and so we eat again

Yep, it's true. We made and ate an entire meal at home. Cardo made ceviche with tuna and avocado. We ate this on saltines because that's how we always eat it. He also made guacamole ('my baby loves me, yes, yes he does'). I smashed up the black beans, because I'm a kitchen goddess.





After dinner, Pic and I made sugar cookies for solstice. They were going to be in the shape of moons, but Cardo helped cut the cookies and then fled the kitchen before anything creative happened. So, yeah, they ended up being circles (yes, still the shape of the moon, but I had a crescent in mind as the more recognizable of the specifically-moon shapes). The cookies looked a bit (or more) a mess, but the icing helped hide that. The icing is just royal icing, which I don't exactly love. It tastes, amazingly enough, like confectioner's/powdered/10x sugar to me. Maybe it's a bit better than that confectioner's-sugar-and-milk icing (which I'm pretty sure has a name that I just can't recall at the moment), but I'm not sure. Anyhow, the icing is pretty good on the cookies, but not so much off of the cookies.

These are the best sugar cookies I've ever made. Okay, so that's not saying much, and I don't want to devalue the cookies or what have you. I have a hard time with sugar cookies. I remember my mom's being so good, but on the few times I tried to duplicate her recipes, all failure broke loose. The cookie dough was always too hard and too dry for me to do much with and I always ended up burning the cookies. I used Katie's recipe [technically her friend's recipe, I suppose] from Good Things Catered. Almond extract and lemon zest...mmm. The dough was beautifully soft, although it probably took me a good three or four times the amount of time it would take anyone else to make the cookies (Pic was helping me, which slows me down a bit, but I'm a really painfully slow baker). And, the cookies really were easy to make. We need a better surface for rolling out the dough, though. When I was growing up, we had a built-in wooden cutting board in our counter. We always used that when rolling out cookie dough or biscuit dough or whatnot. Here, at the apartment, though, we just have the linoleum-like counter tops (I really haven't much clue what they're made of, but linoleum sounds right).



Anyhow, I can't even follow my train of though anymore and I hear the opening to The 10th Kingdom in the other room. Apparently Cardo is sitting down for a good six hours worth of television and I might go join him a bit (especially if he's out of the pissy snit he's been in for the last two days).

Happy Solstice! (Nothing says solstice like a periwinkle dinosaur, right?)



---------------------

P.S. I apologize for the sucky pictures. We didn't find the camera until hours after dinner and cookie prep. The icing was supposed to be dark blue (night, darkness, ecc), but I got impatient, added a bit of red and ended up with something resembling periwinkle, though you'd never guess it from these pictures, I understand.