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Last December my friend Marian brought these to book club. They are wonderful and so very addictive. I have a special sweet tooth for baked goods with ground almonds in them. At the time Marian said the recipe was a family secret, but she has now decided to share! I'm hoping to make them this weekend.

The cookies I had were 1.5 inch round sandwich cookies, with the tops and bottoms coated in powdered sugar, and raspberry preserves between the layers.

Nonna's Spitzbuben -- translated by AnnaGram

Spitzbuben

2 1/4 sticks butter
7/8 cup sugar
5 oz. almonds (not blanched), finely ground
1 Tbs. pure vanilla extract
3 1/2 cups flour (or less - need to adjust)
Raspberry preserves (or part chocolate frosting)

Mix ingredients - butter,sugar, vanilla, almonds, then flour. Roll out on a board, make small round shapes, bake until light yellow in moderate oven (375o or less?) for 8 -15 minutes (depends hugely on kind of cookie sheet and oven temp!)

While still warm, dip tops into sugar, and spread flat bottom with jam or chocolate (even both!) and lay another cookie on top.

(These ingredients are translated from German pounds. If you have a gram scale, and keep in mind that 500 grams = 1 German pound, the quantities are:

1/2 lb. butter
200 gr. sugar
1/4 lb. almonds
1/2 stick of vanilla
420 gr. flour - but I use 390 or less)

Looking for a house is okay; we are still in the "figuring out what we want and what is available and what we can afford" phase. It's still sort of windowshopping; until we get down there it probably won't dawn on me that we have to actually BUY one of these houses.

But talking to mortgage brokers is stressful like whoa. I hate anything that implies that prices are negotiable - I am like the anti-haggler - and I still feel very at sea about the whole process. Lender #1 writes, "do you plan to pay taxes and fees with the payments" and all I want to do is write back "How the fuck should I know?"

ION, we are doing THREE full-day interviews for my search committee next week, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. And one more at a time yet to be determined. The good news is, this means nice dinners out with the candidates. The bad news is, intense! And now that the names of people we are interviewing are released, another layer of stress, as one is an internal candidate and another is local and the spouse of a former employee (who left to have kids).

Book club is discussing Suite Francaise tonight; I LOVED it, and I really don't like much fiction. I regret that it's unfinished - there are only the barest notes of where she intended to go with it, and they were surprising to me given what exists - the story about the author and the circumstances surrounding its 60-year delayed publication are as much of a novel as the work itself.

Last night was Bad Mommy night; tonight will be Bad Book Club Member night. (And boy, Bad Book Blub is sure a funny combination of words.)

I am about to go to the Perk to purchase some baklava to take to book club. It's a "no book this month" month (we only read every other month), but at our annual recap and plan ahead meeting in October someone suggested we make the non-book months have food themes. This month is Middle Eastern, with a specific No Hummus rule instated after 3 different people brought hummus to the October meeting. (Coming up is Thai; WTF am I supposed to do then?)

Most of the women in my book club make something; several are excellent cooks, and those that aren't seem to wield a Whole Foods or Costco card well and are rocking the fancy cheese and champagne grapes or something like that.

I have a Bad Attitude about the competitive foodiness vibe, which is silly, because I like food! Only I always forget, and also, we always have WAY too much food, because everyone brings something. Things I have brought include: bottle of cheap wine; open box of crackers and cut into cheese that I happened to have in my house; box of Thin Mints; bowl of pistachios and bowl of figs; tub of Fage Total yogurt I happened to have in my house. Other people BAKE, yo, with heirloom tomatoes and free-rage eggs and shit.

I need to resign myself to the fact that what *I* bring to book club is 1) actually having read the book and having something to say about it and 2) links to local blogs and Youtube and things These Kids Today are into. Martha Stewart, I do not bring.

ION, I received two surprise presents today, and to the one of you who reads here - you shouldn't have! But thank you! (I found it on my porch this morning; I wonder if the delivery person was too appalled by the screaming in the house last night to ring the doorbell.)

So, the 1933 movie of Little Women does a decent job of smashing all that plot into 2 hours, but boy is it dated, and thus hard to watch. The acting styles, the close-ups of the women with vaseline lenses, the EXCESSIVE makeup on Laurie (he was wearing more makeup than anyone else in the movie), the silly over-plucked eyebrows of Amy - there was a sad amount of MST3King. One woman who saw the Winona Ryder version said that was well done and more in tune with current naturalistic tastes. Also, she noted, that Prof. Bhaer was played by Gabriel Byrne, which made THAT part of the plot suddenly more understandable.

I told them that large numbers of my friends, when asked about Little Women, said, "I love it and read it every year." The response was, "Those are all LIBRARIANS!" I refrained from explaining that they were actually (mostly) my invisible friends, and also did not point out that since this was a BOOK CLUB it would not be entirely surprising to find book lovers among this group!

In good news, the Dillo has slept WELL (4-hour stretches, no insane early wakeup) for TWO nights now. He is again un-stuffy, which is why, but I praised him to the skies this morning. Unfortunately I didn't get to bed until 11 last night, so I am still tired. Book club is full of Night People.

This post brought to you by the EMPHATIC CAPITALS of gronk.

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Entries tagged with book club

Spitzbuben

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Little Women II - the movie!

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