What's Cooking Wednesday - Rugelach

First, I'm a guest blogger over at Crime Scene Collective. I hope you'll pop over and say hello.

For this week's recipe, I thought I'd share one of our family traditional cookie recipies. They're not 'officially' connected to Hanukkah, although we've made them at our house for decades. They're great for assembly line preparation with kids. And enough work so that they're a definite 'occasion' treat. You can also make the dough well ahead of time, which is another plus in my book.

(Sorry I don't have a real photo--I'm not actually making these until next week.)



Rugelach

Pastry:
2 sticks butter
8 oz. cream cheese
½ t salt
2 c flour

Filling:
½ c + 2 T sugar
1 T cinnamon
3 T melted butter (you might need more)
¾ c. dried currants (or raisins, but chop them down to currant size first)
1 ¼ c finely chopped walnuts.
(rumor has it mini chocolate chips are good here, too!)

Elephants and the Creative Process

Thanks and Welcome! to my new followers. So glad you're joining us here at Terry's Place. And thanks from my parents for all the good anniversary wishes.

Frequent visitor to this site, Elizabeth Spann Craig, spends some time each day on Twitter, giving references to blogs about the writing craft. I followed one of her links to this site about writing a first draft.


There's some good advice here, as long as you don't feel too restricted and regard them as hard and fast "rules." Anyone who's followed this blog for any length of time knows I don't like rigid rules.

The other night, our landlords invited us up for a glass of wine and some conversation. As I mentioned a while back, she is a sculptor who works primarily in stone. She mentioned that it was interesting that we were both artists.

Frankly, I'd never considered myself an artist, but we discussed our creative processes. There's an old saying that in order to carve a block of stone into an elephant, you simply chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. In writing, you keep adding until you get the elephant.