Running from lawnmowers

Everything green makes me sneeze, itch and feel perturbed. Oak pollen covers the screens. A lawnmower circles our little house like it's riding out the dawn of a new, sheared age, careening and sending clouds of allergens into the air. I'm allergic to the earth.

In an effort to remember that I like living with other living things, I've been searching for redeeming green. For example, Silvie brought home limes from the co-op in profusion, and I like putting brown sugar on them and just suckling. What's more green than limes? And mâche, oh mâche, pictured above, which I just learned is also called lamb’s lettuce, is incredible. And green tea – I've been drinking Arogya's Organic Dragon’s Well tea made from Chinese Long Jing leaves. I even took a cup of it and sat outside! In the grass!


So, generally, I think green tea is an overplayed and overrated ingredient right now (case in point: the soured green tea frozen yogurt I tasted in an sterile New York shop yesterday), but I had some old (really old) matcha in the pantry and saw a recipe from Marc at No Recipes for matcha green tea frosting, and I wanted to adapt it.

But then, of course, frosting needed something to frost, so I found an old recipe from Gourmet magazine, the first recipe I ever really made by myself – chocolate chip cookies. This time I left out the chocolate chip cookies and about ½ of the butter, from which the simplest cookie resulted. Then Anna, Andrew and I proceeded to take some artistic liberties with the matcha frosting.

Never before have such grotesque scenes alighted the faces of cookies. The greenish slop was so unappetizing that Anna pushed two cookies together so as not to see the celadon drops – and a sandwich was born. They actually didn't look that bad. After a fine dusting of confectioner’s sugar and powdered matcha tea, they even looked purposefully, uh, cute.

So we ate them and watched Planet Earth, and that made me feel both better and worse about being allergic to our planet. Caves are so cool. Sugar solves most everything.

Simple Butter-Sugar Cookies

1/t tsp baking soda
¾ teaspoon salt
1 cup all-p flour
2/3 cup white sugar
½ stick butter
1 large egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
½ tsp hazelnut extract (it’s your call on this)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Mix the wet ingredients, then add the dry ones. I don’t remember how long I cooked them – maybe 10 minutes.

Matcha Green tea frosting
Stir together:

1 tsp. matcha
1 tbsp. water
1 tbsp. cream
1/3 cup confectioner’s sugar

It's critical that you let the cookies cool before adding the frosting otherwise it will get runny and even more ghastly unappetizing.