Lemon Shortbread with Fresh Rosemary

There is a coffee shop near my office called Blue Bottle that has the most amazingly decadent shortbread cookies.  They have two kinds of shortbread - an olive oil rosemary shortbread and a savory parmesan shortbread with fennel (which I will be making the next time we have people over because they are absolutely delicious - recipe available here).  Both of them are buttery and scrumptious, but I was looking for a dessert cookie so I decided to make some rosemary shortbread.  I spent a few minutes searching for a recipe and then came across a few different lemon and rosemary shortbread recipes that sounded promising.  So I picked one, threw together the dough and left it in the fridge to chill.  And then it kept chilling for a few days until I had the time to bake it because Alex cut me off on baking and cooking on Christmas Day since I made fudge that morning (more on that later) and we were already making duck, brussels sprouts, cornbread and salad for dinner.  Suffice it to say that I get a little over-ambitious sometimes and Alex has to rein me in.

These shortbread cookies are exactly the type of elegant little cookies I think should be served at high tea.  Or at a wedding/baby shower.  They are light, fresh and very easy to munch on.  The flavors of the lemon and rosemary are pronounced, but are balanced nicely by the buttery flavor of the shortbread and the crunch of the turbinado sugar sprinkled on top.  Brief side note - turbinado sugar is one of my favorite baking ingredients because it gives you those little bursts of sweetness and that nice crunch on top.  You have to be a little careful when baking with an herb like rosemary because a little goes a long way and you don't want to feel like you are eating a pine tree.  I felt like this was the perfect amount.  I do have one caveat - if you served a platter full of homemade chocolate chip cookies on one side and these shortbread cookies on the other they might be overlooked, but on their own they shine quite nicely.


Recipe after the jump!

Butter-Blanched Southern Greens

I love Trader Joe's.  It is one of my favorite grocery stores, partially because they have great frozen meals and great pre-washed and prepared greens.  They also have the happiest, nicest people working there.  This is the first time that we have tried their Southern Greens Blend, which includes mustard greens, turnip greens, collards and spinach.  This is also the first time we have tried our new Jean-Georges cookbook, Home-Cooking with Jean-Georges: My Favorite Simple Recipes.  The recipe almost sounded too simple to be worthwhile.  But blanching greens in butter seemed like an interesting approach and sometimes simple is good, so I decided to give it a try.  I had to cut down on the amount of butter because 12 tbsp for a pound of greens (or 6 tbsp for 1/2 of a pound) seemed like an obscene amount.  So I cut the amount of butter by 2 tbsp for 1/2 lb of greens.  And we used the mixed greens rather than the mustard greens as the recipe called for.

Alex and I were both surprised by the amount of flavor the greens picked up from the butter.  He was worried that the greens were going to be bitter and/or bland, but somehow they weren't.  We were trying to decide just how we would change the recipe, but I'm afraid that adding any additional ingredients would mask the delicate (but rich) flavor of the butter.  We didn't use the optional mustard oil that the recipe called for, but maybe we will try that next time?  Altogether this was a pretty decent first recipe from our new cookbook and a fun new way to cook greens!

Recipe after the jump!

Radish Butter

 When I studied abroad in France I could never understand the French proclivity for eating radishes with butter.  I just didn't get it.  Granted, at the time I thought radishes were pretty nasty, bitter, peppery little creatures.   My dad used to eat them at home with just a sprinkle of table salt, which I found equally baffling.  But over the past few years I have discovered that radishes aren't so bad.  And from time to time, they're actually quite good.  I would never order a plate of radishes and butter.  Gabrielle Hamilton serves radishes and butter at Prune (which I have briefly considered ordering because it is Prune after all) but I just don't like radishes that much.  With that said, this Radish Butter was one of the recipes that first drew my eye in The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern.  I have no idea why it drew my eye, but it looked so pretty in the picture and the recipe was so simple.  Plus I love how pretty the radishes are at the farmers' market.  I literally have to seriously restrain myself from buying them they are so pretty.  And I find that I have a need to try ingredients that I don't particularly like over and over again until I either decide I like them after all, or I finally admit defeat.  It's kind of like poking at a bruise (and yes, I do that too) - you keep poking at it and it keeps hurting, but somehow you expect a different result.

I think the key to this recipe is to use some really nice butter.  We picked up some butter from Ronnybrook Farm, which was delicious on its own and could only become better with the addition of radishes fresh from the CSA.  It was butter with a slight peppery kick and crunch.  Alex said it grew on him, but I thought it was pretty delicious from the start.  I thought that the butter really improved after we let it sit for 10-15 minutes while we fried up our Fried Green Tomatoes (more on those later).  The flavors really melded.  I think part of that was because our butter and radishes weren't exactly at room temperature when we mixed them together so as they sat they warmed up and the flavors intensified.  Yum.

Recipe after the jump!

Grandmother Walters's Biscuits and Homemade Honey Butter

If you couldn't tell by the number of different posts I have already on biscuits, I'm a little biscuit obsessed.  I have found some pretty amazing biscuits over the years.  My personal favorite (at the moment) is Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt.  But sometimes you want plain biscuits.  And I have yet to find a really good plain biscuit recipe.  All of the biscuit recipes that we have made and loved have involved cheese or scallions or something else to just give them that something extra.  But for Easter dinner we wanted a plain biscuit to serve with the ham our friends made.  So I pulled this recipe out of my file of recipes that I want to make.  I have been a little skeptical for some time about this recipe since it called for whole milk instead of buttermilk, but sometimes you just have to make a leap of faith.

These biscuits were really tender and buttery.  Rolling the dough over kind of like puff pastry also gave them lots of fluffy layers, although I felt like they were a little too tender to be as flaky as I would like.  They were a perfect blank canvas for whatever you wanted to pair them with.  I thought they were delicious with the honey butter (so delicious that after eating a few last night with dinner I had two of the leftover biscuits this morning with more butter).  As for the honey butter itself, I would serve it with biscuits (duh) or with cornbread.  It was pretty yummy.

Recipes after the jump!