My old copy of The Joy of Cooking lists a recipe for thumbprint cookies and says that they are called puits d’amour, or wells of love, in French. I have asked many French friends and none of them had ever heard of these cookies, still I like the name and the sentiment behind them. During a recent food-centered conversation, a friend asked me, "What do you like to cook most?" It took me not a second to reply, "I like to cook food that makes people happy." So often, the food that makes people happiest is attached to memories. Comfort food we call it. I know what my sister craves when not just her belly, but also her soul needs feeding, it’s tuna on toast, people, the most humble of meals. For my younger brother, it’s sugar cookies with a thick layer of frosting. With me, it’s usually meatloaf or macaroni and cheese, but lately, these cookies have been pulling the nostalgia strings.

This is the first year in a long time that I made thumbprint cookies without my friend Matilda. We made them together for years for her to take to school for a holiday cookie exchange, I would make the dough, she and I would roll them into little balls and I would take her little thumb and push it in to make the well for the jam. We would make a double batch, one with raspberry centers and one with apricot and split them. I’m missing her and her parents very much; we shared many great meals and memories together this year. Here are our cookies; now that you have the recipe, maybe you’ll make them and remember me. Happy Holidays everyone!

puits d’amour (wells of love) or thumbprint cookies

• 1 cup butter, softened
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 t grated lemon rind
• 1 t vanilla extract
• 2 cups sifted flour
• 1 cup toasted almonds or hazelnuts, ground
• 1/2 cup jam

Cream together butter and sugar; incorporate egg, lemon rind and vanilla. Mix in flour then almonds. Chill dough 1 hour or overnight. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Roll dough in 1" balls and place on ungreased cookie sheets. Make a well in the center of each round and add a dab of jam. Bake until lightly golden, about 8 minutes. Makes approximately 4 dozen cookies.

I really didn’t set out to bake up a horde of cookies of northern European ancestry this month, really I didn’t. I was just looking for one thing, a recipe for speculoos, the Belgian spice cookie. But then I stumbled on the banket and the jan hagels and breezed my way through batches and batches of them; I also made a series of thumbprint cookies and then realized I had somehow digressed from my original plan. I realigned myself and looked into it again and here we are with another cookie recipe and I’m really hoping that you (and your waistline) will forgive me, but I must tell you that this latest recipe is also a keeper and really easy, like the last one, and you should be like my sister was with the jan hagels and get up from your desk, leave your computer and make these. Right. Now.

Speculoos are a traditional Belgian holiday cookie, but once you try them, you might be as surprised as I was to realize that these are windmill cookies (without the windmill). Also called speculaas in Dutch, my very old edition of Joy of Cooking also has a recipe for speculatius cookies. All of these names are probably derived from the Latin word, specula, meaning mirror, because it’s traditional to roll them out and cut them into shapes or use a mold to press them into elaborate images of saints, especially St. Nicholas. One more thing that I love about this recipe is that it has no eggs, so I was able to give some to my niece, Jessica, who has an egg allergy. She’s also a really picky eater. They won her full approval.

speculoos, speculaas or speculatius cookies

• 1 lb (4 sticks) butter
• 2 cups dark brown sugar
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• 1/2 t baking soda
• 2 t cinnamon
• 1/2 t ground nutmeg
• 1/2 t ground cloves
• 1/2 t ground ginger
• 4 1/2 cup flour
• 1 cup sliced almonds

Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees. Cream butter and brown sugar with a hand mixer (or a stand mixer), add sour cream. Sift together flour, soda and spices and add to butter and sugar mixture. Stir in nuts. Form dough into 2 inch high and 4 inch wide rectangle. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least one hour or overnight. Cut into slices (thinner for a crisp cookie, thicker for a cookie with more chew) and bake for 10 to 12 minutes.

Honestly, I’m still searching for a recipe for speculoos, but I’m taking the road less traveled on my way to making them. I keep getting distracted. Other things keep tempting me, calling my name. First it was the Dutch letters, then I made some thumbprint cookies last weekend for a couple of parties; this time it’s Jan Hagels, my new crush. Crisp, lush, shortbread-like pan cookies, flavored with a hint of cinnamon and almond extract and topped with almonds and sugar. What is there not to love?

