Biscotti

It's a bit silly to keep harking back to my culinary heyday in Montréal, but the fact is that I had lots of good cooking habits then. One of them was always, always having a large glass jar of biscotti on the counter. I've been thinking of it dreamily for a few weeks, but today I finally got around to making them again.

My biscotti jar held quite a variety over the years, but I tended to make a few beloved recipes over and over. My all-time favourite is the Anise-Almond Biscotti from Epicurious. I make a few changes, such as using at least six times the amount of spice, but using whole toasted fennel seeds rather than ground anise. And putting chocolate in one of the two loaves. But otherwise the recipe produces a crisp, golden, crunchy but not hard cookie that keeps for weeks and goes so beautifully with coffee, with tea, for breakfast, in a long golden afternoon sitting with a book on the balcony...

The biscotti came out of the oven into a golden afternoon, but I was just dashing out. So it was in the golden evening, after sighting the sweetpea, that I sat out in the backyard with my espresso and little pile of biscotti and little pile of books. To good old habits rekindled.