OPB’s “Superabundant” explores the stories behind the foods of the Pacific Northwest with videos, articles and this weekly newsletter. Every week, Heather Arndt Anderson, a Portland-based culinary historian, food writer and ecologist, highlights different aspects of the region’s food ecosystem. This week she offers a recipe for chocolate-chestnut shortbread pinwheel cookies.

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With 2024 nearly in the rearview mirror, some of you will no doubt escape the damp and chill by scurrying off to sunnier climes. Perhaps there will be palm trees and salty fishbowl margaritas or fireside Schnapps with a view of snow-capped mountains; maybe you’ll find yourself gazing across a sapphire sea over a platter of fritto misto. But for the rest of us homebound souls, we’ll always have cookies. Whether you’re a devotee who starts the lebkuchen dough months in advance, prefer a no-bake polvorón or you’re more of a classic iced sugar cookie person, there’s an ideal holiday season cookie for pretty much everyone. I like to make a new cookie every year (how else will we discover our new favorites?), and this time I’ve come up with a buttery shortbread swirled with chocolate-chestnut paste. Why is it called “shortbread,” anyway? Read on to find out!

As we wind down this eventful year, we at “Superabundant” wish you all a cozy holiday season and we’ll see you bright and fresh as a paperwhite on Jan. 10. May the time between the Solstice and the New Year be peaceful, and let the crumbs never land in your sheets.

Our favorite recipes of 2024

This week, instead of sharing food news, I’m jumping on the year-end bandwagon and sharing a listicle instead. (Don’t @ me — I’ve got lots of cookies to bake!) Here are five of the top “Superabundant” recipes of the past year, based mostly on arbitrary personal preferences (but also on your social media engagement).

🍔 Celebrating the burgeon of our local bigleaf maple syrup industry, the maple-glazed breakfast burger was a surprise hit. I say “surprise” because sure, it tastes like calorific perfection (as any breakfast sando should), but it’s a glossy pork sausage patty topped with melted cheese and a runny egg (i.e. looks a gloppy mess).

🌸 Salt-preserved sakura blossoms were an easy (yet photogenic) way to usher in cherry blossom season. By simply layering the fragrant pink flowers in sea salt and waiting a short while, you can enjoy the flavors of spring all year long.

🎃 One of my proudest recipe developments this year was my custardy pumpkin spice Basque cheesecake — the ultimate mashup. Take a wholesome autumn bake and top it with creamy, tangy cheesecake. Then let it get a little burned on top (it’s meant to be like that!).

🌿 Sichuan-style fiddleheads were made from lady fern fiddleheads foraged from a muddy streamside in early spring, at the same time that stinging nettles and bigleaf maple blossoms were at their peak. The recipe drew inspiration from Chinese and Korean approaches to the ephemeral seasonal vegetable.

🍄 Though many of the Northwest’s wild mushrooms come in the autumn, springtime mushrooms like porcini and morels prove that a wild mushroom rarebit (aka fancy cheese toasties) is an ideal meal any time of year. Plus, when you learn to make a Mornay sauce you’ve also learned to make a roux and a Bechamel — three staple kitchen skills!

The cutthroat history of cookies in Portland

To celebrate cookie season, I took another look at the history of Portland’s cracker and cookie industry with a new story (I touched on the topic in a newsletter two years ago). During my research, I discovered a few surprising similarities between Gilded Age robber barons and the winner of the 2024 Oregon State Fair Junior Baked Foods competition. Read all about it here.

Good things abound

Not much new to report on this front, except that I’ve recently noticed one of my neighbors has a rather large yuzu tree in her front yard and now I can scarcely think of anything else. I even dreamed about this tree! It’s covered in large yellow fruits, and I’m desperate to have one for making my own yuzu kosho — it might be a good time to go introduce myself (with a jar of blackberry jam in hand, of course).

Lately, in the “Superabundant” kitchen

✨ I’d cooked a 2-pound tri-tip roast on Sunday, so the week was largely spent working through the leftovers. This started with a lovely, fragrant pot of pho (not to be confused with pot-au-feu!). I love charring the aromatics (shallots, ginger and garlic) directly over flame before tossing it into the pot with the cinnamon stick, star anise, cloves, bay leaf and green peppercorns — it helps turn the broth a richer dark brown and adds a ton of flavor. I seasoned the broth with fish sauce and a little palm sugar, then added razor-thin slices of roast beef, rice noodles, Thai basil and bean sprouts to the bowls (I like lots of lime and hoisin sauce in mine).

