Havin’ Fun In The Kitchen

When the weather turns out its uglier face I am enjoying our kitchen.  With only 4 weeks left to Christmas, my thoughts are circling around Christmas cookies and a lot of other delicacies. First off, I started on an old family recipe: Chocolate lard cookies!  Yes, these cookies are made with lard – not butter. They are simply the best. Want to know the recipe? Ok, here it is: 1 pound of lard 1/2 pound sugar 3/4 pound all purpose flour 1 tsp, baking soda cocoa or melted chocolate chips vanilla Mix lard with sugar, add flour and all other ingredients, knead a lot like a bread. Dough must get quite solid. If too soft add more flour. Put the dough away for cooling in the fridge overnight. Next day form little balls and put on baking paper. Bake at 350F for 10 minutes. Make sure they are not overcooked, as they are gonna loose their delicate softness. Cookies will show small cracks on the surface when done. The same cookies can be done also without chocolate/cocoa but with added vanilla. Ok, another thing I did was making jelly of rosehips. These read fruits are appearing on wild roses, also called beach roses or (latin) rosa rugosa. The fruit contains a lot of pesky seeds. Now, if one wants to make jam, the seeds need to be removed, which is a lot of work. When I picked the fruits, they had gone too far and were too soft to get the seeds cleaned away. So I decided to do jelly instead. Making jelly one only has to remove the small leaves, then cook the whole stuff. I had to add a lot of water as the fruits are getting were sticky and can burn to the pot. When the fruits are all mashed and enough liquid is in the pot the whole stuff has to be put through a cheese cloth. The liquid will run through and build the base for the jelly. I had a shopping bag full of rosehips and got 2 jars of jelly out of that. Tastes delicious if you add some lemon or apple juice. Rosehips contain tons of vitamin C and are especially good during the fall season when there is an increased chance of catching a cold. A funny story about rosehips occurred when an American lady inquired during a sightseeing tour whether the red fruits would be “Beach Tomatoes”!  LOL. A little flower sticking out of a lot of brown leaves.