Santa Claus Cookies (and Rebbe too)

Making Santa Claus cookies is a family tradition spanning three generations. Grandma (my dad's mom) is the originator. I don't know how she got started making the large, intricate cookies, but she made them every single year along with dozens of other types of cookies. My siblings and cousins all learned how to make them in Grandma's kitchen and most of us still keep the tradition alive, though they are a  lot of work. This year the entire process took me three days. 

In order to make Santa Claus cookies, you first need to have a Santa Claus cookie cutter. Without Aunt Chick's Jolly Santa Cookie cutter, you can't make these cookies. No substitution will work.  Grandma's Santa was probably from the 1950s. My oldest cousin, who is a trained chef and baker, inherited that one. I got mine in the early 2000s. Fortunately, you still can get one today.

I got my Santa as a kit with three other cookie cutters - a star, a tree, and a stocking - and a recipe booklet. I don't uses the recipe in the booklet. I use Grandma's recipe. I'm not sure if Grandma started out using the one as written and modified it so it worked for her or if she just used one of her own from the beginning. It doesn't really matter. It works and it's hers so I use it. I'm also willing to share it:

1 1/2 cups soft butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 tsp. vanilla, 2 eggs, 4 cups flour, 400, 10-12 min. 

Okay, so that's a very minimalist recipe. I've got a bunch like this in my cooking binder. I know how to make the cookies, so I don't need more details. I will, however, provide those details in case anyone would like to give these a try. 

So first, cream the butter and sugar. I use a stand mixer. Then add the vanilla and eggs. Once that's all beaten together, slowly add the flour. I then take the dough out of the mixer, split it into two lumps, wrap them in plastic wrap, and refrigerate them overnight. That's day 1 of the process.

Day 2, I remove one of the lumps of dough from the fridge to work with. With the kitchen scale I bought for myself several years ago, I weigh out 55 grams of dough for each cookie. This is not at all necessary, I just love weighing stuff on that little scale. Now the exercise in patience begins. Work the dough between your hands until it starts to warm up and soften slightly. You really just have to get the feel for it to know when it's right. Then press it into the lightly-floured cookie cutter with your thumbs.

Very slowly and carefully peel up part of the edge of the dough and try to get it to release from the mold.

Feel free to swear a this point but don't loose faith! The first one is always a mess, just like with pancakes. Just wipe down the cutter, re-flour it, and try again. Remember to keep breathing. Take your time. Calm your senses and the universe will reward you, eventually.

Repeat this process, redoing and swearing as needed, until you've filled a cookie sheet with six Santas. Then bake in a preheated oven at 400 degree Fahrenheit for 10 to 12 minutes. I let mine bake a tad too long so they were slightly brown on the edges. It's fine. Let them sit on the cookie sheet for three minutes after you remove them from the oven then transfer to a rack to cool completely.

Now, Santa Claus cookies are very clearly for Christmas. But what if you celebrate other winter holidays or no holidays at all? Well, my grandmother would send her sister's family "Old Man" cookies as they are Jehovah's Witnesses. My husband had the brilliant idea several years ago to transform Santa into a Rebbe for Hanukkah. To do this, we only filled the cookie cutter with dough up to the hat brim. Then we added an addition rectangle of dough to the top for a shtreimel. The resulting cookies weigh in at 70 grams - 50g face and beard, 20g shtreimel (in case anyone is keeping track).

The dough turned out slightly softer this year, so the cookies flattened out a bit in the oven, but overall, I was pleased. After about an hour an a half, I had 19 cookies cooling on the racks. Now, if I had had time, I could have decorated them right away. As I didn't, I wrapped them up and put them in the freezer. These cookies freeze amazingly well both undecorated and decorated.

Day three of the process came three days later. I pulled the cookies from the freezer then got things prepared for decorating. Part of what makes these cookies so special is that each one is hand decorated. What you will need for this is red and blue food coloring, shredded coconut (I whiz it in a food processor to make it into smaller shreds otherwise the beards and eyebrows look particularly wild and unkempt), and white icing. I always make my seven-minute icing, as Grandma taught me. I suppose you could cheat and use store-bought icing, but I wouldn't. 

