It was a good party season f0r homemade baked goods: this year I discovered some great cookies. This is our cookie tray from last night’s party.

Starting at the top and moving clockwise: lemon-butter wreaths from our cookie gun; Maida Heatter’s Chocolate Cracks; black walnut bars made with black walnuts from our yard; shortbread with a caramel-pecan top layer; lemon-glazed persimmon bars; jubilee wafers.

We learned a new way to “frost” the chocolate cracks, which by themselves aren’t so Christmasy, but they’re really chewy and fudgey, so you want to invite them to the party.  We add peppermint extract and frost them with Shirley Corriher’s technique: roll the dough balls in granulated sugar first, then in powdered sugar. The granulated sugar layer prevents the moisture in the cookie from wetting the powdered sugar, so the cookies stay frosty-looking.

I only make black walnut bars every couple of years. Black walnuts, they’re a lot of work. You have to gather them in either a basket (that you never want to use again for anything else) or a paper bag. Let them sit in the basement until the hulls soften and turn dark brown (and the bottom of the bag disintegrates). Pour  them onto the driveway in the tracks of the car tires. Run over them to remove the hulls. Wear gloves to pick them up and wipe them off, or even rinse them off. Back in the basket to dry. Crack with a heavy rock. Pick meticulously. One hour of picking will give you about 1 cup of nuts. Hardly anyone sells black walnuts — they’re a pain and they don’t keep well — so if you want them, you do them yourself. Their dark, almost fermented flavor is ideal for adding to a toffee cookie bar.

Lemon-glazed persimmon bars: I’ve looked for years for something to do with the persimmons that are abundant most years in the yard. In the past, I sometimes made persimmon pudding, which is a pudding in the English sense of something baked and of a soft, spoonable texture. The bars are easier to eat, to transport and to serve. They are nicely spiced, and dates add some extra chew. The recipe is from Epicurious and I love it so much I wish I could move to a persimmon island and eat them full-time.  A photo of persimmon puree.

Jubilee wafers came from the 1973 Joy of Cooking. I wanted a refrigerator dough that I could make in advance, then shape and decorate later. I’ve made every roll cookie in the Joy, I thought, but somehow I overlooked Jubilee wafers.  Jubilee wafers call for a lot of honey, a lot of spice, and half a cup of bourbon. Jubilee, I’ll say. They were also supposed to have nuts and fruit, but I left those out. It’s a chewy, spicy cookie with a little touch of jubilee. A keeper.

Not on the tray were Jennifer’s little miniature gingerbreads, made from a great Williams Sonoma Thanksgiving cookbook recipe. Good molasses flavor, lighter texture than most gingerbreads, with a little orange flavor. And Ashley’s layered stacks of sugar cookie alternating with jam. They looked like accordions, sort of, and I admired all the work that went into them, and how good they were.

For everyday miracles, nothing can match homemade bread. A little flour, water, salt and yeast transform into a a loaf of springy, warm, edible food. A miracle every time. It’s like watching a great movie: you know how it ends, but you enjoy it so much anyway.

For about 15 years, my favorite book has been Great Whole Grain Breads by Beatrice Ojakangas. Of the 200-odd recipes, I’ve prepared maybe half of them. For ten ears until 2007, I baked a loaf almost every week.

And that’s partly because of dough hooks. I wouldn’t have done it without dough hooks. The directions “Knead for 10 minutes until smooth and elastic”? Might as well be in Norwegian for all I follow them. I just put it in the bowl and let the dough hooks do the rest.

This oat and wheat loaf has been my workhorse because it has all the qualities you could ask for in a loaf of homemade bread. It’s easy to mix, hard to mess up, and the recipe doubles perfectly. The bread is multigrain and also tastes great, the loaves keep well, freeze well and when it goes slightly stale, it makes great toast.

Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Bread

2/3 cup rolled oats

2 cups boiling water

1/2 cup nonfat dry milk

1/4 to 1/2 cup packed brown sugar (more if you’re a sweet tooth, less if you’re not)

1/4 cup butter or vegetable oil

1 teaspoon salt

1 package (2 teaspoons) yeast

1/4 cup warm water

1 teaspoon sugar

6 cups flour, white or a combination of white and whole wheat

Combine the oats and water in a large bowl. Add the milk, sugar, butter and salt and cool for about 20 minutes until you can hold your finger in the mixture for a count of 20.

Combine the water and yeast and let stand until foamy. Add to the oat mixture, then stir in 5 to 5  1/2 cups of the flour to make a stiff dough. Knead or use dough hooks, adding remainingflour as needed to make a soft but not sticky dough. Knead 5 minutes with dough hooks until bread is smooth and satiny.

Shape the dough into aball and place in a greased bowl. Spray the top with cooking spray. Cover with a clean kitchen towel and set aside to let rise until nearly doubled, about 1 hour. Punch down the dough, divide into two and shape into loaves or rounds. Put into two greased loaf pans. Cover and let rise until puffy, a bout 45 minutes. Bake at 375 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes. Remove from pans immediately and cool completely. Makes 2 loaves.

Big Fella’s fond childhood food memories include Shake ‘N Bake chicken, and for the 19 years of our marriage, he’s not failed to bring it up at least every month.

I suppose I was meant to take the hint and buy it but it’s a fact that my fond childhood food memories do not include Shake ‘N Bake. We rednecks didn’t venture much beyond flour, salt, pepper and Crisco, because why would you want to bake a chicken when you could fry it?

So he finally bought it himself, like he finally started putting his Big Bucket into the dishwasher himself, again after waiting 19 years for me to do it.

It shakes up nice, and bakes up golden, I’ll give it that.

But the taste is so vile, and even the tiny nubbin I tried left my mouth tasting of plastic and chemicals. I had to drink a gin and tonic with extra lime to clear the taste. Big Fella got a Proustian rush from every morsel. I think it explains a lot, really.

Today I take a professional culinary exam called the CCP — Certified Culinary Professional. It’s offered by the International Association of Culinary Professionals, which is a pretty wonderful organization. It’s a funny credential: there are more neurosurgeons in the United States than there are CCPs. And I’m not sure what I’ll do with it, but it seems important to have something to show for 18 years of food writing and cookbook editing.
The CCP exam is the kind of comprehensive, 2-hour test I haven’t taken since college. It started my first-ever round of dreams about signing up for a class and never attending. So how did I prep for the exam?

Drove two kids to the country and picked 8 pounds of berries. They did a great job — they’re veteran berry-pickers, and they know that dark red is better than light red, that a slight softness is better than firm. They know how to grasp right above the berry and tug slightly to avoid bruising the fruit. They’re selective. Probably because they know they’re going to eat the berry they pick — every time I looked up from picking, and later in the car on the way home, they were shoveling unwashed berries into their mouths.

Is there anything prettier than a ripe strawberry?

Yep: a jar of homemade strawberry jam.

On a rainy late winter day, I came in from a long day away and my Precious Muffin surprised me with these extraordinary flower cookies.  She picked the recipe from American Girl magazine and she and Big Fella shopped for the ingredients. It was no short-cut slice-and-bake or box mix cookie, either, but a real toffee cookie with a chocolate chunk center. She didn’t shortcut the decorations, either. It must have taken hours. They were beautiful and really good, too. I guess she is interested in the culinary arts, after all. As with everything else, chocolate and marshmallows were key.

Like a lot of parents, I buy for Sweet Cheeks whatever toys I really, really wanted as a kid, but didn’t get.

So it was a happy Christmas for everyone in 2004 when Santa brought an Easy-Bake oven. I was so excited, er, Sweet Cheeks was initially excited, mostly about the cookies and cakes that were suddenly not just permitted, but encouraged. We worked that oven like Faberge worked those eggs, like Banksy works a wall. We made chicken spaghetticranberry orange torte with a cookie crust, pies

quiche, yellow cake, soda bread. If we were artists, it was our “Easy-Bake” period.

