Our cookbook club chose the A16 Food+Wine cookbook several months ago.

I brought two dishes, Croccante cookies and the Chocolate and Sea Salt Shortbread Cookies. Both were the celebrated success of the evening.

Ingredients
1 ¾ cups plus 1 tablespoon flour
½ cup plus 1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder (I used Penzeys Dutch Process)
¾ teaspoon baking powder
1 cup or 8 ounces room temperature unsalted butter
¾ cup sugar
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate coarsely chopped
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
¾ teaspoon sea salt

Directions
In a large bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa and baking powder. In a mixer, combine butter and sugar, beat on medium speed for about 2 minutes, or until pale and smooth. Switch to low speed, add the flour mix in 3 additions, beating after each addition until just incorporated. Add the chocolate, vanilla and salt and mix just until blended.

Divide the dough in quarters. Put the first quarter on a lightly floured work surface, roll the dough into a log about 1 inch diameter. Repeat with the next three. Wrap the logs separately in plastic and refrigerate for an hour.

Put the oven rack in the middle and upper third and preheat to 300.
Line 2 baking sheets with parchment or a Silpat-type lining.

Cut the logs into ¼ inch rounds, set out on the baking sheet. Bake, rotating the sheets once from front to back, for 15 to 20 minutes, or until baked through but still soft. Transfer the sheets to wire racks. The cookies will firm up as they cool.

And damn, they’re delicious.

Sending Valentines to my friends to my friends instead of Christmas cards is a new parent cliché, but baby, sign me up.

I’m a serious romantic and besides Halloween, my favorite holiday to send cards on is Valentine’s day.

This year’s valentines are straightforward and include a family photo. I started them in January and they’re ready to go right now. Even better, I have leftover heart stamps from Nora lea’s “meet the Baby party.”

Valentines are doubling as thank you cards, they’re doubling as holiday cards, they’re doubling as “You’re awesome and we love you cards.”

What’s not to like?

Sorry to get all mushy on you but Valentine’s month has been on my mind since Christmas was over.

February means red and hearts and love. And who cares if it’s a consumerist holiday? There are amazing ways to show the folks you love that you love them.  And there are even more amazing ways that don’t cost anything at all.

This month I’ll be posting some inexpensive ways to show the people in your house that you care about them.

Everyone loves a Valentine, no matter what the method.
Home made paper hearts, valentine’s gifties, and sweet Valentine’s treats.
(These are a few of my favorite things.)

So go buy some stamps, we’re making some easy peasy Valentines.

When feeling deprived — not necessarily deprived, more resenty — I look to baths.

Resenty:
Helen Jane word meaning that I’m feeling put-upon.

Resenty feelings mean that the burdens of my day to day existence have piled up upon my head to the point that I resent every other living being for having it easier than me.

When feeling resenty, I take baths. Lots of them. Preferably with high-cost ingredients and a glass of white wine.

The Official Helen Jane Bath Preference Cheat Sheet:

My favorite bath product company?
Lush

Favorite products?
Buffy Body Butter
Brilliant! It’s a moisturizer AND exfoliating product all at once!

All the bath melts that there are
Bath melts are so moisturizingly brilliant, leaving you drenched with sweet smelling softness that you forget that you’re going to have to clean the tub so you don’t slip in the shower the next day.

The Big Blue bath bomb
Not too flowery, not too perfumey, this is a bath bomb for grownups.

All right, so what if you can’t afford the Lush priciness?
(Firstly, you should, you deserve it.)

But my solid budget recommendation is:
Burt’s Bees

Favorite Products:
Mama Bee Nourishing Body Oil
I love this oil for its versatility. You can use it all over as well as in the bath. And if my baby kisses my skin, I don’t feel too guilty about all the chemicals… because there are very few.

Naturally Nourishing Milk & Shea Butter Body Wash
Not sure if it’s the Shea butter or the Milk, but this body wash smells exactly like elementary school summers. And it’s an immediate wave of relief.

And our good friends at Target also have a phenomenal selection of bath products.

Babysitter! Hired! And she’s awesome!