Before I get going with the icing, I paint the Santas (and Rebbes). Santa gets red food coloring very slightly diluted with water painted on his hat with a small paintbrush and they all get a dot of red for their mouths. Then, I dilute the red with a lot more water and add a light blush to their winter-kissed cheeks and noses. I used a toothpick and undiluted blue food coloring to paint in eyes.

Then, it's time for the icing. Here's Grandma's recipe:
 

2 egg whites, 1 cup sugar, 1/8 tsp. cream of tartar, 1/4 cup water, 1 tsp vanilla

Again, minimalist, and this one definitely needs some instructions. Mix all the ingredients together in the top of a double boiler. For me, that means the Pyrex bowl that fits very well on top of my Revereware pot, which I fill 2/3 of the way with water. Let the water come up to nearly a boil then turn down the burner and put the bowl of icing ingredients on top of the pot.

Mix constantly at low speed with a hand mixer for seven minutes, making sure that you get around the edges and that you don't let the water in the pot below boil over.

Remove from the heat but leave the frosting bowl over the pot to keep it warm. If you have a pastry bag, put about 1/3 of the frosting into it. I don't have a pastry bag, so I use whatever type of plastic bag I have at the time and snip off the corner. 

I trace over the eyebrows and mustache and under the mouth with the piped frosting and fill in the hat band and pompom.

I do just a few at a time so the frosting doesn't set up before I'm done. Then I carefully lift Santa, hold him by the sides of his face, and slather his beard with frosting using a butter knife.

I then cover the entire top of the cookies with coconut. I press it down gently into the frosting before flipping the old man upside down and tapping the back of his head with a spoon to get rid of the extra coconut. And there we have it!

I've tried various things for the Rebbe's shtreimel over the years. First I tried dying coconut with black food coloring (read I had my husband try it). That was a mess. The next year, I tried crushing up chocolate cookies. That worked okay but was a bit chunky. This year, I tried sending the chocolate animal cookies through Grandma's meat grinder, thinking it would make nice consistent chunks. Well it did, but the chunks were dust-sized. So, I mixed the cookie dust with the shredded coconut. It turned out okay, but I think I'll try something new next year. I just don't know what yet. 

I left the cookies on the board in the oven overnight to dry then packaged them up. 

Whew! They do take a lot of effort but I love making them every year. And friends and family seem to enjoy getting them. I've been told they are too pretty to eat and I reply that I put so much work in them, you'd better eat them! I recommend eating them from the hat down.

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!

Grandma's Cranberry Relish

I just finished making this year's batch of cranberry relish for Thanksgiving. It's one of the only dishes I always make for the holiday. The rest of the meal is whatever I feel like making that particular year. The funny thing is that when I was a kid, I didn't like cranberry relish. Every year Grandma would make a big old bowl of it for Thanksgiving dinner and I would go for the can-shaped cranberry sauce instead. My tastes have certainly evolved over time. I never liked baked macaroni and cheese (despised it, in fact) or lasagna back then either but I do now. And I love the tangy relish too, though I still have a soft spot for uber-processed jelled circular sauce.

The recipe for Grandma's Cranberry Relish is not at all a secret. It's on nearly every bag of fresh cranberries: a bag of cranberries and an orange all ground up and mixed with 1/2 cup of sugar. Her recipe is slightly different, as is mine, in that we include an apple as well. I think she liked using a Granny Smith apple. Sometimes she'd put in a lemon too. This year I had Honey Crisp apples in the fridge, so that's what I used. 

The real secret to making the most amazing cranberry relish ever is in the tools. Years before Grandma passed away, she gave me one of her old Universal meat grinders. This heavy metal tool from the early 20th century is essential for getting the perfect grind. I've never made this cranberry relish with any other tool. The bag recipe says to use a food processor, but I don't think that would work as well. 

Another tool I use in making this relish is not at all necessary but has become a decade-spanning tradition in our household. That is the wide, low stoneware bowl my husband got from his uncle. It fits beautifully under the grinder.

Once all (both) the tools are gathered, the relish takes literally minutes to make. Rinse the cranberries and sort out any bad ones, then thoroughly wash the orange and the apple. Core and slice the apple and cut the orange into wedges. Note: do not peel the orange! Then send everything through the grinder. I like to alternate the cranberries and fruit slices, but that's not necessary. Take your time and listen to the sounds of the cranberries popping, the apples crushing, and the oranges squeaking through the screw drive of the grinder. 

