In which it all starts to make sense

So I was watching a few minutes of Martha Stewart's Christmas Special. I turned off the TV when "celebrity" Melissa Joan Hart showed up to make houses out of sugar cubes. Also, Santa seemed to be wearing leather pants, and I that was a little beyond my comfort zone. I headed back into the kitchen remove some pans that I had been reseasoning from the oven, then I put my natural sugar and my new bag of flour in their cannisters; I tossed the leftovers from the fridge, took out the trash and the recyclables. Then I decided how and where to arrange my collection of vintage soda bottles.

It was about that time when I realized that I have no use for Martha Stewart because I am Martha Stewart--minus the staff and all that her fortune entails, of course--I'm the younger, cuter, urban hipster version of Martha Stewart. Things make a lot more sense now. I've been fighting this for years and that's contributed to my lack of complete satisfaction. Maybe I should just go with it.

I have little use for Martha because she's largely responsible for the disappearance of cool, cheap junk from thrift stores. Am I ever going to find another wonderfully crazed chicken egg cup for a dime? I don't think so. It's not impossible to find cool, cheap stuff, but the pickings are slimmer and slimmer every year. That makes the good finds a little more rewarding, but the finding is a lot more frustrating.

Anyway, I have well seasoned cast-iron pans now. My cookbooks are organized according to how often I use them, except the tall ones that have to go on the bottom shelf, and the soda bottles have all been washed. I arranged them on top of the cabinets in the kitchen. I wish I had more green ones, actually. I've spent the past two evenings working in the kitchen, and I'm about prepared to make cookies.

The winners in the cookie competition are:

Cranberry Coconut Oatmeal Cookies, from Catiecake
Grandmother's Rugelach, from Squibnocket
Christmas Cookies, from Sophie
Lemon Bars, from Steve H. via Ellen
and Chocolate Christmas Bars Cockaigne, from The Joy of Cooking

I'm also going to make some molasses cookies with candied ginger and peanut butter cookies. I was going to do peanut butter with chocolate chips, but I think I'm going to drizzle chocolate on the peanut butter cookies instead. That's seven completely different cookies. I nixed White Chocolate Chunk Macadamia when there were no white chocolate chunks at Trader Joe's. I wanted to make the Scandinavian cookies that use the wooden molds, the name escapes me right now, but I can't find my molds. If I do find them, I'll probably make those, too. (Yes, I have an idea where they might be.)

I've had the molds since I was about 8; picked them up for a quarter in a Salvation Army or something, because I thought they were cool looking. See? I told you.

before - after