…And another vermin-control tidbit
To finish up this series of posts about gifts of food for the holidays [Here and Here], I’d like to share a perennial favorite recipe that makes good use of some of that wonderful home-grown grape jam made earlier in the late summer or fall from a portion of the grape harvest.
Jam-Filled Butter Cookies
These basic butter cookies are seriously coveted by my military and foreign service relatives, for reasons they’ve never shared with me except to beg for more. Baby sister and her three kids want the straight jam every year, swearing it tastes better than anything they can buy anywhere. The older boys have learned to trade half their pbj’s at school for other kids’ cookies or candy. But if my jam butter cookies can get my service-members a weekend pass or time off for a visit home I’m more than willing to bake up a storm!
3/4 cup salted butter, softened
3/4 cup white sugar
2 egg yolks
2 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour
Home made jam
Cream together the butter, sugar and egg yolks until creamy. Mix in the flour a little at a time. When it gets difficult to stir with a fork go ahead and knead in more flour. The butter makes for an odd consistency, you want to be able to shape balls.
Roll pinches of dough into balls of about 1″ in diameter. Place these on ungreased cookie sheets about 2″ apart. Press the base of a small (~3/4″) shot glass or jar down onto the balls. This presses them out into ~2″ cookies and leaves a depression in the center. Fill this depression with jam, approximately 1/2 tsp per cookie. Bake at 375º for 10-12 minutes.
The cookies should be barely golden on the bottom edge, the jam should be melted and flattened to the cookie. Sometimes the jam will melt over an edge, that’s okay. Just spreads the goodness out! Cool thoroughly and store in a covered container until ready to pack for shipment. These cookies don’t need to be wrapped individually, though you will want to put them on waxed paper and cover them with another sheet to maintain freshness during shipping.
I have also made these cookies (accidentally, it turned out pretty good) by spooning about a quarter cup of jam right into the bowl with the dough. Using a spoon I mixed the jam into the dough roughly, meaning there are swirls, it’s not mixed thoroughly. Spoon the results onto the cookie sheets with a teaspoon and bake. These are quite colorful and amazingly delicious cookies. Because they’re so butter-rich you don’t need more than a couple to satisfy your desire, and the jam adds a little fruit tartness (I like my jam tart) that is delightful.
Intro Snake-Story
I got a delightful comment to my post Babies On the Jade Plant! that opened up a whole avenue of tale-telling about various kinds of vermin and some ‘natural’ ways of dealing with them. “Garden Decorations Junkie” wrote:
You must be a real garden and nature lover to have so many “friends” that are insects. You bring new meaning to the idea: bring some nature in your home. Thank you for the delightful story!
In my response, I mentioned something about how as soon as I find a better means of copperhead control than black snakes, I’d be sure to deploy it (if it’s not more poisonous than the copperhead).
Thought I’d post a little foreshadowing of future blog posts that will deal with vermin. As opposed to garden friends, that is. Copperheads are capable vermin-eaters that, if they weren’t nasty, smelly, poisonous, incredibly arrogant pit vipers, might be welcomed friends. Or house (yes, we’ve had them come right on in, they like closets, clothes dresser drawers, sock baskets and that nice warm space behind your clothes dryer).
I mention black snakes because I happen to really like black snakes. A lot. And while I’ve had pet snakes here and there since early teenager-dom, I like black snakes the best. They’re big enough to be impressive, but not so big you have to consider whether they’ll strangle you in your sleep. They’re very pretty – a just-molted black is beautifully blue-black even if they are somewhat grumpy at that time. They get over it, their bite isn’t too bad, and eventually they remember they love you too.
But the very best thing about black snakes is that they are voracious copperhead-eaters. I know, some readers may have never heard of a snake eating another snake outside the Bible, but black snakes really do eat copperheads (as well as mice, voles, beetles, grubs and other vermin).
This was just an old wives’ tale to me until I saw it happen. In a waterhole pit near a friend’s water supply koi pond a copperhead had been trapped because it tried to bite that friend cleaning out the system. He’d spiked it with a trident tool before we got there for a visit, couldn’t wait to show us. We who live in these environs find copperheads in the yard, in the garden, in the water source and in the house all the time. They don’t mind people at all – or, are positively antagonistic. They love to bite, and that’s a trip to the ER none of us can readily afford.
By the time we got to where we could look into the pit to see the skewered, still-struggling pit viper, a black snake of approximately the same size had found its way into the hole through the water opening. It was busy swallowing the copperhead, had worked its way to the trident that pinned the copperhead. We were all duly amazed. So we carefully worked out a way to get the trident out of the copperhead without disturbing the black. Sure enough, that copperhead was totally consumed in about a half an hour by that well-fed black.
Now I’ve a reason to tell family and visitors not to mess with any black snakes they encounter. I have a really big one that lives (and is welcome) right under the front deck stoop. We hardly ever see timber rattlers (our only other poisonous indigenous reptile), but copperheads aren’t shy and will move in if you let them. I’m hoping someday to have a population of blacks who are as comfortable living close to our home as the copperheads are!