, wrapped it in plastic, and found it some space in the refrigerator. Alas, I have no photos of this step in the proceedings, because Steve left to run errands and my hands were much too sticky to handle the camera!

My friend Sasha arrived just in time to roll crinkles. We filled baking sheets with little balls of dough rolled in confectioner's sugar, and chatted away as we rotated cookies through the oven.

As the finished cookies began to cool, we piled them up on a plate, trying hard to resist gobbling them up in the process.

Next, it was time to take the Almond Butter log from the fridge and slice it into cookies. Once again, my shiny new Santoku knife proved indispensable, and in no time at all, I had two sheets full of oh-so-thin wafers ready to bake.

These are a new addition, taken from my mother via a friend, but I expect they will become a staple of my baking repertoire. I loved the smell of the dough as I worked with it, I loved the way the almonds looked in the unbaked slices, I loved the crisp and golden look of the finished cookies, and, best of all, I loved the delicious, toasted-almond taste.

I suppose I could have stopped at this point, but I was on a roll (and a spoon-and-finger-licking-induced sugar high). On an internet site I frequent, I'd seen a great recipe for quick, flourless, peanut-butter-chocolate-chip cookies. Pretty much anything involving peanut butter makes me happy, and these sounded like the perfect complement to shapes and flavors I'd already produced.

True to their billing, these cookies were ridiculously easy to make. It took me barely 10 minutes to produce this:

And in just 12 more, I had these:

And then, I stopped, stiff-hipped from standing for hours, bloated and jittery from the nibbles, but utterly satisfied with my endeavors.

The only casualty of the day was one of Steve's cherished Packer Glasses, which I used to mix egg-wash and managed to crack.

When I suggested that perhaps the ruined glass was symbolic of the Packers' less-than-stellar season, Steve was not amused. He, by the way, spent much of the afternoon in the basement, building the bookshelves that will someday liberate our library from the 30-some-odd boxes in which it has been stored for the past 15 months.

Aren't we quite the non-traditional couple?

An Open Letter

Dear friends and family,

I love receiving your news, photos, and good wishes at this time of year. Your cards are displayed prominently on the wall of our home, and we feel very fortunate to have so many wonderful people in our lives.

Steve and I will be sending out our own holiday greetings this year, as soon as I make my way over to the post office to buy the 100+ stamps I need. I hope you enjoy the photo, which captures one of our favorite moments from our wedding day. I apologize for not having time or space to write a more personal greeting to each of you, but please know that our good wishes are many and heartfelt.

However, as much as I love your holiday greetings, I am not so enamored of the envelopes in which they are arriving. The unfortunate majority of them have caused me a great deal of sadness and anxiety, which I know you did not intend. You see, Mrs. Freiburger lives in Wisconsin, and is not taking her mail at our house. And while I adore Steve and his family and think their last name is perfectly lovely, it is not mine. Furthermore, I find it distressing to see that so many of you hold the erroneous belief that by getting married, I sacrificed not only my last name, but also my first. When I married Steve, I did not become him.

When you receive our card, please take a moment to read the message, in its entirety. If you look closely,* you will see that its senders are Madeline Cohen and Steve Freiburger. We will greatly appreciate if you address future greetings to us by those names.

Happy holidays!

Love, Mad.

*In fact, if you have to look closely to see this, you must be trying very hard to ignore the fact that my name is exactly what it has been for the past 35 years.

My first blog post as a thirty-five-year-old.

Apparently, turning 35 traumatized me into silence. When midnight struck and November 23 became November 24, I half expected crow's feet to sprout at the corners of my eyes, saggage to suddenly strike my boobs, and streaks of gray to appear in my hair. But, in truth, 35 feels pretty much like the tail end of 34, except with new cross-country skis and a gorgeous shell-and-bead necklace made by my very talented husband.

Speaking of XCing, I am starting to get the hang of this skate-ski thing. It is by far the most physically strenuous activity I have ever attempted, but I'm slowly putting together the pieces of the required technique and, more important, really enjoying it. Most of the time, I have to stop every few minutes to gasp for air and pull my form back together. But when arms, legs, skis, poles, shoulders, knees, ankles, hips, and head all come together correctly, it's like the elusive feeling of "swing" I sought to achieve in my college crew days. I wasn't a particularly talented rower, but on the rare occasion when the boat hit swing, it felt like we could go forever; the perfect rhythm of the boat turned the searing pain in my lactic-acid-churning muscles and oxygen-deprived lungs into a dull hum of background noise.

In fact, we have yet to ride a chairlift this season, having missed last weekend’s powder dump for a trip to Atlanta for boundless nephewly giggles. Assuming I shake the bug that’s currently plaguing my upper respiratory system, I’ll strap on my tele skis for the first time this season on Saturday, for an overnight back-country hut trip with Steve’s office crowd. I’m looking forward to the trek, and to the post-ski wine and relaxation in the cozy hut. But I’m feeling a lot of anxiety and uncertainty about skiing on the "big mountains" this season.

At the end of last year, I was starting to feel really nervous on the downhill slopes, particularly in areas with heavy snowboarder traffic. Both cross-country and back-country skiing allow me to focus on the physical effort, rather than the visual challenge, while alpine skiing down a crowded run requires me to be hyper-vigilant about what I can and can’t see. It’s stressful, and I’ve become increasingly afraid that I’m going to hurt myself or someone else because of my vision loss.

We likely won’t do any en piste telemarking until January. This gives me some time to think about what, if anything, I want to do different this season. I might start wearing an orange Blind Skier vest, if only so that other skiers will give me a wider berth. Wearing the vest will require that I suck up a fair amount of pride, of course, but if pride goeth before a fall, that’s an even better reason for me to get over it.

On an unrelated note, Congress is once again threatening to tighten the habeas reins, making it even more difficult for prisoners to obtain relief for serious constitutional errors in their convictions and detention. I have plenty of opinions on this matter, most of which are unsuitable for public consumption, but this piece by Slate's Emily Bazelon offers a good overview and reflects many of my own views on the issue.