But it gets better. If you thought that the previous recipe for Dutch letters with its making of a pastry, rolling it around almond filling and shaping it into letters looked a little too much like work, this one is for you. It’s the easiest dessert I’ve made in a long time. It literally only took me fifteen minutes to put this together and get it in the oven. Next time you need something quick and easy for a dinner party, make these and serve them with some ice cream.

Jan Hagels (pronounced Yahn Hoggles), translated literally from Dutch means Jan Hails. The only way I can make sense of this name is to imagine Jan the Dutch boy crying out with pleasure as he bites into of one of these. My old Betty Crocker cookbook also calls these John Hall cookies. As with so many traditional recipes, the why and wherefore of their name is elusive; I’m sure nobody remembers the original Jan or John or why his name is associated with this particular recipe, but these are the standard cookie in many Dutch households, the thing you make from what you already have in your pantry, and I can see why because they are so simple and so satisfying.

Jan Hagels cookies

• 1 cup butter (2 sticks), softened
• 1 sugar
• 1 egg, yolk and white separated
• 1/2 t vanilla
• 1/2 t almond extract
• 2 cups flour
• 1 t cinnamon
• 1/2 cup almonds, roughly ground in food processor with 1/4 cup sugar

Pre-heat oven to 325 degrees. Cream together butter and sugar with hand mixer (or stand mixer). Mix in egg yolk and extracts. Add flour and cinnamon and mix just until combined. Place dough in a jellyroll pan (a baking sheet with sides) and press mixture evenly over pan to a depth of about 1/8 inch. Depending on the size of your baking sheet, you may not be able to cover the whole pan bottom, just push the dough into three sides and shape the remaining side to form a rectangle. Brush the dough with egg white, sprinkle on the almond sugar mixture and press it into the dough to help it adhere. Bake for 30 minutes or until top is slightly browned. Cut into 1×3 inch rectangles while still warm.

Have you ever gone in search of something and found something else entirely, something you had no idea you were looking for but that exactly fit your hidden craving? This hasn’t happened to me very often, but this time I’m really excited about it. I was looking for a cookie recipe. Not just any cookie recipe, but a spiced cookie recipe from Belgium that is made for St. Nicholas day, December 6th. This is traditionally the day that kicks off the holiday season and I decided that rather than make dozens and dozens of cookies for Christmas later in the month, I wanted to make some cookies now, some more next week and another batch or two the week after that so we can spread out the fun (and the calories).

I started looking for a good recipe for these Belgian cookies, called speculoos, and I did a search for St. Nicholas cookie recipes and instead came up with a Dutch pastry called banket or Dutch letters. Everywhere I saw it mentioned there were statements about this being the best cookie ever, about how this is always the first treat to disappear, about it being the thing that inspires people to trek all the way to places like the Jaarsma Bakery in Pella, Iowa, because Dutch bakeries aren’t that easy to find. With so many accolades, I started wondering what the fuss was about and had a look at the recipe.

It’s essentially an unsweetened piecrust dough rolled out extra thin, filled with a mixture of almond paste, sugar and eggs, rolled up and brushed with cream, milk or egg whites and sprinkled with sugar. Once rolled together, you can either leave them as straight sticks and bake them that way, or the rolls can be shaped into letters. Because these are for St. Nicholas day, they are often formed into the letter s (Sinterclaas in Dutch).

They are often also shaped into the first letter of people’s names or used to spell out Christmas greetings.

You could use them to spell anything at all really.

After reading about how the dough turns all flaky and puff pastry like, I was skeptical, it really looked like regular old pie crust to me, but wow, just flour, butter and water come together in an almost magical way here and the not-too-sweet pastry showcases the rich almond filling really well.