I haven’t realized how much I was taking on, what with the working and momming full time. But with this great babysitter coming a few times a week, I’ve got time, I’ve got opportunity, I’ve got the chance to catch up on work. And with this opportunity to catch up, I also have evenings free.

So instead of furiously writing, designing and well, emailing every evening, I get to watch Wall E with my husband,
chat on the phone with my sister and
catch up on blogs.

Four blogs I love lately include:
http://jordanferney.blogspot.com/
http://www.ohjoy.blogs.com/
http://www.designmom.com/
http://www.orangebeautiful.com/blog/index.php

Oh yes, and wine sipping.
I’m doing that too.

Happy babysitter hiring to us all!

Just found out from Tim, our PR pro that the Midwest Wine Connection December issue mentions Cab Franc/Carmenere 2007 as a “Top 5 Value”.

…The supple flavors of Cab Franc combine with the more rugged Carmenere to form a very good Chilean wine.

88 points

So she’s six months old.
Six months of baby growth, she’s finally out of that lumpy larval stage and showing me a personality.
She’s practically a woman.

I’m thrilled.

Now what I’ve been missing is Helen Jane time. I’ve missed lots of social engagements, events and parties with the baby excuse. I miss my lady friends, my kitchen and realized I’m terribly out of the loop.

Naturally, I spent this time figuring out my new mom-ness, and I’m happy I have. But I’m getting itchy for something more. Like I said, I miss my lady friends.

This year, my New Year’s Resolutions are threefold.
Make new friends,
make more time for my friends and
talk 35% less.

Yay for (oops) and the wine to meet up with these lady friends of mine. I prefer the Sauv Blanc or the Carmenere Merlot for sipping. And since many of our resolutions revolve around taking more seriously what we put in our bodies, I’ve used the Carmenere in a lentil soup recipe to much acclaim (recipe coming later this week).

What are your resolutions?

We’ve been “enjoying” our own holiday disaster over here, a viral infection of brutal and angry proportions. 

Thankfully, only one of us new parents over here had it at a time and the baby is yet unscathed (knocking on all kinds of hard surfaces over here).

This reminded me of one of my least favorite Christmas celebrations on record, Christmas 1983.  I was eight. 
(That was the year I got a microscope.)

We went to Grandma’s house every Christmas Eve for seafood stew and a $20 bill for each of us.  We loved it.  In 1982, she had candies, desserts and Grandma-style treats all over the house.

Being eight, I could not resist.

I ate and ate and ate and ate and ate.  I found these chocolate covered graham crackers that  were unlike anything I’d ever tasted before.  I ate some more of these.

I ate until I was sick.
The sickness absolutely ruined Christmas morning.

There was no looking at a graham cracker until…
…until last year when I invented these Inside Out S’mores.

Ingredients
1/2 package small marshmallows
4 oz dark chocolate
1/2 cup almonds
18 graham crackers

Melt the chocolate in the microwave on high for 45 seconds. Stir until glossy and soft. Add marshmallows and almonds, stir until all is covered. Take a tablespoon of the chocolate marshmallow mixture and set on graham crackers. Let sit until chocolate has firmed up.

See? Goodness can come from overindulgence.
Happy holidays!

As my parents just left, and James and I find ourselves exhausted, I see that I should have turned to FlyLady.net for a little pre-visit advice.

See, her method is to tackle just a little bit (15 minutes to be exact) at a time and you’ll have no need for a “crisis cleaning.”

Before my parents arrived, James and I took a whole day to freak out and run around the house, washing windows, wiping down walls, washing ourselves.

We vacuumed curtains, under the couch, the dog.

It was exhausting.
By the time they arrived that afternoon, we were beat — and I couldn’t get all the things that still had to be done out of my head.

Now that’s not a very elegant way to begin a visit with my parents.

If you feel like your house could get away from you at any minute, I urge you to visit the Flylady site.  It’s jam-packed with excellent house tips to keep it running smoothly.

My favorite takeaway?  Her holiday planning control journal.  It helps you outline all the cookies, the gifts, the budgeting and the entertaining well ahead of time so you’re not scrambling at the last minute.

