Short and Sweet: The Hamantaschen Chronicles, 2017.

This past Friday, I was mostly housebound with a sick child. Since she was spending the day curled up on the couch dozing or watching TV shows, there wasn’t much I could do except be nearby, which meant that I had an opportunity to focus on making Hamantaschen (this weekend is Purim, after all). I made several dozen beautiful Hamantaschen, using the recipe I decided was the Mother of All Hamantaschen. (The recipe is here; but I have altered it slightly to suit my tastes. I use only butter, and skip the orange juice, which is anathema to me. I wrote at length about making these, in vast quantities, last year. This year, I had the good sense to not double anything, and avoided disasters. By five p.m. I had a lovely pile of hamantaschen, some of which I packed up (in tins leftover from a Christmas cooky exchange, gevalt) to deliver to friends. Shabbat dinner was Chicken a la King served over rice, with Hamantaschen for dessert.

The fillings this year, by the way, were poppyseed; raspberry; and fig. It turns out that fig jam makes an admirable hamantaschen filling.

Saturday evening my husband went out to a concert and I stayed home with our daughter, who was still a little under the weather. She and I went to bed around nine o’clock, and hence I was asleep when my husband came home. I caught up with him this morning when I went into the kitchen to get some coffee. He was there, pouring himself some coffee, and peering under the lid of the cake carrier in which I am storing the cookies. “There should be lots,” I said. “We each only had one last night.”
“Well, except, I got home last night and ate four,” he said.

“Four Hamantaschen! That’s kind of a lot,” I said.
“I know, but they’re good.”
“Yeah, but — these aren’t small  Hamantaschen,” I said. “They’re kind of big. So four is a lot of cookies.”
“I know,” he said, “It was very satisfying.”

I may be making more Hamantaschen today, because clearly doubling the recipe is what has to be done to assure that we all get enough Hamantaschen. I am considering using the rest of a jar of orange marmalade in some of the next ones; I hate orange marmalade, and this might be a good way to use it up and clear the space in the fridge. (Birds, meet stones.)