There are several names for these pastries. Dutch letters is used when you shape them into, duh, letter shapes. They are also called almond letters, almond banket or banket letters. Banket is a Dutch term for pastry, it actually means banquet and refers to the fact that pastries would have been set out after a meal on a table and the name transferred metonymically from the thing it would have sat on to the thing itself. Banquet is a word from French meaning small bench. It’s like the word pâté, which originally referred to the dough that meat or other ingredients were wrapped in but eventually came to refer to the filling. My favorite example of metonymy, replacing a term with one that is in close proximity, is when people say about a guy that he likes to "chase skirts," when everyone knows that it’s not really the skirt that he’s after. In any case, call these what you like, once you try them, you’ll also call them delicious.

banket or Dutch letters

for dough

• 2 cups flour
• 1/4 t salt
• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, chilled and cut into small pieces
• approximately 1/2 cup cold water

Place flour and salt into bowl of food processor and pulse once or twice to mix, add butter and pulse until mixture resembles course crumbs (if you don’t have a food processor, use a pastry cutter). Add water a little at a time just until dough comes together. Turn dough out onto a sheet of plastic wrap, flatten it out into a rough rectangle and fold it onto itself in thirds (like a business letter). Chill at least two hours before using.

filling

• 8 oz. almond paste
• 1 egg
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/4 t almond extract
• 1/4 t vanilla extract

Place ingredients into bowl of food processor and pulse to combine (if you have no food processor, you can mix them together in a bowl using a wooden spoon). Place filling into the center of a piece of plastic wrap and chill at least one hour before using.

assembly and baking

• 1/2 cup cream
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 375 degrees and line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Cut filling into sixteen pieces and roll it between your hands to make ropes (if it sticks, use some powdered sugar on the filling and on your hands). Cut dough into sixteen pieces and roll to a rectangle about 5-6 inches long and about 1-1/2 inches wide with a thickness of about 1/8 inch. Place filling in the center of the dough, fold the short ends of dough over the filling and roll up jelly roll style. Shape the dough into letters and place on lined baking sheets at least one inch apart. Brush with cream and sprinkle with sugar. Bake for 20-25 minutes until cookies are golden brown.

Are you done with turkey yet? After a couple of days of sandwiches and turkey noodle soup (with parmesan and pesto) and then a few days of putting turkey in enchiladas, risotto with porcini mushrooms and empanada, I was down to my last bit of leftover turkey and turkey stock. I was ready for something new, an exotic taste, something with a lot of flavor and a little heat. It’s also freezing out and I thought that some sort of soup would be a good idea.

I love Thai food, but at home I used to just turn to the red or green curry paste in the little jar and follow the directions on the label. Since using Pim’s recipes for pad thai, beef massaman curry and nam prik pao though, I’ve ventured into unfamiliar territory and have been really happy with the results. Thai food has a few special ingredients that you may not already have, but once you buy some lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, fish sauce and coconut milk, you’re halfway there and putting it together is usually fairly simple.

Tom yum gai is one of my favorite Thai soups, it’s usually made with chicken, but I had that turkey and turkey broth on hand, so that’s what I used. There are endless variations; two of my favorites are tom yum goong, made with shrimp, and tom kha gai, a chicken version with the addition of coconut milk, which I’ll probably add the next time I make this, because I love that flavor. If you don’t have any more leftover turkey, use chicken.

tom yum turkey

• 4 cups turkey or chicken broth
• 1 stalk lemon grass, cut into 2 inch pieces and lightly crushed*
• 3 kaffir lime leaves, torn into pieces (if you can’t find these, some recipes say to put in a piece of lime zest, but I usually just skip it if I can’t find any)*
• 3 slices galangal (this is a root similar to ginger, which makes a decent substitute if you can’t find it)*
• 2 shallots, sliced thinly
• 3 T fish sauce*
• 1 cup sliced shitake or cremini mushrooms
• 1 cup sliced turkey (or use sliced chicken breast and cook just until no longer pink)
• juice from 3 limes
• 6 large basil leaves, sliced
• 3 T cilantro, chopped
• nam prik pao (spicy Thai red pepper sauce)*

Heat chicken broth to boiling. Add lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, galangal and shallots, reduce heat to simmer and cook for 10-15 minutes until broth is fragrant and strain, discarding solids. Reheat broth and add fish sauce, mushrooms, turkey (or chicken) and simmer for 3-4 minutes (longer if using uncooked chicken). Remove from heat and add lime juice and basil leaves. Place a small spoonful of nam prik pao into bottom of soup bowl and ladle soup over it, garnish with cilantro and serve.

* Available at Asian grocery stores and some supermarkets