As I write this (in mid-March), I am making plans for a provincewide book-based kitchen party to celebrate the role of food in our lives. My essay collection Bread & Water: Essays has been chosen by the Saskatchewan Library Association (SLA) as the 2025 One Book One Province (OBOP) selection, which is a singular honour. I’ll be touring Saskatchewan libraries, reading, talking, signing books, visiting and sharing some handmade cookies along with the words. (You can find the schedule here.)
The SLA created OBOP in 2017, aiming to generate a provincewide conversation based on a single book at the same time as supporting literacy and creating a reading culture, raising the profile of libraries and literacy organizations, and building community. Food is an ideal medium to meet these goals, and two of the previous eight OBOP honourees are wonderful food books: Amy Jo Ehman’s Out of Old Saskatchewan Kitchens (2018), and the late Habeeb Salloum’s Arab Cooking on a Prairie Homestead (2022). My book Bread & Water is a culinary memoir about my return to Saskatchewan in 2010, woven through with meditations on cooking, grief and loss, aging, flood and place, the politics and issues of local and sustainable food, and sexism in the restaurant world.
April is a great time for a kitchen party. On the Prairies, the month is a hopeful time for food lovers: we’re perusing seed catalogues, planning our gardens and dreaming about salads made from the season’s first greens. We know that our winter plainsong chant of cabbage and carrots and rutabagas and beets and the winter’s last spuds will soon be replaced by the tonic notes of the first rhubarb, the grassy high notes of the first asparagus, the snare drum rattle and roll of crunchy first peas. And of course food remains a doubly hot topic as our nation keeps our collective elbows up in the face of trade tariffs.
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Tins of handmade cookies will make the trip with me. As regular readers know, cookies are high on my list of gifts to make and share, and I’ve rummaged through some of my favourite recipes for ideas on what to bake for this road trip.
Cookies are deceptively simple bits of baking. Being made of very few ingredients, they rely not only on the best ingredients but careful attention to detail and technique. They are often the first thing that child bakers attempt, because how complicated can they be, right? Regardless of whose hands do the mixing and shaping, cookies made with good will and attention are community builders of the highest order, and I’m pleased to share mine with you. First we eat, then we turn our attention to matters of trade.
Apricot and almond stars
These rich cookies are fragile and a wee bit fussy, but immensely delicious and beautiful, ideal for a mid-afternoon cuppa with your bestie. They are proof positive that handmade cookies far outstrip anything you can buy in a grocery store, and are worth the time they take to make.
Makes about 30 cookies.
- ½ cup unsalted butter
- 1/3 cup white sugar
- ½ tsp. almond extract
- 1 egg yolk
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- ½ tsp. baking powder
- A pinch of salt
- 1 egg white or whole egg
- 1 Tbsp. milk or cream
- 1/3 cup apricot jam
- ¼ c. sliced almonds, optional
- Set the oven at 375 F. Line several baking sheets with parchment.
Cream butter on high speed for a minute. Add sugar and almond extract, and cream until light and fluffy, 5 minutes. Add egg yolk and mix well. Sift together dry ingredients, and blend into the mixture.
Whisk the egg white or whole egg with cream until homogeneous, then set aside.
Dust the counter with flour and roll out the dough to a thickness of 1/4-inch or slightly thinner. Cut into 2-inch squares. Use a metal lifter to place each square on baking sheet. Use a small knife to slice each corner diagonally, leaving a ½-inch centre unsliced. Spoon a bit of jam into the centre. Fold every other point into the centre, forming a star. Gently brush exposed cookie dough with egg wash and sprinkle with optional almonds. Bake until golden brown, about 7-10 minutes. Cool before moving from the tray.