And I assume you’ve entered your holiday disaster story to win an (oops) Holiday Survival Kit?
You have a great chance of winning an amazing prize.

Get on to it!

Fortunately, I can’t remember having any major holiday entertaining disasters. I avoid those by greeting guests with a well-stocked wine table and lots of snacks all over the room.

(This advice is golden, folks.)

However, disasters in the social sense? Disasters ending in general embarrassment?
We only have to look back to the early nineties for those.

Christmas break, 1992. My friend Lizzie and I were bored beyond end. After slowly walking around the local convenience store looking at lipstick for an hour, we found a home permanent kit in the sale aisle.

Bingo, boredom abated.

My hair that decade was a thing of beauty. Chestnut brown, hanging to the middle of my back, thick and lovely, why anyone would want to mess with it, well, I would.

After we got home, Lizzie and my sister got to work, rolling and rolling and rolling all that gorgeous hair onto the tiny perm rods. Next, they mixed — PU! — the solution. Finally, there was dousing. Lots and lots of dousing.

The smell of home permanent solution is specific indeed. Acrid, burning, yet there’s something sweet about it completely unlike my precious wine — where the only scent waffles between blackberry and boysenberry.

Anyway — home perm. We decided to leave it on twice as long due to the length and density of my locks. Can you see where this is going?

When the time came to remove the rods, I immediately felt a difference. The texture of my hair… was this the curly look I was after? We rinsed and rinsed and gelled an moussed and blew dry and all three of us were silent. Large stringy patches of frizz stuck out 90 ° from my head. Fried and coarse, dry and yet the same texture as an SOS pad.

Maybe it wasn’t that bad, I thought and rallied the girls to attend a basketball game that night. As I walked into the stands, shouts of “What’s that smell?” rang out after me. In disaster recover mode, I went to the car and found a knit hat, sprayed it with glove box perfume (also, something I only kept in that compartment during high school) and I wore a perfumed knit hat the entire night.

Which only left me smelling like permanent solution doused in CKOne.

Sigh.

Our cookbook club chose the A16 Food+Wine cookbook several months ago.

I brought two dishes, Croccante cookies and the Chocolate and Sea Salt Shortbread Cookies. Both were the celebrated success of the evening.

Ingredients
1 ¾ cups plus 1 tablespoon flour
½ cup plus 1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder (I used Penzeys Dutch Process)
¾ teaspoon baking powder
1 cup or 8 ounces room temperature unsalted butter
¾ cup sugar
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate coarsely chopped
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
¾ teaspoon sea salt

Directions
In a large bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa and baking powder. In a mixer, combine butter and sugar, beat on medium speed for about 2 minutes, or until pale and smooth. Switch to low speed, add the flour mix in 3 additions, beating after each addition until just incorporated. Add the chocolate, vanilla and salt and mix just until blended.

Divide the dough in quarters. Put the first quarter on a lightly floured work surface, roll the dough into a log about 1 inch diameter. Repeat with the next three. Wrap the logs separately in plastic and refrigerate for an hour.

Put the oven rack in the middle and upper third and preheat to 300.
Line 2 baking sheets with parchment or a Silpat-type lining.

Cut the logs into ¼ inch rounds, set out on the baking sheet. Bake, rotating the sheets once from front to back, for 15 to 20 minutes, or until baked through but still soft. Transfer the sheets to wire racks. The cookies will firm up as they cool.

And damn, they’re delicious.

Sending Valentines to my friends to my friends instead of Christmas cards is a new parent cliché, but baby, sign me up.

I’m a serious romantic and besides Halloween, my favorite holiday to send cards on is Valentine’s day.

This year’s valentines are straightforward and include a family photo. I started them in January and they’re ready to go right now. Even better, I have leftover heart stamps from Nora lea’s “meet the Baby party.”

Valentines are doubling as thank you cards, they’re doubling as holiday cards, they’re doubling as “You’re awesome and we love you cards.”

What’s not to like?

Sorry to get all mushy on you but Valentine’s month has been on my mind since Christmas was over.

