Making Cookies ...

It's been an age, it seems , since I made a good batch of oatmeal cookies for Silent Bob. He's not a complainer, but I'm pretty sure I heard a sigh when he came in from loading the woodboxes yesterday and rattled the top of the cookie jar. He must have been expecting the elves to have stocked it overnight, but alas. Hence, the sigh.

So, this evening, while he is off at a planning meeting for a series of bike tours he'll work on come Spring, I am baking him oatmeal cookies with pecans and butterscotch chips. The fire is humming along in both stoves, the cats are chasing each other through the house and stirring up the smart Corgis, and I am blissfully baking cookies, taking photos, and ...

An Aside ...

I started another scrappy quilt yesterday ... my beloved Ohio Star pattern. Sooner or later, I will have to buy enough fabric to make the offset squares, though. I want to use the strip piecing method to make 16-block squares of calicos, using that golden color and some of the colors in the patterned scraps to carry through the quilt. Each of these squares are 12 inches finished. That makes for a quilt that will grow quickly in size when I begin putting things together.

While I piece these blocks, I'm also putting together that Pinwheel quilt face. I have more than 200 squares of 7 inch pinwheels to lay out this week and begin putting into strips. I'm thinking that the Pinwheel quilt will be a queen sized affair ... wish me  luck on that!

As usual, Little Bee had to be right in the middle of everything, as I trimmed up the squares and took pictures. What a little busybody!

Maple Apple Cake - Gluten Free and Great

I very rarely return to a recipe within a few weeks, even if I love the recipe. Those food bloggers who make a recipe to the letter the first time, and then return right a way to adapt it and perfect it before posting it are a different breed of cooks. I am a food diarist. What you see is what you get and if I adapt a recipe, I usually adapt it right out of the gate because I've read the recipe through and thought about it's ingredients or the cooking instructions, or the constraints of my pantry or the likes and dislikes of our house full of hungry folk, or, or, or ...

That being said, I want you to meet this Maple Apple Cake. This cake (above) started out as Rum Apple Cake, a recipe straight from The FOOD 52 Cookbook.

Happy New Year From the Virtual Supper Club !!!

A new year begins here at The Cooking Light Virtual Supper Club and what better way to celebrate than with small plates - tapas - mezze - hors d'oeuvres ! What ever you call them, they are the perfect way to eat lightly into the new year! A series of these small plate recipes would serve the host or hostess of a New Years celebration really well. The very nature of small plates culture is such that offerings are brought out for friends one or two at a time. There are drinks, usually beers or glasses of wine, and a few bites served up with plenty of conversation - the perfect way to party! This month we have created a spread of small servings and celebratory wines or cocktails to help bring in 2015 with true pizzazz.

Pain Ordinaire - French Bread

Winter returned to the grey cottage over the weekend. We had snow, sleet, freezing rain and then a gusty freezing polar vortex swept in to freeze everything rock solid. One hears the cold crunch of the ice on the road as the neighbors head out to work. The wind makes the icy coating of the branches clatter, when it gusts around the house corners. It's colder than a witch's left hind roopy-too, as my Dad liked to say!

Buttermilk Waffles with Sautéed Apples

When I was a kid, Dad would sometimes haul an aged and decrepit waffle iron out of the closet on Saturday mornings and mix up batter to make brown crispy waffles for us kids. We'd get a stack of two or three waffles, a side of bacon or sausage links and a big glass of juice for breakfast. I always felt like the luckiest kid in the world for some reason. I can remember swinging my legs under the breakfast table in anticipation of watching gobs of butter melting in the little nooks and crannies of the waffles and chanting for more maple syrup when Dad divvied out the liquid gold.

Food memories are such powerful things!