All too soon, you will have a full, beautiful bowl of perfectly ground fruits. This year, the orange was a particularly juicy one, so I drained off a lot of liquid. Then I added just under a half cup of white sugar. I tasted it and added a little more. And that's it! Grandma's Cranberry Relish!

I spooned the relish into two containers and put them directly into the freezer since Thanksgiving is still two weeks away. Grandma would often make gallons of the stuff when the cranberries were on sale for the holiday and fill a dozen frosting containers that she had saved throughout the years. That way, anytime she roasted a chicken or other large chunk of meat, she could pull some relish out of the freezer and make it a festive meal. I don't make a lot of cranberry relish at a time. I really like the seasonality of it. We only use one container for Thanksgiving, however, so the second container is a nice addition to a meal later on.

I really miss my Grandma but I feel her with me every time I make her cranberry relish.

Enjoying the Vegetables of Our Labor

 Every evening after dinner, my husband and I go out to the garden. Nearly every single day since the end of June, we have picked something while there. Sometimes it was just a handful of snap peas. Other times, it filled that nice old square gathering basket we've had for years. It's been a lovely, steady stream of fresh produce filling our refrigerator. So, what have we done with our harvest?

The daily haul on July 27, 2024

Pak Choi

Our first bulk harvest in June was the pak choi. We cooked up most of the little greens with some butter beans (from a can), garlic, herbs, and a touch of vinegar to make a fairly hearty dish. A sprinkle of bacon bits really made it.

Beets

People either love or hate beets. I happen to love them. This year, I planted some beet seeds that have been sitting in my seed collection for several years. I wasn't sure if any would actually grow, but they did. The vast majority of the small crop were chioggia beets, which have lovely interior rings like a target. There were also two or three Detroit dark red beets in the mix. I picked them in two rounds. The first batch I cooked whole in our Instant Pot, skinned them, then sliced them up. I toasted a couple rounds of naan, spread a mix of mayonnaise and feta cheese on them, layered on the beet slices and sprinkled it all with fresh thyme. Sooooo good!

A couple weeks later, I picked the rest of the beets, Instant Pot-ed and peeled them again, then used them to make pickled beet eggs. The recipe is simple. I put 1cup of cider vinegar, 1 cup of water, half a cup of sugar, and a teaspoon of salt together in a pan and heated it until everything dissolved. I also sliced up the one and only Detroit beet and added it to the pan. The chioggia are a light pink color when cooked and I worried they wouldn't dye the eggs that beautiful fuchsia. I put six hard boiled eggs and the whole chioggia beets into a glass canning jar and poured the vinegar mixture on top. After a few days in the fridge, we pulled them out and had very tasty pickled beet eggs.

Eggs and beets ready to soak up that pickle-y goodness.

That color just three days later!

Green Beans

Actually, they're Royal Burgundy garden beans, but they cook up green. I really love these purple beans because of how well they grow and because they have a built-in cooking indicator - as soon as they turn from deep purple to a beautiful bright green, they are cooked just the right amount. No squishy, overcooked beans! 

My husband is not a huge fan of green beans, so I just had four plants this year. It was still enough for several lunches for me (and the plants are still making beans). One nice way to use them is in ramen. I put a pack of instant soy sauce flavored ramen noodle in a pan with the seasoning pack and enough water to cover the noodles. I then put whole trimmed purple beans around the edges of the noodles before turning on the stove. As the water starts to heat up, I crack a whole egg on top, then put on the lid and let it all come to a boil. As soon as it does, I stir up the egg to make sure it cooks all the way. Within another minute or two the noodles, egg, and beans are all cooked just right.

Green bean and egg ramen with a side of cucumbers and dill.

Cucumbers

For the last month, nearly every meal has had a side of cucumbers - and I love that! This year, I planted a mix of old Chicago Pickling cucumber and Garden Bush Pickle Hybrid cucumber seeds. I'm not sure which ones actually grew, but they are all lovely. I eat them dipped in hummus, swimming in a light vinegar brine as quick-pickles, and mixed with sour cream.

Cucumber slices with sour cream and dill looks a bit slimy but is very tasty.

