checkerboard cookies

Not hard. Really. These cookies, which both look interesting and taste really good (ask Nate, my QA) just take a little time and planning. There is a fair bit of shaping and chilling, followed by more shaping and chilling, and then even more chilling. But they’re worth it! In fact, all of the chilling/shaping/chilling makes these cookies very easy to make during the week. Just split the stages up between days or mornings and evenings. I’ve heard that the dough also freezes well, but I’ve never tried it. Don’t be intimidated!!! Just take it one stage at a time.

Both a high altitude version and a sea level version are here. If only one measurement is listed, it applies to both.

COLORADO (High altitude) ||  EVERYONE ELSE

Ingredients:

White Dough:

2  1/4 cups all-purpose flour || 2  1/6 cups a.p. flour

1/2 tsp. baking power

1/2 tsp salt

1  1/2 sticks unsalted butter, softened || 2 sticks unsalted butter, softened

2 cups sugar

1/2 tbsp vanilla

1 egg, room temperature

Chocolate Dough:

2 generous cups all-purpose flour || 2  1/4 cups a.p. flour

1/2 cup cocoa powder

1/2 tsp. baking power

1/2 tsp salt

1  3/4 sticks unsalted butter, softened || 2 sticks unsalted butter, softened

2 cups sugar

1/2 tbsp vanilla

1 egg, room temperature

Directions:

Stage 1: Mixing (45 minutes)

(Mix the white and chocolate doughs separately! Resist the temptation to mix all of the similar ingredients into one big batch, and just add the cocoa powder to half of it. That’ll make your chocolate dough very dry and likely to crack in the oven. You need to have the slight differences between the recipes, especially at altitude but at sea level too.)

Sift flour, baking power, and salt together. (For the chocolate dough, sift it in as well.) Set aside.

Cream the softened butter and sugar (i.e. beat together with a mixer until smooth.) Add the egg and vanilla, and beat until well-mixed.

Add the flour mixture into the butter/sugar/egg/vanilla mixture in stages. If using a handheld mixer, be prepared to do most of this by hand. (It may be easier to literally do it by hand: reach in and gently knead the dough until the flour, etc. is mixed in and the dough is holding together. Not a good cookie-making practice, but hey, it works.)

Split the dough in half. Form both halves into rectangles, and use a rolling pin to roll one to 12″x5″ and the other to 12″x6″. Use a ruler – the dimensions matter! Wrap in plastic wrap and put on a cookie sheet, then put the cookie sheet into the refrigerator. Chill for at least two hours to a full day or overnight.

At the end of Stage 1, you should have four rectangles: two chocolate and two white.

Stage 2: Cutting Checkerboard Strips (30 minutes)

Pull one of the 12″x”5″ rectangles out of the fridge. Cut into nine strips, each a 1/2″ wide. Use a ruler! This is the nitpicky stage. Use dough scraper or a pizza cutter to cut the strips, but do not separate yet. Wrap back up in plastic wrap and put the dough back in the fridge. Repeat with the other 12″x5″ rectangle. Chill for at least two hours.

At the end of Stage 2, you should have two rectangles, one white and one chocolate, cut into 9 strips. You should also have two other rectangles still untouched.

Stage 3: Making the Checkerboard (30 minutes)

Pull the “stripped” rectangles out of the fridge. This is one of the fun parts.

Form three rows of alternating strips, one row on top of another. Click here for a very useful diagram from another recipe (actually the one I used and tweaked.) When finished, wrap in wax paper or plastic wrap, and chill for at least two hours.

At the end of Stage 3, you should have two logs of alternating strips, and two rectangles still hanging out in the fridge.

Stage 4: Wrapping the Logs (20 minutes)

Pull out the logs and the 12″x6″ rectangles. Their time to shine has finally come. Unwrap the white rectangle and place on a sheet of wax paper.  Place the log with five chocolate strips in the center, long sides parallel with the long sides of the rectangle. Use the wax paper to wrap the white dough around all four sides of the log, pressing firmly. Roll to each side several times to create defined corners, and make sure the seam between the two edges of the rectangle is smooth. Wrap tightly in the wax paper, and stick it back in the fridge. Repeat with the chocolate rectangle and the log with five white strips. Chill for at least two hours.

At the end of Stage 4, you should have two logs, wrapped.

