Recipes

We Are In Love; Harry Connick, Jr.

I bought Betty Crocker’s Best of Baking shortly after arriving in Annapolis in 1999. I don’t remember the circumstances under which I bought it. But I zeroed in on two cookie recipes: Giant Toffee Cookies and Triple Chocolate Chunk Triple Dipped Chocolate Chip Cookies. I made a couple batches of each before going home for Christmas that year. They were a hit and they’ve been expected every Christmas since.

My work at Christmas has become so sporadic in the past few years and I don’t know until a month or so before Christmas how much time I’ll have to be with my family for the holidays. So, I’ve taken to making Christmas cookies in August while I’m at my Mom’s place in South Dakota. It’s nice to have a little Christmas cheer during the dog days of summer.

In August of 2008, I drove all the way to South Dakota before I realized that I had left my Betty Crocker book back in Annapolis. What would you do? Here’s what we did: On the pretense of visiting Great Aunt Vi in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which we did and had a very nice visit, we stopped at the Barnes and Noble, found the Betty Crocker’s Best of Baking book, took pictures of the pages with the recipes and skedaddled.

My favorite song from Harry Connick, Jr.’s, 1990 “We Are In Love” CD is “Recipe For Love”. How’s this for cute?

A little bit of me and a whole lot of you

Add a dash of starlight and a dozen roses, too

Then let it rise for a hundred years or two

And that’s the recipe for making love

__________

It doesn’t need sugar ‘cause it’s already sweet

It doesn’t need an oven ‘cause it’s got a lot of heat

Just add a dash of kisses to make it all complete

And that’s the recipe for making love

__________

And if you’ve made it right you’ll know it

It’s not like anything you’ve made before

And if you’ve made it wrong you’ll know it

‘Cause it won’t keep you coming back for more

__________

I didn’t get it from my grandma’s book upon the shelf

I didn’t get it from a magical and culinary elf

No, a little birdie that you can’t make it by yourself

And that’s the recipe for making love

Over the past few days, Mom and I have been fabricating a Pho-ish low-carb chicken noodle soup, using brined chicken breasts, onion, ginger root, cloves, peppercorns, sage and other assorted “chemicals”. The freedom of cooking without a net is comparable to the liberation from printed music on the stand above the piano keyboard. Anyone who sets out to create a dish without a culinary blueprint is, effectively, a jazz musician at heart.

The first time that D. ate one of my Giant Toffee Cookies, she re-dubbed them Roast Beef Cookies, from the standpoint that they were so big that you felt like you consumed an entire roast beef dinner.

Credits: To Great Aunt Vi. Ninety-six years old and still makes minced meat pie. MMMMmmmmmmmmm. Minced meat pie……………