Dinner Drag

I love cooking...but I hate preparing meals. I truly love cooking. I love looking for an interesting recipe, getting all the ingredients, preparing it and presenting it to my family. But weeknight dinners? Ugh. It's getting really bad. My poor husband has been working insane hours to provide for our family and I can't even manage to cook him a decent dinner most nights. It's terrible of me, I know. I find myself starting to say I can't help it, but that's not really true. I also have a long list of excuses ready - really good excuses. Things like:

• I forgot to get the meat out to thaw.
  
• The meat I got out 3 days ago and kept putting off cooking has now spoiled.
  
• The produce that I needed has spoiled.
  
• One of the 10 ingredients I need for that dish has been used for something else.
  
• We just got home from (insert lesson here) and it's only 45 minutes until dinner.
  
• The kids won't eat it anyway.
  
• I think a migraine is coming on (happens about twice a month, but this one makes a more frequent appearance, I'm afraid!)
  
• I'd hate for my favorite local restaurants to go under due to the economy.
  
• (Nearest child) needs some "mommy time", and really, isn't that more important than a home cooked meal?
  
• The kitchen is too dirty - I need to clean it first and there simply isn't time
  

All valid excuses...right? Regardless of the reasonable nature of the excuses, the fact of the matter is that I really SHOULD be cooking dinner rather than making the poor man pick up dinner on his way home after a very long day or just throwing something together that the kids will possibly eat and he will definitely not enjoy. I tell myself it will get better when summer comes and we have the fresh produce and the grill available. What a shame June is such a long way off. For the sake of our health, our budget and most importantly, portraying to my husband how loved he is, I am now on a journey to improve my stats in the kitchen. I'd give some hard figures here, but I'm just too ashamed to admit the current state of affairs. :)

Lemon Cookies

I finally got started making this year's Christmas cookies. I had to get at least one kind done before the MOMS club recipe club I'm hosting tomorrow! So I broke out the old standy special event cookies. The Lemon-don't-know-what-to-call-them cookies. I don't remember where I got the recipe for these filled lemon cookies. Once upon a time they were sandwich cookies that were then rolled in powdered sugar called "Lemon Snowdrops", but most of the Lemon Snowdrops I have seen are just plain teacake cookie balls rolled in powdered sugar. I've also tweaked it so much that it doesn't really resemble the original anymore anyway. They take a while to make, but are oh so worth it!

Dough:
1 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup powedered sugar
1 tsp lemon extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp milk

Filling:
1 egg, beaten
2/3 cup sugar
3 Tbsp lemon juice (fresh is truly best here!)
1 1/2 tbsp soft butter
lemon zest (if you used a fresh lemon - just a bit)

Powdered sugar for sprinkling

Preheat oven to 350. Cream butter and sugar. Add extract, flour, salt and milk. Mix thoroughly, but do not overmix. Add a few drops more milk if the dough is too crumbly. Form small balls (I use a small cookie scoop), then flatten slightly and make an indentation with your thumb to form a "cup" shape. Place 1/2" apart on an ungreased cookie sheet and bake 10-12 minutes.

Make lemon butter filling by combining all ingredients in the top of a double-boiler. Cook over hot water until thick, stirring constantly. Cool. Fill indentation in cookies and allow to set. (Note: I sometimes skip the double-boiler and just do straight in a pan over medium-low heat, but you have to be careful!) I like to have the cookies on a cooling rack so the excess that runs out of the dent doesn't pool around the edge of the cookies.

Once the filling has set, put powdered sugar in a mesh strainer and shake over the cookies.

Productive, Lazy Sunday

What a good day today was. It's one of those days where you end it feeling as though you've accomplished something, yet feeling rested at the same time. It started off with church, our own pastor back from vacation, not too hot - just a nice time of worship. We got home and sent the kids out to the pool. Checked on the garden and came in with a basket full of tomatoes, poked the pre-baked ham in the oven and plugged in the laptop on the deck to get some work done while still supervising the kids. After lunch, laid Anna down for nap, started the tomatoes cooking for sauce to freeze, mixed up cookies and watched the kids out the window. Then while the sauce was cooling, I logged into work for a little bit (down in the oh-so-much-cooler basement) and listened to the older kids laughing and having a good time playing the Wii a floor above. Add in a little home grown spaghetti squash with freshly made sauce on top for dinner. So while tomorrow it will all start up again, with not enough time to accomplish all that needs to be done, today was a good day.

Unfortunately, Ben's day wasn't quite so idyllic. He had to fix the upstairs toilet...again. And he doesn't even like the kind of cookies that I made today. Poor guy.