Like any Christmas gift, the Easy-Bake’s novelty fizzled quickly. One rainy Saturday, I pitched the idea of a cake and filling. “Let’s make sponge cake with creme anglais filling. I mean, in the Easy-Bake! Of course! Doesn’t that sound fun??!!?” And before the egg whites were even holding firm peaks, Sweet Cheeks had wandered off to play with some inferior form of entertainment.

I tried to get rid of the thing last year. Bad timing — there was a recall of Easy-Bake ovens two models newer than ours. Hysteria being what it is, there was no explaining that my oven wasn’t a threat to life and limb. It was a tough sell: “No, see, my oven is five years old, not two years old.” Tried again to sell it when the hysteria had passed. This time Sweet Cheeks protested — she liked it. So she said — it is still sitting, untouched, on the kitchen counter, collecting dust.

We were packing for a trip on a sunny day recently when I noticed that Sweet Cheeks was developing her first pimple. I’m thinking our Easy-Bake period is history.

We’ve been making Christmas cookies with our cookie gun. A gen-u-wine Ron Popeil invention, as-seen-on-TV battery-powered cookie gun. It cranks out dough in cookie shapes. For a device from the early 1970s, it’s made like a Swiss watch and performs like a dream. I think my mother-in-law bought it years ago at a garage sale. The back if the box actually says “As seen on TV.”

Anyway, we listen to Christmas radio while we work, and after you’ve heard a song 20 times, you notice there are some stoopid lyrics out there.

Start with Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody”

So here it is Merry Christmas
Everybody’s having fun
Look to the future now
It’s only just begun

I’m pretty sure, and people will back me up on this, that the future has always just begun. You’ll have a hard time finding a moment when the future isn’t, in fact, beginning. How this time/space miracle connects to Christmas is another matter altogether.

And then there’s Santa Claus, the oppressor, is Coming to TownYou better watch out/You better not cry/You better not pout/ I’m tellin’ you why…

What kind of emotional blackmailer IS this guy? Crying — it’s a sign there’s something wrong, see. You’re supposed to figure out what is making kids cry, rather than brush it off. Santa? Oh, he’s the guy who makes you repress negative feelings and then rewards you with presents.

And finally, Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer, which begins

…but do you remember
the most famous reindeer of all?

Ummm. Isn’t the definition of “famous” “having a widespread reputation”? Is that how short the American attention span is? You don’t remember the renowned large flying scarlet-proboscised mammals of yesteryear?

Anyway, we had fun, the cookies looked great and we gave them to friends, which felt good.

You know that bumper sticker that you see occasionally, “What if schools had all that money they needed and the Pentagon had to hold a bake sale”? The Pentagon would be would do well to put our local elementary school in charge of it.

It’s a bake sale in the same sense that Niagara Falls is a creek – over the top, wildly exceeding any expectations you might have. What you see here is a fraction of one table.

You’d never know that inside those SUVs, under those tennis hats beat the hearts of professional pastry chefs. Dozens of perfectly decorated cupcakes cradled in specially-designed boxes. Dozens of brownies wrapped in seasonal cellophane and decorated with seasonal trinkets like plastic spiders, as an incentive to buy. Carefully decorated cookies heaped in a basket and priced to sell for pocket money. “Dirt cake” in colorful paper cups packed with a spoon. Goodie bags of three snickerdoodles and a chocolate kiss.

Mama knows what kids like. And has a marketing degree, too.

And then there are the items designed to bring out the parents’ checkbooks. Coffeecakes, focaccia, honey-oat bread, dinner rolls, Moravian sugar cake, challah, baguettes, sourdough.

But the prize goes to the mom whose cake-baking is her therapy and who apparently owns the largest deep freezer in town.

