Pizza Beans, Cookie Bonanza, Memorizing Poetry

This post has been sitting in the drafts for a few weeks while I was waiting to cook "something new". But we've been contentedly eating quick meals from our usual rotation and I haven't had the bandwidth to try new recipes or play around in the kitchen. 

Yesterday, in using up some dried cannellini beans, I tried out something small but new to me, pizza beans. You don't really even need a recipe for this. I simply cooked soaked cannellini beans in the instant pot, drained them and mixed in marinara sauce and pizza seasoning, then ladled them into a baking dish, topped with a little mozzarella cheese and baked/broiled until bubbly. They're so easy and good- something different from the usual bean recipes I make. (and kid-friendly, although only one of my kids ate them). I served the pizza beans with some roasted broccolini. 

* * * A Cookie Bonanza * * *

First up, printed design cookies. My Aussie friend and my son and I had ourselves a mini baking session on a Sunday morning last month. We had a farewell lunch at work later that week and I thought I'd bring some cookies in to share. A fun trend that I'm seeing in the baking world is called printed design sugar cookies. 

The idea is that you lay out little colorful cutouts on a plain dough base, roll it all out to uniform thickness to make a printed cookie dough sheet, then stamp out cookies and bake them. Have you seen these on blogs and social media recently? Here's a cute how-to post of a floral print, and another post on printed cookies from King Arthur Flour. If you want an edible craft project, this one is for you. 

I used my favorite cookie dough. We left most of it plain for the base, and broke off some pieces and added food coloring. We used play-doh tools (sanitized and washed!) to stamp out shapes and make patterns. I chose to make a bright flower pattern in keeping with the season. Then I placed a parchment sheet on top, rolled it gently to flatten the shapes into the base, then cut out cookies with a drinking glass!

It was such a great little project, and I can imagine being able to customize all kinds of cookie designs for people (initials) or occasions. 

Second, baking from the bookmarks. I have so many cookie recipes saved in my to-make files, it is well beyond my life expectancy to try them all. A recipe I had bookmarked recently is Scandinavian almond bars. I love that this recipe came from the blogger's student who brought it to school as a assignment! These were very easy to make but it was quite tricky to tell when the cookie slabs were done baking. It is like biscotti without the second bake. Everyone loved the taste of these cookies. 

Third, my newly acquired cookie press. I saw my friend and former co-worker at the aforementioned work lunch and she gave me a very sweet, very late holiday present- an OXO cookie press with 18 design disks! My son and I couldn't wait to try it out. I used the butter cookie recipe in the product leaflet. This was my first time using a cookie press, and at the beginning, it didn't work at all. The cookie shape would squeeze out but wouldn't release. After some frustrating minutes, I realized that the steel design disks are not the same on both sides. There is a subtle difference, with the design on one side being sharper than the other. When I made sure to place the disk with the sharp side touching the dough, the cookies released beautifully. (Nowhere is this mentioned in the product directions, by the way.) We tried three designs this time- two flowers and a teddy bear! 

                                                      * * * A math book * * *

I've been binge reading so many great books. I'll mention just one in this post, that I picked up from the library's "new books" shelf- Math for English Majors by Ben Orlin. The subtitle of the book is "a human take on the universal language". Orlin argues that just like any language, math has nouns (things; numbers), verbs (actions; calculations), grammar (algebra). 

The book is informative and funny and charming. I'm an averagely mathy person. I don't "get it" the way I get biology, for example. I'm constantly on the remedial math train, is what I am saying. Orlin uses fun little line drawings and creative examples to illustrate ideas and explain what it is all about. 

One of my favorite chapters was on Large Magnitudes, with examples on how to overcome "number numbness" and get concrete. He explains orders of magnitude (1, 10, 100...1 million...10 billion) in terms of people, dollars, years. For instance, the difference between a million and a billion can be hard to intuitively understand; they are both big numbers. But they are vastly different from each other. 1 million seconds is 12 days while 1 billion seconds is ~32 years. 1 million calories can feed a person for 16 months, 1 billion calories can feed a person for 1300 years. 

I loved this book so much that I bought a copy to give my nephew for his birthday. If you have middle/high school aged kids or if you'd like a little dose of entertaining math yourself, I highly recommend this book.

* * * A couple of fun challenges * * *

The last week of April, I spent a few minutes each day memorizing a poem, of all things! One of my besties from high school texted me with a link to this poetry challenge on NYT, and I was happy to play along. It reminded me of when this friend and I memorized poems in middle and high school. (We had an amazing and very strict English teacher. I credit her with a lot of my love for the language. And thanks to her determined drilling, I can tell you all about the figures of speech to this very day.) 

The poem itself is about an all-nighter on the Staten Island Ferry, which coincidentally I rode only a few weeks ago. This poetry challenge was well-designed- with little games to test your memorization, and short articles diving into the meaning of the poem. We so rarely memorize anything any more, making this a refreshing challenge. This is what life needs more of, enjoyment of beautiful language, human connection, culture. As the articles said, 

"Memorizing a poem is like taking a work of art that you love and letting it live and bloom inside of you." 

"It can be a way of holding onto something beautiful, a morsel of verbal pleasure you can take out whenever you want." 

"It’s a flower in the windowbox of your mind."

Another time, I did a 10 minute challenge (gift article)- looking at the famous painting, "The Starry Night" by van Gogh, for 10 whole minutes and taking in every detail and letting yourself soak in the experience. Fantastic! So very different from the second or ten we spend looking at things. It makes me want to take an afternoon and go to the art museum and stare at paintings and sculptures.

Other delightful moments from the past few weeks: an early morning walk in the botanical gardens on my birthday... 

Trees and sunshine= perfect birthday

Taking time to smell the roses

...and a day hike with a dear friend. We got out of town for a day, drove to Amicalola State Park, hiked up to the top of the falls, climbing 604 steps in the process, ate lunch at the restaurant at the top, hiked 45 minutes on trails at the top (towards the start of the Appalachian Trial), then walked down. A perfect day with perfect weather! 

Amicalola Falls, a 729-foot waterfall
that is the highest in Georgia

The view at lunch