A quick Sunday update for those of us in the Chicago area.

Joanna of My Vegetable Blog and The Kitchn is organizing a bake sale for Haiti relief on Monday evening at The Hideout.  Her initial post calling for bakers is here.  And Gapers Block gives an update of who’s participating here.

I’m making my signature rosemary shortbread.  This is the dough ready to go in the oven.  I made a quadruple batch and spread it into a giant sheet pan, then sprinkled it with sea salt and some demerara sugar.

It seems like such a small thing to do, but while I was baking I sent healing energy to the relief workers and the citizens of Haiti.  I believe that a small action and healing energy is better than shaking my head over the news.

If you live in Chicago, I hope you’ll be able to come out and support the cause.

I’ve been missing cookies exchanges all over the place.

I’ve been separated from these exchanges by scheduling challenges or distance.  And writing 65,000 words.

But now Serena over at Farm Chicks is hosting an online cookie exchange.  So in my mind, or rather in my fantasy parallel universe, I’m nestled in my kitchen baking up a storm instead of working at my computer.

And because this is a perfect fantasy parallel universe, in my mind I’ve already purchased holiday tins and cheerful wax paper to wrap them all up and send them along to you.

Here’s what’s on the menu for my cookie gift packages:

• Rosemary sea salt shortbread
• Chocolate shortbread (that’s it, in the picture, above)
• Gingersnaps, adorned with royal icing, cut out with my collection of vintage cookie cutters (in the picture, right)
• And a batch of brandied cherry brownies, baked in a 9×9 pan and cut into little 3×1 “fingers”

I hope you enjoy these holiday goodies.  If nothing else, the calorie count is exactly right.

What’s on your fantasy recipe list?

Photos and recipe links courtesy of Janine MacLachlan, www.RusticKitchen.com.  All rights reserved. If you enjoy this post, please consider subscribing to my newsletter, or my feed.

Monday was this blog’s second anniversary (oops, I’m a little behind).  And today is my 200th post.  Over the past two years I got married, started writing a book, fell in love with a couple hundred farmers.

Plus, over and over, I revealed my deep affection for dessert by posting more sweet treats than any other category.

This kind of milestone calls for a little reflection.

First, I’m so grateful for the friends I’ve made through writing here — there are people I feel I know so well, even though we’ve never met in person.  And I’ve found a venture that helps me focus on my photography, too. Both have given me a level of awareness I don’t think I had before. I like to think so.

So what’s next?  Nothing too fancy.

I’ll consider a salad event to rival my blueberry fest and brandied cherry series.  A lot of my healthier, non-dessert dishes are more of the improv variety, but I’ll make of point of writing them down before putting them in my mouth.

I’d like to write more in depth about the farmers I met along my Heartland road trip.  I’ll try to bring you more recipes.

A big thanks to everyone who’s made this experience so rewarding.  My cup overflows.

Photo compliments of Janine MacLachlan, www.RusticKitchen.com.  All rights reserved.

Her books are on shelves across the country, maybe the world. Her kitchen is in the Smithsonian. She was even spoofed by Dan Ackroyd on Saturday Night Live decades before Governor Palin. And now, of course, the movie. You know who I’m talking about. If you don’t, well, there’s not much I can say. (Plus the picture gives it away.)

I met Julia Child in the mid-1990s when my client sponsored the Baking With Julia series on public television. My friend Dorie, who wrote the companion book, first connected us. I was able to meet Julia several times while we organized the sponsorship, and then later I visited the set, which really was her very own Cambridge, Mass. kitchen, the one that’s now in the Smithsonian.

It was a lovely visit, and I learned so much. Such as?

· Julia was a great cat lover.

· Her husband Paul was a talented artist, and his paintings were displayed throughout the house.

· Her focus was food, not decor – the dining room (the control room during the shoot) was furnished with avocado-green banquettes, and the utilitarian metal file cabinets in the upstairs offices were burnished with flower power stickers. I found her all the more charming because she didn’t redecorate just because a bunch of posh bakers would be streaming through her house all summer.

· The team in the control room tracked “Julia-isms” – funny, clever Julia quotes – on multi-colored post-its.

· Julia could go from resting in an easy chair to full-on performance energy in zero seconds flat.

· And she was quite the flirt.

As Dorie once said “she’s everything you want your heroes to be.” Indeed.

And food lovers have more than one hero . . .

Lately I find myself enchanted with another cook, not so famous, but maybe equally important. Edna Lewis had her most prominent book, The Taste of Country Cooking, published in 1976. She and Julia shared an editor, the highly-regarded Judith Jones of Knopf, definitely an editor with an eye for talent.

Her book followed the growing season when most Americans were focused on technique (when they weren’t popping TV dinners into the oven). It’s chock full of recipes for preserving fruits like wild strawberries, Seckel pears and Damson plums. She differentiates between crispy and soft biscuits.

A summer menu for a cool-evening supper lists “store soda crackers” and she goes on to say “It was a great novelty to have Uneeda biscuits or soda crackers once in a while with soup or cheese.” My heart fluttered, because I live in a loft stared life in 1908 at the Uneeda biscuit factory, and now I’m certain that where I sit, was the exact spot where someone whipped up some batter to make food for Edna Lewis.