February means red and hearts and love. And who cares if it’s a consumerist holiday? There are amazing ways to show the folks you love that you love them.  And there are even more amazing ways that don’t cost anything at all.

This month I’ll be posting some inexpensive ways to show the people in your house that you care about them.

Everyone loves a Valentine, no matter what the method.
Home made paper hearts, valentine’s gifties, and sweet Valentine’s treats.
(These are a few of my favorite things.)

So go buy some stamps, we’re making some easy peasy Valentines.

When feeling deprived — not necessarily deprived, more resenty — I look to baths.

Resenty:
Helen Jane word meaning that I’m feeling put-upon.

Resenty feelings mean that the burdens of my day to day existence have piled up upon my head to the point that I resent every other living being for having it easier than me.

When feeling resenty, I take baths. Lots of them. Preferably with high-cost ingredients and a glass of white wine.

The Official Helen Jane Bath Preference Cheat Sheet:

My favorite bath product company?
Lush

Favorite products?
Buffy Body Butter
Brilliant! It’s a moisturizer AND exfoliating product all at once!

All the bath melts that there are
Bath melts are so moisturizingly brilliant, leaving you drenched with sweet smelling softness that you forget that you’re going to have to clean the tub so you don’t slip in the shower the next day.

The Big Blue bath bomb
Not too flowery, not too perfumey, this is a bath bomb for grownups.

All right, so what if you can’t afford the Lush priciness?
(Firstly, you should, you deserve it.)

But my solid budget recommendation is:
Burt’s Bees

Favorite Products:
Mama Bee Nourishing Body Oil
I love this oil for its versatility. You can use it all over as well as in the bath. And if my baby kisses my skin, I don’t feel too guilty about all the chemicals… because there are very few.

Naturally Nourishing Milk & Shea Butter Body Wash
Not sure if it’s the Shea butter or the Milk, but this body wash smells exactly like elementary school summers. And it’s an immediate wave of relief.

And our good friends at Target also have a phenomenal selection of bath products.

Babysitter! Hired! And she’s awesome!

I haven’t realized how much I was taking on, what with the working and momming full time. But with this great babysitter coming a few times a week, I’ve got time, I’ve got opportunity, I’ve got the chance to catch up on work. And with this opportunity to catch up, I also have evenings free.

So instead of furiously writing, designing and well, emailing every evening, I get to watch Wall E with my husband,
chat on the phone with my sister and
catch up on blogs.

Four blogs I love lately include:
http://jordanferney.blogspot.com/
http://www.ohjoy.blogs.com/
http://www.designmom.com/
http://www.orangebeautiful.com/blog/index.php

Oh yes, and wine sipping.
I’m doing that too.

Happy babysitter hiring to us all!

Just found out from Tim, our PR pro that the Midwest Wine Connection December issue mentions Cab Franc/Carmenere 2007 as a “Top 5 Value”.

…The supple flavors of Cab Franc combine with the more rugged Carmenere to form a very good Chilean wine.

88 points

So she’s six months old.
Six months of baby growth, she’s finally out of that lumpy larval stage and showing me a personality.
She’s practically a woman.

I’m thrilled.

Now what I’ve been missing is Helen Jane time. I’ve missed lots of social engagements, events and parties with the baby excuse. I miss my lady friends, my kitchen and realized I’m terribly out of the loop.

Naturally, I spent this time figuring out my new mom-ness, and I’m happy I have. But I’m getting itchy for something more. Like I said, I miss my lady friends.

This year, my New Year’s Resolutions are threefold.
Make new friends,
make more time for my friends and
talk 35% less.

Yay for (oops) and the wine to meet up with these lady friends of mine. I prefer the Sauv Blanc or the Carmenere Merlot for sipping. And since many of our resolutions revolve around taking more seriously what we put in our bodies, I’ve used the Carmenere in a lentil soup recipe to much acclaim (recipe coming later this week).

What are your resolutions?

We’ve been “enjoying” our own holiday disaster over here, a viral infection of brutal and angry proportions. 

Thankfully, only one of us new parents over here had it at a time and the baby is yet unscathed (knocking on all kinds of hard surfaces over here).

