A Cookie for What Ails Me

ADDENDA:
When I was food shopping yesterday, I finished collecting my list and decided to find something that would cheer me up. I walked over to the cookie section and found Walker's Scottish Shortbread - I used to wolf this easily-digestible high-calorie fatty cookie when I was travelling cross country by bike, a lot of positive associations with it. However, something to eat while sitting on the couch....eh. I looked at the nutritional information, and noticed it had four ingredients - butter, flour, sugar, salt....hmmmm....I HAVE all those ingredients at home..... it might be more depressing to just buy a box of cookies to snarf, but if I were to snarf cookies that I made myself...

Found a simple recipe online which called for brown sugar, and left out the salt (I thought if I were to snarf a pile of cookies, at least keeping them salt-free would give me some defense against Ilsa's wrath!) After getting to bed around 3:30am, woke at 10:30 feeling ok. After vegetating in front of the TV, started working with the ingredients. Organic whole wheat pastry flour, organic unrefined brown sugar, organic butter. The recipe calls to cream the butter and sugar, had to look that up and wait for the butter to get to the right temperature - three ingredients or not, this is not brain dead work! Mixed in the flour by hand, worked the dough and felt the heat of my hands softening it a bit much, so I rolled it out on my stone counter with my cold metal roller, cut it up onto a baking dish and into the oven.

Twenty minutes later, I had a nice warm pile of comfort while I watched TV all afternoon. Hmmm, I think I may get out of the house tomorrow. Usually eating a bunch of heavy fatty cookies while doing nothing is self-reinforcing depression, but making shortbread cookies for the first time really lifted my spirits. I may cook some more later...

BRUNCH: 1pm, a pile of homemade shortbread cookies, hunger 4/5

PM WATERING: 3pm, 2 pints of tap water

DINNER 1:6pm, half a fully homemade pizza, hunger 4/5
Made dough from scratch following a recipe on line. Unfortunately, I think it meant a DRY measure of water, which would of been about half. After rising 30 minutes, the dough was very liquidy and unworkable. So without rolling or kneading, I poured a portion onto a cookie sheet and put it into the oven. Once it solidified a bit, I took it out, topped it, and put directly on a pizza stone in the oven.

It looked pretty, but taste wise....there was a notable lack of chew - the bite was a bit crumbly. The flavor of the crust was spot-on, but no gluten was developed, making the mouthfeel a bit crumbly and dry. I also used plain fresh cow's milk mozz because no bufalla was available - nt nearly as silky or flavorful.

I shared it with B then attempted a 2nd pie, but it disintegrated in the transfer from untopped to topped. I ended up still hungry...

DINNER 2: 8:15pm, shrimp in garlic sauce with black beans and yellow rice, pint water, hunger 4/5
Ordered in from a local Spanish joint. Big portion. I guess the real usefulness of delivery is to cover when your cooking fails!