In this week's installment of Food for Thought, Nancy Leson and I explore the delights of dunking with not a donut or basketball in sight. Instead, we break out the dunkage on cookies, whiskey, sandwiches, saltines and soup.
My wife, the Lovely & Talented Cheryl DeGroot, recently returned from a trip to Ennis, Montana. To welcome her back, I made a batch of her favorite cookies, Martha Stewart's Rosemary Shortbread. DeGroot's coming home present for me was the quart of bourbon she'd earned from a day pasting labels on bottles at Willie's Distillery in Ennis.
The cookies are fun to make. After mixing the dough, roll it into a couple of inch-and-a-half-thick logs and wrap them in parchment paper. Martha says to stuff them into the cardboard tube from a paper towel roll for a perfect cylinder, but I didn't bother with that. Roll 'em as round as you can get and that'll be fine. Then after an hour in the freezer, slice quarter inch disks and bake.
My other recos on these cookies are to dispense with the egg white and sanding sugar she suggests rolling the cylinders in. The cookies really don't need it. And I doubled the amount of minced fresh rosemary she calls for. I might even triple it next time.
Sitting at the counter with cookies, Bourbon and The Cowgirl home again I tried the shortbread-dunked-in-bourbon experiment. I recommend it.
"Don't dunk your nigiri in the soy sauce." – Anthony Bourdain