This reminded me of one of my least favorite Christmas celebrations on record, Christmas 1983.  I was eight. 
(That was the year I got a microscope.)

We went to Grandma’s house every Christmas Eve for seafood stew and a $20 bill for each of us.  We loved it.  In 1982, she had candies, desserts and Grandma-style treats all over the house.

Being eight, I could not resist.

I ate and ate and ate and ate and ate.  I found these chocolate covered graham crackers that  were unlike anything I’d ever tasted before.  I ate some more of these.

I ate until I was sick.
The sickness absolutely ruined Christmas morning.

There was no looking at a graham cracker until…
…until last year when I invented these Inside Out S’mores.

Ingredients
1/2 package small marshmallows
4 oz dark chocolate
1/2 cup almonds
18 graham crackers

Melt the chocolate in the microwave on high for 45 seconds. Stir until glossy and soft. Add marshmallows and almonds, stir until all is covered. Take a tablespoon of the chocolate marshmallow mixture and set on graham crackers. Let sit until chocolate has firmed up.

See? Goodness can come from overindulgence.
Happy holidays!

As my parents just left, and James and I find ourselves exhausted, I see that I should have turned to FlyLady.net for a little pre-visit advice.

See, her method is to tackle just a little bit (15 minutes to be exact) at a time and you’ll have no need for a “crisis cleaning.”

Before my parents arrived, James and I took a whole day to freak out and run around the house, washing windows, wiping down walls, washing ourselves.

We vacuumed curtains, under the couch, the dog.

It was exhausting.
By the time they arrived that afternoon, we were beat — and I couldn’t get all the things that still had to be done out of my head.

Now that’s not a very elegant way to begin a visit with my parents.

If you feel like your house could get away from you at any minute, I urge you to visit the Flylady site.  It’s jam-packed with excellent house tips to keep it running smoothly.

My favorite takeaway?  Her holiday planning control journal.  It helps you outline all the cookies, the gifts, the budgeting and the entertaining well ahead of time so you’re not scrambling at the last minute.

And I assume you’ve entered your holiday disaster story to win an (oops) Holiday Survival Kit?
You have a great chance of winning an amazing prize.

Get on to it!

Fortunately, I can’t remember having any major holiday entertaining disasters. I avoid those by greeting guests with a well-stocked wine table and lots of snacks all over the room.

(This advice is golden, folks.)

However, disasters in the social sense? Disasters ending in general embarrassment?
We only have to look back to the early nineties for those.

Christmas break, 1992. My friend Lizzie and I were bored beyond end. After slowly walking around the local convenience store looking at lipstick for an hour, we found a home permanent kit in the sale aisle.

Bingo, boredom abated.

My hair that decade was a thing of beauty. Chestnut brown, hanging to the middle of my back, thick and lovely, why anyone would want to mess with it, well, I would.

After we got home, Lizzie and my sister got to work, rolling and rolling and rolling all that gorgeous hair onto the tiny perm rods. Next, they mixed — PU! — the solution. Finally, there was dousing. Lots and lots of dousing.

The smell of home permanent solution is specific indeed. Acrid, burning, yet there’s something sweet about it completely unlike my precious wine — where the only scent waffles between blackberry and boysenberry.

Anyway — home perm. We decided to leave it on twice as long due to the length and density of my locks. Can you see where this is going?

When the time came to remove the rods, I immediately felt a difference. The texture of my hair… was this the curly look I was after? We rinsed and rinsed and gelled an moussed and blew dry and all three of us were silent. Large stringy patches of frizz stuck out 90 ° from my head. Fried and coarse, dry and yet the same texture as an SOS pad.

Maybe it wasn’t that bad, I thought and rallied the girls to attend a basketball game that night. As I walked into the stands, shouts of “What’s that smell?” rang out after me. In disaster recover mode, I went to the car and found a knit hat, sprayed it with glove box perfume (also, something I only kept in that compartment during high school) and I wore a perfumed knit hat the entire night.

Which only left me smelling like permanent solution doused in CKOne.

Sigh.