Stage 5: FINALLY, the Baking

Preheat the oven to 350 and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Pull one of the logs out of the fridge and use a very sharp knife to cut 1/4″ slices. Space the slices on the cookie sheet about 1″ apart. Once the slices fill up the pan, rewrap the log and put it back in the fridge before opening the oven. The chill factor is key to these cookies retaining their shape.

Bake for 10-11 minutes, or until the edges of the white-bordered cookies have just a hint of brown. Remove from the oven. Allow the cookies to cool on the pan for 5-10 minutes, then put on a cooling rack.

Store in an airtight container once cooled. Makes between 6-7 dozen.

all done, so good.

Round lemon cookies, dusted with powdered sugar. I tweaked this recipe and this one too. I wanted cookies exactly like the Christmas cookies but with a refreshing lemon accent instead of a nutty flavor. The recipe on the first link is great, but I’m not an icing person, and I had to adjust for altitude. Two big powdered-sugar-covered thumbs up.

This recipe makes about 30 cookies. If I were taking them somewhere, like a potluck or the office, I’d probably double it as these are bite-size.

COLORADO (high altitude) VERSION || EVERYONE ELSE

(unless otherwise noted, amounts are the same for all altitudes)

—–

1 1/3 c. flour || 1 1/4 c. flour

1/4 tsp. baking powder

1/8 tsp. salt

6 tbsp. butter, softened || 1/2 c. butter, softened

1/4 powdered sugar

2 tbsp. scant granulated sugar

~1/3 cup lemon zest

2 tbsp. lemon juice

1/2 tbsp. water (for mixing) || do not add water below 3000 ft.

—-

Mix flour, baking powder, and salt together in a small bowl. Set aside.

Beat sugars, butter, and lemon zest together with a mixer on medium to high, until light and fluffy (approx. five minutes.)

Add lemon juice and beat into butter/sugar mix.

Slowly add the flour mixture, beating on low speed. Add water if necessary (but only if you’re baking at over 3000 ft.)

Roll dough into small 1″  balls and place on a parchment-paper-covered cookie sheet.

Chill for a half hour.

Preheat oven to 375 (a bit higher at high altitude) and bake for 10-12 minutes. Do not overbake, and don’t let them get brown!

Remove from the pan and allow to cool slightly. Roll in powdered sugar, allow to cool completely, and then roll again to get a good coating.

Store in a closed container, etc…

I looked at the lingere websites, and one wishes that in the interest of women everywhere, the greenies could have a confab with a few feminists and quit equating sexy with silent or childlike.

Also from the post:

Entitled “Eco Ways To Romance Your Partner,” it is an emetic little digest of eco-friendly sex tips. Do you and your heartthrob like chocolate? Why not: the “Aztecs believed that chocolate had aphrodisiac qualities.” Oh, well then, if the Aztecs thought so, go for it, right? But be sure to procure “organic and sustainable brands.” (Didn’t the Aztecs also believe in ripping the beating hearts out of young virgins in order to propitiate the sun god? Well, never mind.)

I raise my glass and give a hearty if silent cheer to that one. By all means buy organic if thats where your heart lies, but I personally would look for fair trade chocolate first!

No, it’s not intellectually honest to throw out the Aztec beliefs about chocolate with the Aztec child-sacrificing theology. You shouldn’t dismiss the entirety of a culture simply because of one unacceptable point, but that’s not Kimball’s point. The advertisement in question plays on the infatuation in the West with the State of Nature (Rousseau, not Hobbes) which assumes that the wisdom of a long-passed native people is naturally better than ours and totally more in tune with Nature. Minus the child sacrifices and horrific cruelty to conquered peoples. The ad has nothing to do with Aztecs, and everything to do with thoughtless yuppie sensibilities.

Back here in Colorado, Nate and I went to an IMAX presentation of Wild Ocean last weekend. There’s a spot on the western coast of Africa, KwaZulu-Natal, that has a ton of marine life, largely because massive schools of sardines get swept close to the coast where all sorts of predators can easily reach them. In fact, the sardines come so close that they are literally swept up on to the beach, and the local villagers were shown wading into the water with milk crates, aprons, plastic bags, anything, and coming out loaded down with fresh fish. A true boon for all involved. (Well, except the sardines.)

It’s just too bad that the sustainable fishing boats won’t stop doing business. Several clips of the film showed fishermen using eco-friendly nets, and then a child opening a can of sardines. If only, the narrator laments, all countries would make at least 20% of their waters into marine reserves!

