Brought to You By the Letter S

My younger son's class at day care is discussing the letter S this week. They've made sock puppets, painted spiders, played with stickers and sand, and talked about the sun and smiling. I thought it was a good excuse to make square shortbread cookies with silver sugar stars. My son isn't actually old enough to eat the cookies, but, you know, I'm just trying to support the school.... and perhaps getting to eat the broken ones was an added incentive.

Shortbread is remarkably simple: just butter, sugar, vanilla, salt, and flour. I say "just" butter, but in truth it's an ungodly amount of butter. But, wow, the buttery-ness! My best friend and I were discussing fruit crumbles once and she said, "yeah, a stick of butter makes pretty much anything taste phenomenal." Indeed, a stick (or, ahem, a stick and a half) makes for a divine dessert.

Let's just hope this batch makes it to day care.  

Canning

I’ve been on a canning kick lately. It started with a recipe for peach butter that Deb at Smitten Kitchen posted. It was so, so good. I ate a spoonful  every morning in my oatmeal and it was hard to resist dipping the spoon in the jar at other times. My stores of peach butter started to run low right when the farmers’ market was packed full of delectable local apples. I brought home several bags and made some apple butter without a recipe. It was… meh.

I’d been craving lemon, so on Friday, I made a lemon raspberry marmalade.

It was a bit too sweet. I think I’ll leave out a tiny bit of sugar if I make it again. It’s a lovely, vibrant color, though, and very lemony.  I zested the lemons, rather than grating them. Grating would make it more like orange marmalade and less like raspberry jam.

I had to wait several days for my Bartlett pears to ripen in a paper bag with bananas and apples, but today they were just the right degree of squishiness. I made this pear-cranberry butter from a 1982 New York Times recipe. It took about five hours to firm up (not 50 minutes), but I hope the butter will be worth the wait. The jars are still cooling now.