Almond mazurkas

It's been a while hasn't it. Chalk it up to holiday related ennui.
Here is a very yummy, mind blowingly flavorful dessert recipe for your enjoyment.

Here's a Wigilia (Christmas Eve vigil) recipe just as delicious for Inauguration Day or Martin Luther King Day.  Original recipe is from the Culinary Art's Institute Polish Cookbook: Traditional recipes tested for today's kitchens.  It's in the general desert section, love the Easter and Christmas sections too, I rely on them for preparing holiday dishes.

The Cautionary Preamble Including Sadness: I didn't have ground almonds as an ingredient so I ground my own. I soaked almonds for 2 or 3 days changing water daily, then ground without blanching/removing skins first.  I ground with lots of water in my Vitamix blender in batches. I got worried when the blender stopped.  I thought I broke it, yikes. I read the fine print on the machine later that it should start again in a half hour or so.  It did.  I used smaller batches of almonds and more water.  Maybe an actual grinder or food processor would be a more appropriate tool.  Later my husband told me that in the directions it says to add the almonds through the top while the water is in motion.  I felt like a dummy not reading first. I froze the excess of ground almonds.

When I was done with the blending I had a water slurry, I poured off the liquid  through a flour sieve, added honey to taste I stored the almond milk in the fridge.  Sadly it did not last for more than a week before fermenting.  I should have frozen some. I saved the ground, bicolored bits of almond for the recipe.  Mine were kind of chunky and irregular which we liked.

As a recipe variation I used rose water for flavoring and stirred in jam I made from rosehips earlier.  It was heavenly. Lemon would be good, or orange water, or vanilla, or a complementary liqueur?

So finally, the actual recipe:

Almond Mazurkas (Mazurek Migdalowy)

1 pound blanched almonds, ground, about 4 cups
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
2 tablespoons lemon juice ( I used rose water instead)
(I added about a 1/2 cup of rose hip jam, stirred in loosely, so you could see swirls)

Combine almonds and sugar; mix well.
Beat eggs with lemon juice until just foamy.  Stir into almond mixture.  Pour batter into a well greased 15x10x1 inch jellyroll pan.  I used parchment paper thankfully. (The finished product was as sticky as the floors of a downtown movie house circa 1978.)
Bake at 250 degrees for 1 hour, or until golden.
Cut into 2 inch squares while still warm.  Remove from pan.

We layered parchment paper and wax paper between sticky, fragile layers.  Maybe if the almonds were ground finer without the skins the squares would've held together more easily.  After they cooled they held together pretty well.

Let me know if you try this.  Do you have favorite cookie/cooky/biscuit recipes?
 

lemon lime pie

Clement & I have a long history of making published and invented variations of lemon cookies and lemon cakes.  Ever since he discovered the puckery pleasure of sucking on lemon wedges, that has become his favorite dessert flavor.  For this Thanksgiving we branched out & made a lemon pie  or tart  (texture similar to lemon squares we've bought in bakeries).  

We made some changes to a recipe published in the November 2011 issue of Glamour.  I started getting it as a substitute to longtime Domino subscription after it folded. Glamour it turn adapted it from Food52 cookbook by Hesser and Stubbs. 

The recipe calls for Meyer lemon which we didn't find in the store.  We used an organic lemon & peel & a lime (no lime  skin, I tasted it first & rejected the colored/pesticidey? yucky flavor).  We used our Vitamix blender which really pulverizes stuff to a fine consistency.

Lemon lime pie recipe
Anyhow, I peeled the lemon skin off,
put the skin & lemon minus the pith & seeds into the blender.
Added a lime, no skin, no seeds.
1.5 cups regular sugar (recipe said superfine, but the blender ground it up just as well)
1 stick soft butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 eggs (like sister Eymard taught, broken one at a time into a cup, pick out shells, toss if spoilt,
if clean & good only then toss in blender)

pulverize

pour into shell (open faced)

We made recipe for 2 shells from my first cookbook by Doubleday from about 1979

Recipe for 2 pie shells
2 cups flour
2/3 cup Crisco (we used butter flavored)
a tiny bit of icy water

cut first 2 ingredients with 2 butter knives, the a little bit of water,
mold into 2 balls, roll with rolling pin cut to fit tin.  Wisteria was a big help with the rolling. 
It's very freeing to delegate kitchen duty to offspring especially since it felt like playtime to her.

Sweet potato pie freeform recipe
The second shell we used to make invented sweet potato pie. 
So, baked sweet potatoesand/or butternut squash,
(I like the dry fluffy texture of these combined, maybe you like pumpkin, I don't so much, seems it comes out too wet/stringy for my taste, I don't like most banana breads for the same reason)
use your own good guestimate
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
some cardamon, ginger, pumpkin pie spice (which typically includes cinnamon & nutmeg)
to your taste

pour into shell (open faced)

Our oven's dial is kind of deformed,
so we baked each pie at some mediumish temperature for about 40 minutes. 
I kept checking, so things didn't burn up.
If you can regulate with some accuracy, 350 degrees is probably good.

One of my favorite sweet potatoe pie memories was a former roommate's mother coming to visit for Thanksgiving weekend.  She brough with herself 4 sweet potato pies. 4 days later they were all gone.  Before leaving Sunday she baked more to leave behind.  What a kind, gracious person.

Technical note: the blender definitely speeds things up.
But grating the skin and squeezing the juice and  mashing things up would be fine too.

Before the weekend washes away in the rain, the children and I will make a second round to ease us into the week.