My Buttery Jam Cookies look a lot like my sugar cookies from last week, thanks to the watermelon sprinkles! The taste is a whole lot different though. 
In addition to the apricot jam the recipe called for, I threw in a couple of handfuls of walnuts and topped them with cinnamon and sugar. Yum!
I also experimented with popping the dough in the freezer between bakes to facilitate a nice, lovely, round shape. It worked pretty well although I think I just need to get a melon scooper.
These yummy shortbread cookies left my hands all buttery, smelling like a dairy farm or an expensive hand treatment, or both.
I just returned from a three week trip to China where I was visiting my sister, playful pandas, and the Great Wall. It was a great vacation with highlights including Chinese massages with back-cracking, volunteer caretaking for two wonderful panda bears (Lulu and Meching) in Szechuan, and, of course, lovely culinary delights!
There is a lot of meat in Chinese cuisine, but also tofu, so as a pescetarian I didn't have any real difficulties...except in actually communicating "no meat please." The Lonely Planet food section was very helpful as I pointed to the Chinese characters for "I am a vegetarian" and "spicy tofu." Many Buddhist temples had vegetarian restaurants attached with lots of scruptious mock meat dishes and bean pastries. Some restaurants had menus in English although the descriptions themselves were sometimes confusing or vague. A lot of dishes simply said "meat," since the Chinese word for pork can also be used for meat in general. In addition, there was "fish like squirrell," in which the fishtail curled upwards to the ceiling (quite tasty). 
I also loved the roasted chestnusts sold on every street corner. And the milk tea! And the little steamed baotze balls filled with cabbage or a darker, kale-like veggie! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baozi Every morning, I saw people lining up for baotze and I quickly joined the queues. Hot pot was neat - putting veggies and dumplings in a heated bowl of boiling broth. 
In Beijing, my sister and I found a night market with an entire street of food vendors lined up with fried noodles, fried ice cream, fried scorpion, fried beetles, fried centipede, fried starfish, fried dough, fried dumplings, fried rice, fried honeybees, and the list goes on. Yep, no oil spared here my friends. I partook of the fried ice cream and fried banana balls (which btw, contained absolutely no banana) while my more adventurous (and carnivore) sister nibbled on crunchy centipede and scorpion. Yes, many pictures were taken. 
Things I want to try:
I ran into a small dilemma when I went to steep the cranberries. I'd never before steeped dried fruit in alcohol and wanted some guidance on it. I googled and searched but found nothing. I tried to use what common sense I have and soaked the fruit in the sherry, then drained it. It added a lovely though strong sherry taste.
