I thought that I would try something different today, and practice my penmanship. On mini-tiny Scrabble cookies. Cute, fun and different and if you have friends who are into Scrabble or Words with Friends, these might be cute and cupcake or cake toppers. I’d made these a couple of years ago for Valentine’s Day, but have updated my sugar cookie recipe since then.
As an aside, when I was in high school, I had my wisdom teeth out. They were pretty impacted and the whole surgery turned out to be a bigger ordeal than planned, so I was out of school for quite some time. My sister at the time was dating an exchange student from Uruguay; a great guy named Eduardo. He came over every day after school and played Scrabble with me because I was so bored. Whenever I see a Scrabble board, I think of him.
This pan-sized cinnamon roll is just the thing for Easter breakfast. Instead of making individual cinnamon buns, I wrapped the whole thing into one big one, filing the entire pan. Quite ingenious, actually. We then ended up slicing it just like you would cut a pie, but you could also take it out of the pan, and let people pull off a strip. Either way, a nice presentation and really quite simple to make.
Tomorrow is Maudy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter. In Germany, Maudy Thursday is called Gründonnerstag which translates as Green Thursday (it also has a bunch of other names and I am not going to write a whole bit about the misnomer and history of why it is called Green Thursday … you’re here to read about food, not religion, right? Also, I am not Catholic. So there.) Anyway, one of the traditions is to each green food on Green Thursday, so I went about making Spinach pasta from scratch. I love homemade pasta. It is about a million times better than any dried pasta and really doesn’t take all that much effort. My pasta machine (one of those old fashioned hand-crank ones, though eventually I might get the attachment for my Kitchenaid) is one of the very first kitchen “appliances” that I ever received (back when I was in my early 20s?) and even though I don’t go through the effort all that often, it is always worth it.
I didn’t write a recipe for the finished dish pictured here, but in a nutshell, it is diced ham, frozen peas, a few tablespoons of cream and a liberal sprinkling of grated Parmesan, in a pan for about 3 minutes … exactly the amount of time that it tastes for the pasta to boil.