While the impression from the film is that these waters are not protected, they are. And while the sardines haven’t shown up yet this year, it’s largely due to an unusual cool streak in the weather. Not the fishermen.

For a film that was so clearly ideological, I felt it was incomplete and I left with the question of the future of coastal villages. If a coast is declared a reserve, it could significantly affect the lives of people in nearby villages, so what is done to offset the change?

Never mind that. The movie ended and the audience wound way out of the theater, feeling rather like the sardines just observed. A five-year-old behind me was excited and called out, “That was a very ecological movie! I got a mini eco-system for Christmas last year!”

It’s like a religion.

On the flip side: Colorado is way more eco-friendly than Ohio, sometimes annoyingly so, but it is a welcome change. For example, there are entire tracts of land untouched by developers, left as “open space.” If you’ve ever lived in a rural area and seen it overgrown with shops and pavement, you’ll appreciate those open spaces. Things like that make sense. Companies like the one I work for, which makes energy conservation easy and economically smart, make sense. Hopefully, similar philosophies will trickle back to the Buckeye state.

Overall, I think everyone in every state drives more or less the same, with customized idiocy depending on the state’s traffic laws.

This was the rainiest June since the mid-nineteenth century, I’m told. Seemed perfectly normal fine to me. The sun will bake you here in a way you don’t feel in Ohio, and the humidity is wonderfully low. I hear that once things dry out a little, all the bugs will die, and this is the up side to watching everything turn brown and yellow.

New toy: banneton, for making longer, slender loafs. With the holes in the pan, you can bake the bread on it, cooking the crust evenly. It makes a big difference.

Tonight I made pizza marguerite, and it was amazing. Pizza dough, a tiny bit of sauce, mozarella, thin-sliced tomatos, and basil. Sooo good.

We watched the American Masters show on Garrison Keillor while we ate. At the end, he talked about stupid, simple realizations that a person comes to, like when he walked out of the hospital after holding his newborn daughter for the first time. Something so significant, yet so commonplace. Everyone comes into the world, after all, he said, in much the same way, but now, seeing his own child, it was so extraordinary. Keillor said that he used to fear having just an ordinary life, but that is more or less what we all end up with – and it’s plenty good enough.

As my pizza-filled hubby and I watched TV in our spare bedroom while sitting in collapsible outdoor nylon chairs, I had to agree.

Work: I have a job, and I start Monday. I’ll be working at Tendril, an energy conservation company in Boulder that is doing some rather cool things (check out their website here.) They make thermostats and other devices that allow consumers to see details regarding their energy usage, with both economic and environmental benefits. (That green color is the color of an accent wall in every room of the office. Good thing I like green.) I’m excited. What exactly I’ll do is still to be determined, but I know it will draw on all of my work experience so far: customer service, networking, and engineering services. I’m looking forward to Monday, obviously a little anxious too… new jobs do that to you.

Colorado: We like our new state. It’s gorgeous, obviously, and so far it has rained almost every evening. Sunny in the morning, gathering clouds in the late afternoon, and finally the rain, which dramatically cools everything off. Apparently this weather pattern is very unusual and has CO residents a little flustered. Now I just tell people that I brought the rain from Ohio. They usually laugh.

Last weekend we went up into the mountains, specifically to Estes Park. At a mile and a half above sea level, you really begin to feel the difference in altitude, something I hadn’t entirely noticed before then. And then when we got home, we went biking… never mind those twelve mile rides in Ohio, I’m beat after five miles here. Part of it is the altitude and part of it is the hills. You can’t bike without going up some decent hills here, and I consciously avoided those back in Dayton. Combine those two factors, and those five miles are a good workout, at least for me. Our current regular path takes us to a field full of prairie dogs. They aren’t nearly as happy to see me as I am to see them.

Bread: Tried three new things lately.

I made coconut milk sugar rolls, and they turned out pretty good. I think I’ll make them again. Every twist of fate was against them, it seemed: I got the wrong kind of coconut (sweetened instead of dried), they rose too much, and the oven overheated. Zapped all the sugar and fat into a dark brown. But they’re not unhealthy, and the little hint of coconut flavor makes them good even on their own.

I gave yorkshire teacakes a shot, substituting blueberries for the raisins the recipe required. The goal was something like a scone but less fattening. Whether that was achieved or not, I don’t know, but they’re good. Not as good, however, as the raisin bread, so we’ll see if I make them again.