✨ More leftover tri-tip roast, finely chopped, made a perfect filling for soft tacos — I seasoned them with my homemade taco seasoning (I use the usual spices, but like extra achiote for that orange grease), sautéed onions and peppers.

✨ One night I threw together a simple Japanese home-style miso-vegetable stew (tonjiru) but used tofu instead of pork, as I had a pack of Ota Extra Firm that needed using up. We ate it with steamed rice and a light cucumber salad.

Recipe: Chocolate-chestnut shortbread pinwheels

When it comes to holiday cookies, I tend to fall into a few different categories. I usually like to bake a warm-spiced gingerbread-type thing like Lebkuchen (or something with lots of cinnamon, ginger and molasses); maybe something with dried plummy fruits and finely diced nuts (like my pflaummenmus drops); and something crumbly that’s coated with powdered sugar, like pfefferneuse or Russian tea cakes. Like many a German-American with a few generations of U.S. citizenship under her belt, I’m never more German than during the holidays.

But I also crave the trappings of an English Christmas, with its citrus pomanders and toddies. I crave the persimmon, pumpkin and walnut of a winter in Georgia (the country) or Azerbaijan, and the chestnuts, sweet potatoes and cloudy rice wines of Japan and Korea.

In the kitchen, there are many winter wonders. Outdoors, the season may seem to grind to a muddy halt, but at the hearth, the flavors of your fervid summer and autumn labors are blessedly pertinent now — the jams and pickles, the fruits you put in jars or hung to dry have perhaps never tasted better, even though they’re months past their season.

If you’re like me, every time you crack open something you nearly forgot is an opportunity to revisit that glorious season which produced it — the peaches in honey syrup put up over the summer, the pickled baby turnips of spring, the marmalade of last winter. And if you were especially squirrely (like me), the chestnuts you foraged, roasted and froze last fall are here to remind you of a crisper, brighter time.

These cookies are buttery, nutty and chocolatey in the best combination of ways: the chocolate-chestnut purée is almost like Nutella while being far more floury, and the shortbread is decidedly short — soft and crumbly rather than chewy owing to the lack of gluten development and high proportion of butter to flour.

Like a proper shortbread, these cookies would utterly fall to pieces at a stern glance, but are bolstered and made tender by their swirl of tender chestnutella interior. Makes about 3 dozen cookies

Ingredients

Chestnut filling

2 cups chestnut purée (from 1 pound roasted peeled chestnuts or 35-40 in-shell chestnuts)

3 tablespoons Dutch process cocoa powder (the higher the percent cocoa butter, the better)

½ cup sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Shortbread

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened

¾ cup sugar

½ teaspoon fine sea salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon Dutch process cocoa powder

Instructions

1. Make the chocolate-chestnut puree: In a food processor or blender, puree the chestnuts, cocoa powder, sugar and cinnamon until smooth, about a minute or two. Scrape it into a bowl, cover and set aside.
2. Make the shortbread dough: In a stand mixer with the paddle attachment (or using a handheld electric mixer, or by hand), whip the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the salt, vanilla, flour and cocoa powder and mix until fully incorporated (but don’t overdo it! You don’t want to develop gluten and make tough cookies).
3. Lay a 2-foot length of plastic wrap on your work surface, then scrape the shortbread dough on top. Mush the dough into a rough rectangle, then flour your rolling pin and roll out the dough into a 12 x 24-inch rectangle, roughly ¼ inch thick.
4. Using an offset spatula, do your best to spread the chocolate-chestnut puree in an even layer across the top of the shortbread dough, working from one edge to the other. If it’s too sticky or difficult to work with, you can lay another layer of plastic wrap over the top and roll it out into an even layer (I had to do this!).
5. Grab the edge of the dough nearest you and begin rolling it away from you. Grab the edge of the plastic wrap to help make a nice, tightly coiled log, smoothing and gently pressing it tight as you work, until you’ve fully rolled the dough into a cylinder. Wrap the log tightly with the plastic wrap (you might need a little extra to cover the ends) and whack it into the fridge for at least two hours or up to two days.
6. When you’re ready to bake, arrange the oven racks in the middle and lower-middle positions, preheat to 350o and line two rimless cookie sheets with parchment paper.
7. Remove the plastic wrap from the dough log and slice the cookie dough into 36 rounds, approximately ¼ inch thick. Lay the sliced rounds onto the parchment, leaving about an inch of space between. Bake (rotating the two pans halfway through baking) until slightly puffed and a little more brown than they went in, about 13-15 minutes. Remove the baked cookies to a cooling rack and allow to cool for 15 minutes before serving.

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