One of the most powerful passages for me comes at the very end. There’s a note about how she doesn’t care for double-acting baking powder and recommends getting good results with one part baking soda and two parts cream of tartar. In a time where Michael Pollan’s latest New York Times article talks about the end of cooking, we have someone who explains how to make a better baking powder. Maybe I’ll cook my way through Edna Lewis.

Bon appetit.

Last week I tweeted:  ”Me: simple angelfood cake w/ rhubarb sauce for husband’s b-day. Him: Dorie Greenspan’s fancy frothy multi-layer cake on cover. Hide book.”

Let me tell you the story, in a venue that allows more than 140 characters.

Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From My Home to Yours was sitting on the kitchen counter and Lauro said “why don’t you make this cake for my birthday?”  On the cover is a three-layer Devil’s Food White-out Cake.  Gorgeous.  I knew he liked angel food cake, simple and light and perfect for a summer birthday, and that was my original plan.  This cake is something else altogether.

So after I tweeted about his preference for something tall and chocolate, I got some great encouragement from fellow twitterers (including Dorie) and decided to switch plans.  I turned to page 247 and began my adventure.  But not without a little trepidation.

I was out of my comfort zone

Remember, I called my cooking school The Rustic Kitchen for a reason.  I think comfy, casual food is the best way to cook and entertain.  It’s easy on the cook, let’s you showcase simple ingredients, and doesn’t intimidate guests, thus increasing my likelihood of getting a return invitation.

I did put a little of my own spin on the project.  When you compare my frothy confection to the cover photo on Dorie’s book, you’ll notice I took a more casual approach to pressing the cake crumbs into the gorgeous frosting.  And gorgeous frosting it is.  A combination of beaten egg whites and sugar syrup, I wanted to eat the entire batch with a spoon, but I feared the diabetic coma that might ensue.  All well worth the time, and my husband was suitably impressed.

Another reason to love Dorie:  she writes a delightful blog, and today her post is about compost, a topic dear to my heart.  I’ve gotten some raised eyebrows when I tell people I schlep my kitchen scraps, coffee grounds and Lauro’s yerba mate to the compost pile in Michigan every weekend.  Even in winter. And here Dorie writes about her own beautiful kitchen scraps, and a friend’s 2001 wedding where he requested compostables as gifts.  She includes a link to a New Yorker article about what food luminaries sent.  That’s true devotion to the soil, and great taste for future harvests.

Photos compliments of Janine MacLachlan, The Rustic Kitchen.

This idea of eating what’s already in the house is pretty fun, particularly since I am challenging myself to prepare what’s around in ways other than my norm.  

Today’s post is turkey sliders.  I typically use ground turkey for a bolognese sauce for pasta.  But I also had a stash of frozen bread dough, which I usually use for a quick flatbread, so I baked up some mini rolls and made tiny turkey patties for sliders.  The sauce is equal parts ketchup and mayo.  Cole slaw on the side made a great weeknight meal.  Yes, I’m the sort that likes to have a little red cabbage on hand.

A special bonus:  I was scrounging around in the fridge and found some of my homemade ginger syrup, for a sparkling ginger ale accompaniment.  I would have loved a splash of vodka, but I didn’t have any in the house.

I know this isn’t my typical from-the-farmstand cooking, but it was simple and delicious, and made room in the fridge for some farm-fresh ingredients, which will be coming my way when the Green City Market moves outside on May 6.   Counting the minutes.

Previously on “from the pantry”

Maple walnut bread pudding

Improv pasta with almonds, peas and white beans

Dried plum smoothie

In my dark secret past, I was not a fan of marmalade.  I was always a jam person instead.  But I’m in a time of new beginnings, and that means opening my eyes to new flavorful delights.  I was recently married, at a simple ceremony with very few friends (and an eye on the picnic-and-croquet party wedding in warmer weather).  My friend Ellen, who also twittered the event, brought us a gift of clementine bay leaf “marriage marmalade,” which forever changed my view of marmalade.

So here’s Ellen’s recipe, copied from her e-mail:

“Marmalade recipe…yikes. Uh.

Slice clementines until you are sorta sick of slicing clementines Add enough sugar until you think it is sugary enough to be officially marmalade but not so much that it is gross commercial marmalade Add some lemon juice since you needed to freshen the disposal and now’s a good a time as any. Add a few bay leaves for some savory texture because maybe you added to much sugar and too sweet marmalade sucks bring to a simmer and then let sit overnight then bring back to a boil and add pectin, I use homemade because I can’t stand commercial pectin taste, though I think that you really can’t taste it and it is all in my mind, and then realize that you got distracted and it is still boiling process.”

Since many of my readers aren’t entirely comfortable with adventures in improvisation, I turned to some of my go-to blogs and found that Elise has a recipe, as does Amy.  And I think I saw a twitter about Pim making some as well.  I have a particular affection for Pim because she promised me a homemade pop-tart for becoming her 500th Facebook friend.

I’ll be experimenting with my own recipe (hopefully over the weekend) and will post that as soon as it’s ready. In the meantime, my new husband and I have a race to the finish and my carb consumtion has gone way up as I have marmalade on toast several times a day.  Good thing we’re not worried about carbs anymore.