mythago performs a blog dance for your amusement

Finally got the tea cookies right! Or so Samwise tells me. I hate tea.

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Line a cookie sheet with parchment or grease lightly.

1/4 cup loose darjeeling tea leaves
1/3 cup boiling water
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 teaspoon rose flower water (optional)

Put the tea leaves in a mug and pour the boiling water over them. Allow them to steep, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes. Strain the tea through a fine strainer into another cup, pressing on the leaves to get as much liquid out as possible. Add the rose flower water to the tea.

Meanwhile, combine all the dry ingredients in the bowl of a mixer (you can also do this by hand, but it’s more work). Beat in the butter a few tablespoons at a time, incorporating it into the flour. Beat for another minute until the mixture is crumbly. Add the tea/rose water and beat for a minute or so until the dough comes together.

Pinch off a piece of dough about 1″ across (smaller than a ping-pong ball) and roll into a ball. Put it on the cookie sheet and flatten with your hand so it is a disc about 1/2″ thick. Repeat with the remaining dough until you have filled up the cookie sheet, leaving about an inch of space in between. On an average size cookie sheet you should be able to fit a dozen cookies.

Bake for 15-17 minutes until just firm but not brown. Remove from the cookie sheet immediately and put on a rack or plate to cool. Makes about 18.

If I never see 2009 again, it’ll be too soon.

I’m really too tired to go around punching people in the mouth today. So: if you find yourself tempted to post one of the following things to the Internet, or God forbid saying one of them sincerely in conversation, would you kindly punch yourself in the mouth? Thanks.

• “IANAL, but….”
• Anything describing how when you were a kid, [commonly accepted safety requirement] either didn’t exist or wasn’t used, and WE all turned out fine.
• Pretty much any sentence ending in “….and WE all turned out fine.”
• Support of tort-reform measures, unless you are a defense attorney or in some capacity employed by the Chamber of Commerce, PHRMA or the Republican Party, because at least then you’re getting paid for it.
• Any argument suggesting that matters of taste are actually matters of absolute truth. (“How can you not like strawberry ice cream? Strawberry ice cream is yummy!”)
• Statements about “religion” which make clear that you think “religion” is a synonym for “those annoying fundamentalist Christians who I had to deal with in the small town I grew up in”.
• A belief that any sexually explicit material, behavior or conversation is perfectly reasonable to have, display or wave around anywhere, anytime, because The Human Body Is Beautiful And Sex Is Natural. If you apply this standard to behavior that normal people would agree is sexual harassment, punch yourself in the mouth twice.
• Huffily stomping out of a discussion with a promise never to return. Yeah, that ever happens on the Internet.

I’m sure there’s more but your knuckles are probably split and bleeding as it is. We can pick up where we left off tomorrow.

We’ve been thinking about replacing the 15-year-old Lesbaru wagon with a more commuting-friendly car and, as it’s about time for me to have my midlife crisis, I have decided that what we need is something more like the car our neighbors are selling:

1957 Chevrolet 210

Samwise is baffled, probably because he grew up in the wrong part of Michigan and thinks we should get, I don’t know, a modern newish car with good gas mileage and crumple zones and that. He’s being a total dick about this. I mean, I’d settle for an Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight or for a classic Cadillac!