Christmas Cookies Part I

Alright here is my first installment of trying out cookie recipes for the Holidays and sharing them with you.  This week was Chocolate Pistachio Biscotti from an old Food & Wine recipe.  It looked quite delicious and biscotti keep very well so I thought I would give it a shot.

I don’t know about you, but I have binders (yes that’s plural) filled with torn out pages from magazines and handwritten recipes I scribbled down on something random.  Hello, torn piece of cardboard or back of “To Do List” from 2003.  My first binder is very well organized, with tabs distinguishing poultry from appetizers from desserts.  However, that binder got full real fast.  I also have a special purple binder emblazoned with Jewel (the singer) stickers that I brought with me to college.  This has in it my own recipes and other special ones, I know exactly which recipes are where in there and how each grease stain and food spot got onto the pages.  I love that purple binder (and no, not just because it has Jewel stickers all over it). 

The third binder is a bit more haphazard.  It’s kind of dangerous actually.  When I open it I have to be careful the recipes don’t take out their vengeance on me and cut me with a million paper cuts.  They are so poorly thrown together, some not even hole-punched (gasp!) that I am sure they feel their very nature has been compromised.  I am always hesitant to reach for that binder because I know it will take me an hour to go through it and find the recipe I want.  Seeing that binder reminds me why I should never take up scrapbooking. 

Perhaps if I have a snow day and some tabs and a hole-punch I can make an honest binder out of it.  Until that day comes, though, I will continue to add torn pages from magazines to the top of my book shelf and neglect them with all the others. 

Luckily for you though, this recipe came from the previous well-organized binder.  But I never had a chance to make it before now.  And the verdict is – it’s not really worth it to make these biscotti.  I know right!  What a letdown.  I had high hopes for these – pistachios, chocolate, almond extract, more chocolate – what could be bad about these.  It turns out that second addition of chocolate just doesn’t work.  Since biscotti get baked twice, they tend to be crisp and sturdy.  These took a little longer to cook then I prefer drying out parts but not the whole thing.  They were also very delicate to handle and tended to crumble since I had to move them around so frequently during the baking process. 

They taste fine, and they are pretty neat to look at but they kind of leave me with a ‘so what?’ feeling.  I figure that when trying to make cookies to encourage your neighbor to snow blow your walk way throughout the entire winter – you had better make some pretty spectacular cookies.  These were not snow blower approved.   If you would like to try them out for yourself, the link to the recipe is here.  So because of this, I do not have recipe per se to share with you today.  However, I am on the prowl for a scrumptious cookie and hopefully I can share a recipe with you next week!

In the Jamie v. Cookies battle so far:

Christmas Cookies – 0

Jamie - 1