The first year I encountered Super Baker Mom, I brought in 3 homemade cakes, which took all weekend to make, and was proud. Super Baker Mom’s offerings numbered in the double digits. It’s grown each year since, and this year, the bake sale committee had to set up risers to hold all her cakes.

Thirty one-of-a-kind, professionally decorated cakes, priced around $35 apiece. Peanut butter, chocolate, pumpkin, blueberry, more chocolate, spice. You can hear the checkbooks spreading their legs flexing. The only slow seller was banana cake. Same thing happened when I baked a banana spice cake with caramel icing and orange sparkling sugar.

I was going to document the fabulous parade of cakes, but my pathetic camera (and, let’s face it, the clueless operator) couldn’t get it all in, and then the memory card ran out of space. We raised more than $1000 — the committee doesn’t trouble my artsy head with figures.

In the world of high expectations, mine don’t seem so big. I just want an ideal recipe. And that’s what we have here.

It’s easy and it’s good and it’s fun. Seems like a simple formula, but everyone’s idea of “easy” is different. A troupe of “easy” lasagna and cheesecake recipes trudges across my desk each year. Just to clarify my position: anything with layers, anything that is wrapped, filled, or folded individually, and any recipe with sub-recipes isn’t easy. Simple, maybe. But not easy.

And don’t even get me started on “good.” (I’m looking at you, eye-watering, mouth-puckering Fresh Cranberry Cake recipe from Gourmet magazine.) Or “fun” as in Fun Greek Salad
Dream bigger people!

As a remedy, Crunchy Salt and Vinegar Potato Chip Tilapia arrived in a recipe swap. This entrée does it all – good, easy, fun. Four ingredients. Two steps. Kids will eat it. Now that’s easy and good, I don’t care how low or high your expectations are.

Crunchy Salt and Vinegar Potato Chip Tilapia

Milk (for coating)

Flour (for coating)

1 (5-ounce) bag salt and vinegar potato chips

4 tilapia or other fillets

Pour the milk in a wide, flat dish. Spread the flour in a similar dish or on waxed paper. Pour the chips into a ziptop bag and seal. Crush them to crumbs (a rolling pin works well for this.)

 Coat the fillet with milk, then flour, then milk, then potato chips. Arrange in a greased baking dish. Drizzle any leftover milk over the fish to help the coating cook onto the fish.

 Bake at 400 degrees for 12 to 13 minutes until golden.

From speed scratch to once-a-month cooking to slow food, there are so many dinner options these days. We’ve done them all, it seems.

Some of the paths in our journey to dinner were based on my job at the time –newspaper food writer, cookbook editor, college professor. Other paths were dictated by where we were living – England, United States, with my in-laws.

The main detour in our journey was my daughter, an extraordinarily picky eater who, until the age of 4 ate just a handful of food items: macaroni and cheese, chicken fingers, applesauce, sweet potatoes, fish sticks, raisins, cereal, pizza, ramen noodles, apples.

When it came time for her to eat vegetables like mommy and daddy, you can imagine her outrage. We began several months early with warnings. “When you are 4, you’ll be eating a few vegetables.”

At the time, we lived in England. There was a fennel bush at a cottage near our house. I showed Sweet Cheeks how to sneak a frond or two, and she loved the stuff. Hooray — a tiny victory in the battle to feed her carbon-based life forms!

Fennel was was plentiful, deliciously tender, and inexpensive. Thin pork scallops with fennel was one of my early triumphs – Sweet Cheeks ate this, and soon developed a taste for fresh fennel.

Pork Scallops with Fennel
2 tablespoons butter or olive oil
6 pork scallops or thin chops
6 green onions, sliced
1 cup chopped fennel tops
Lemon juice
Salt to taste
Heat the butter in a skillet over medium heat and brown the scallops, turning to cook both sides. Add the green onions, cover the pan, and cook for 7 to 8 minutes, until pork is cooked through. Add the fennel and toss to coat. Cook just until fennel wilts, then squeeze lemon over the meat. Makes 3 servings.