For those few of you out there who may have heard of or read Hannah Hurnard, the title of this blog will ring a bell. She has a book by the same title which compares the 9 spices in Song of Songs with the 9 fruit of the Spirit. Anyway, that's not what this post is about, but today's activities reminded me of that and hence the title.
Today I tried another first: grinding spices. Some dear soul here gave us a blender/juicer/grinder for a wedding gift, and I'm trying to make use of it while the sun shines (aka, the power is on). I'm planning to make pumpkin chocolate chip cookies for a ladies prayer meeting being hosted at yours truly's house this Friday, so I decided to make a trial batch today. We have a gas oven, so hopefully whatever kinks there are to be worked out will be discovered today so that Friday's batch turns out nicely.
All that said, back to grinding spices. This is the land of spices, but few of them come in powdered form. Cinnamon, cloves, and mustard, for example, are all used in whole forms here. To begin the process of baking a pumpkin cookie, one must first grind cinnamon sticks, store the ground cinnamon, and clean the grinder. The process is repeated for cloves. Then for sugar. Sugar also comes in a more largely granulated form, looking closer to rock salt than table sugar. After you grind the sugar, you have to puree the freshly cooked and strained pumpkin. (There is no such thing as canned pumpkin in this part of India!) If your recipe calls for brown sugar, and thankfully mine doesn't, you take chunks of molasses sugar, which come in about 2 inch cubes, and grind or beat those into a tacky powdered form to then be pressed into your measuring cup. Provided you've boiled milk in the morning, there is no further work to do for that ingredient.
Finally, after you've got the ingredients ready, mix and drop onto a pan. Convert the oven temperature from Celsius to Fahrenheit and bake away! One nice consequence of all the spice grinding is that I don't have to pull out my pumpkin spice candle; the kitchen already smells like it. Okay. Enough delay, time to mix and bake.
Today I tried another first: grinding spices. Some dear soul here gave us a blender/juicer/grinder for a wedding gift, and I'm trying to make use of it while the sun shines (aka, the power is on). I'm planning to make pumpkin chocolate chip cookies for a ladies prayer meeting being hosted at yours truly's house this Friday, so I decided to make a trial batch today. We have a gas oven, so hopefully whatever kinks there are to be worked out will be discovered today so that Friday's batch turns out nicely.
All that said, back to grinding spices. This is the land of spices, but few of them come in powdered form. Cinnamon, cloves, and mustard, for example, are all used in whole forms here. To begin the process of baking a pumpkin cookie, one must first grind cinnamon sticks, store the ground cinnamon, and clean the grinder. The process is repeated for cloves. Then for sugar. Sugar also comes in a more largely granulated form, looking closer to rock salt than table sugar. After you grind the sugar, you have to puree the freshly cooked and strained pumpkin. (There is no such thing as canned pumpkin in this part of India!) If your recipe calls for brown sugar, and thankfully mine doesn't, you take chunks of molasses sugar, which come in about 2 inch cubes, and grind or beat those into a tacky powdered form to then be pressed into your measuring cup. Provided you've boiled milk in the morning, there is no further work to do for that ingredient.
Finally, after you've got the ingredients ready, mix and drop onto a pan. Convert the oven temperature from Celsius to Fahrenheit and bake away! One nice consequence of all the spice grinding is that I don't have to pull out my pumpkin spice candle; the kitchen already smells like it. Okay. Enough delay, time to mix and bake.
Hope the cookies turn out, but at least today you are getting a nice smell of fall :) VERY cool here today, and I'm loving it! I love you... miss you. Jesus knows :)
ReplyDeleteWow, what a lot of work goes into making cookies! I'm so glad you shared about the process, Betsy. I know those cookies will be so worth it!! :-) Enjoy one for me! All that fresh-ness is bound to make one healthier... that's one "plus" to rejoice in! I'm getting ready to make some blueberry biscuits, and I'll be thinking about you as I do it. love you!
ReplyDelete~Jaimee