I don’t remember the exact name of the Italian bread I made last weekend, but it used a biga and four tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. I didn’t quite taste the “earthy, yeasty” flavor that the recipe promised, but it was a solid bread, decent texture, and it would be great for bread bowls. Too heavy for accompanying spaghetti or any other meal, though. That recipe gets filed away for later.

In its piece on the new AEI study on college graduation, USA Today says that “hundreds of colleges are failing to graduate a majority of their students within six years.”

Why is it a failing of the college if a student doesn’t do what he needs to in order to graduate? A more accurate way of stating the matter would be to say that a large percentage of students who enroll in college find out that they can’t or don’t want to complete the work (minimal as it often is) to earn enough credits to graduate. They’re the ones who failed to do something, not the schools.

-George Leef

See, I find this attitude a bit irritating.

Granted, the world may be full of lazy students who ooze their way through college with nary a thought to applying themselves. Maybe it takes them longer, maybe they don’t care, maybe they weren’t meant for college… ok. I agree that college is not for everyone (a point made regularly on PBC) and there are certainly students who lack motivation. I’ve heard enough from my friends in teaching to believe that.

But it seems odd, and deliberately blind, to assume that all students who fail to graduate within six years are lazy bums.

My suggestion? Follow the money. Higher education is not cheap. I’ve known several students who took over six years to earn their degrees, primarily because of funding issues. One might ask why they failed to earn a scholarship or two, but this question is out of touch with reality. Scholarships are great, but they don’t necessarily increase in proportion to tuition hikes, making them useful but hardly a final answer. (And if you go to a school like my alma mater, where the budget places a higher priority on lamppost banners and teak deck furniture than on scholarships, you’re lucky to get any money at all.)

Some students, rather than take out massive loans and graduate in debt, take time off to work or attend part time while working. This kicks back the graduation date, but when they graduate, they’re in a better position overall. (Full disclosure: I did not follow that plan when I was an undergrad – but I am as a grad student!)

Oh, and did I forget to mention that some undergrad programs are intentionally five to six years in length? Hmmm. What about programs that include co-ops or internships, which provide experience but may also delay graduation until after the four year mark?

And then there’s the question of what kind of students we’re talking about: traditional or non-traditional? Students with responsibilities and priorities outside of their educational goals, especially adults with families, will probably take longer to complete their degrees. Does their inability to become fully dedicated students make them lazy and irresponsible?

But that doesn’t matter. The only concern is the sacred graduation rate, which supposedly shows the educational success of a university. Since when was education judged by manufacturing standards? A factory that creates x number of products in a specific period of time is successful. Is a university that creates x number of graduates in a specific period of time also successful – or is education just a wee bit different?

I realize that it is important for students to work hard. It is not to a student’s advantage to remain in school perpetually, especially if they’re looking to begin a career. And like I said earlier, there are plenty of people for whom college is not the answer, whether because of interest or ability. A-okay.

That being said, I seriously question the standard of a graduation rate as the final standard by which we judge an institution’s, or a student’s, success, for all the above reasons.

Are we really moving to Colorado? I’m going to miss the trees of Ohio and I’ll even miss the humidity. Every time I go out to Colorado I’m less willing to come back, but it’s strangely comforting to step out of the Dayton airport and feel the embrace of humid air.

Update: Mover rep came, made notes, and left. All that paperwork will have to get faxed to the headquarters in Denver on Monday (so I’m thinking it will probably be Tuesday) and then I can call Denver to schedule the actual packing date. Aaarrrgghh, we were so hoping to have a date today! There are all these half-made plans that can only be finished once we have a schedule. I hate it when things are entirely outside of my control.

Commence reciting list of reasons that a having moving company is a good thing. It is, very much. And I’m grateful. And we will get there.

Bread: The first bread experiment wasn’t bad and it was definitely edible, but not the Cheesecake Factory bread. The color was right, but there was too much cocoa powder for my taste and I don’t think the molasses did the trick. So, I have another 1 lbs. loaf in the machine now, with honey instead of molasses, but it’s not rising like it should… oh well. I think it might be this packet of yeast. The French bread I made earlier today wasn’t rising much either.

Soon: I just finished reading a book titled Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, by Kathryn Joyce. There’s a lot floating in my head regarding feminism, it’s impact on the world, reformed theology, how Christians deal with gender, life decisions and priorities, and if that wasn’t enough, how society values children. It’s all going to get thrown onto this blog. Hopefully it will be organized.

So, I’m giving it a shot… we’ll see how it turns out.