I also diced them up in salads. For one salad, I used a bag of riced cauliflower as a base. I added diced cucumber, tomato, pepperoncini pepper, and avocado (not from our garden) and dressed it with a little oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper, and fresh flat leaf parsley. 

So cool and fresh on a hot summer day.

Honestly, most of the cucumbers were consumed straight from the fridge all on their own.

Mmmm. Crunchy.

Tomatoes

I didn't start my own tomato seed this year. Instead, I got a grape tomato and a Supersteak tomato plant from a small local garden center. Both have produced a prodigious amount of fruit, though they have been slow to ripen. This is a good thing, however, so we're not overwhelmed by tomatoes. Even so, the grape tomatoes have become a breakfast staple for me, slice up with cottage cheese and fresh chives. 

A breakfast of champions.

 The beefsteaks are perfect for slicing on sandwiches, and that is exactly what we've been doing with them. Toasted white bread, spread with a layer of mayonnaise, topped with thick slices of tomato, and sprinkled with chiffonaded basil. There is no better seasonal treat.

Summer on toast.

Herbs

I've tried to add fresh herbs to as much as I can this summer, which has become much easier since moving some of them from the garden to our new patio container garden. But what we can't use fresh needs to be preserved for the long dark winter. I've dried two rounds of herbs so far, with at least on more batch to be done later in the fall. I have also made pesto to put in the freezer. I went online and found a good basic recipe - 2 cups fresh basil leaves, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 1 small garlic clove, 1/4 teaspoon salt, black pepper to taste, 1/4 cup of oil, and 1/4 cup of grated Parmesan cheese (I don't bother with the pine nuts) - whipped up a batch and then carefully scooped it into a silicone ice cube tray. Each cube is about 1 1/2 tablespoons of pesto. Into the freezer it went. Once they set up, I popped the cubes out of the tray and put them into a sealed container back in the freezer.

One batch down, several more to go. We have A LOT of basil.

Squash

And finally, the squash and zucchini. I love them in so many ways - diced up and sauteed with garlic and herbs, sliced and coated in cornstarch then fried, layered in long slabs instead of noodles in lasagna (we haven't done that one yet because it's been so hot this summer!). A perennial favorite in our house this year has been to spiralize them into zoodles (or squoodles, I guess, depending on variety).  

Zoodles and squoodles together.

These thin-cut curling veggies can then be cooked and topped like spaghetti. I made a nice dish of the mixed yellow squash and zucchini noodles with sliced faux chicken cutlets and several blocks of our homemade pesto.

So creamy and fresh.

I'm going to be so sad when our harvest finally ends and we have to go back to flavorless off-season grocery store produce.

Putting Up Our Harvest

Years ago, when we lived on the mountain, we had to buy a chest freezer to store all the extra produce from our garden. We have no plans on plugging that freezer in this year but we still have more vegetables from the garden than we can eat fresh. So, here are some of the things we did with the extra veggies.

So many tomatoes!

I intended to make a big batch of cucumber pickles when it wasn’t too hot out. Unfortunately, we had a very dry spell after a very wet spell and that stressed out the plants enough that the cucumbers went bitter. I felt really bad throwing dozens of cucumbers into the compost but they just weren’t edible. I did have a small heap of cucumbers from before the plants turned. There weren’t enough to warrant pulling out the water-bath canner so I made a small batch of freezer pickles instead.

I used the recipe for Freezer Dills in the book Farm Anatomy by Julia Rothman. (This is a great little book, by the way, with lots of basic information and beautiful illustrations.) The recipe is also available on Grit magazine’s website.  I have yet to try them but I’m sure they will be a wonderful treat when the snow starts flying.

Pickles in the freezer

I also decided to pickle turnips. I had not heard of pickled turnips before but the power of Google showed me that they were, indeed, a thing. So, I decided to give them a try. There are a bunch of recipes available online. I ended up using one from Eating Well. I filled two quart jars and look forward to trying them.

Turnip pickles

Back in June I made two jars of pak choi refrigerator pickles. We got into them last week. They are very vinegary (maybe a bit too vinegary for some people’s tastes) but they are really good on hotdogs. The white stem parts are nice and crunchy. I’m definitely going to plant more pak choi next year.

During the winter, I bring soup to work every day for lunch. During the summer, it feels odd to make soup but with all the wonderful fresh vegetables coming out of the garden I had to make a batch of minestrone soup. There are a lot of recipes out there for summer minestrone. The August issue of Cooking Light magazine has a good recipe and it happened into my mailbox just as I was wondering what to do with all my veggies. Homegrown carrots, green onions, tomatoes, squash, green beans and chard all went into my massive soup pot along with cannellini beans and ditalini pasta to make a wonderfully hearty soup. We ate some for dinner and I put the rest (three quart-bags full) into the freezer for later.

Bags of summer minestrone in the freezer

We are currently being inundated with tomatoes. I love fresh tomatoes on sandwiches and salads but it’s beginning to get out of hand. I don’t want to throw out any because I didn’t get to use them in time. So, today I made some tomato juice. I was going for tomato sauce but we didn’t grow sauce tomatoes so it was a bit more watery. No problem. The juice will be a great base for soups and sauces. All I did was cut up the tomatoes and simmer then for about 45 minutes. Then I pushed them through a sieve with a wooden spoon to get rid of the skins and seeds. (This is one time when I really miss my mom’s old food mill.) I then put the juice into zip-top sandwich bags in 1-cup servings. I laid them flat on a cookie sheet and put them in the freezer. Once they are frozen, I will transfer them to a gallon size freezer bag.

From tomatoes...

...to tomato juice ready for the freezer.

And since I was heating up the house to process the tomatoes anyway, I decided to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. And yes, I did put two dozen of them up in the freezer so we wouldn’t just eat them all!

Mmm...cookies!

And a cardinal, just because.

So Much Veg!

Now that we’re deep into the summer, it seems like everything is coming ripe in the garden. This evening I picked tomatoes, cucumbers, garden peas, beans, zucchini and some chives. It had been two whole days since I picked anything so of course we had a pair of Moby Dills (aka overgrown cucumbers.)

Thar she blows!

Every day I can come from the garden with a handful of beans. I’ve started to plan meals around what is ready to pick. Tonight’s dinner was tuna sandwiches with fresh early girl tomato slices and green beans and pear tomatoes on the side. The other day I picked beans, tomatoes and tarragon for a nicoise salad. Lunches have been random mixtures of whatever veggies are on hand on top of lettuce or rice depending on if I feel like a hot or cold lunch. Snacks are snap peas and cucumber slices with hummus.

At the moment we are hovering on the edge of having more veg than I know what to do with. There are five zucchini in the fridge along with a quart bag of beans, another of snap peas, a bowl of shelled peas, large sacks of cucumbers, turnips and beets and a small bag of chard. The chard still in the garden is actually bouncing back from the fungal infection. I had to trim out a lot of infected leaves but those that are still standing look good. I would cut some more but there is still so much other greenery already picked that needs to be eaten.

The colors are so lovely!

I am hesitant to start freezing things for a couple of reasons. First of all it is in the high 80s this week. It doesn’t take that long to blanch some veggies but I cannot bring myself to heating up the house any more than I have to. Second, I really like the taste of fresh vegetables. Things like zucchini and snap peas freeze well enough but they are never quite the same when thawed. Green beans and greens like chard are just as good after freezing but, again, I don’t want to heat up the house getting them prepped for storage. And, of course, cucumbers can’t be frozen at all. I plan on making some pickles eventually when it cools down a bit. So, for the foreseeable future, every meal and snack will be filled with fresh veggies. That’s not so bad.

Other garden updates: the corn is tasseling out and the ground around the potatoes is pushing up and cracking. We pulled out all the kale. I tempted fate and didn’t bother with row covers so the cabbage worms got their fill. The fennel is starting to put on a good show. I don’t know if it’ll have time to bulk up though. The rattlesnake beans are going crazy. We’re going to use them as shell beans. The eggplant and peppers are finally starting to put on flowers and the strawberries are doing their best to fill their entire bed. So far, so good. I think my garden’s first year is well on its way to be called a success.

Rattlesnake beans

Tiny pepper

Tiny spider

Beefsteak tomatoes

Robins!

Strawberries ready to take over the world

Huh?

Rabbit family out for an evening bask