These unique and pretty Christmas cookies are from the December 2005 edition of Gourmet Magazine. Speaking of Gourmet, its final issue is this month, November, 2009. After 68 years, like so many other publications, it is now a thing of the past. What led to Gourmet’s demise? Even with nearly 1 million subscribers, who looked forward to the fantastic articles,recipes, and pictures each month, the magazine fell victim to a decline in ad sales due to popular television food shows and online recipe sites, like its own Epicurious.com, taking up its former advertising revenue.  Upon the announcement, on October 5, 2009, The Wall Street Journal said it was “like a giant soufflé falling.”  I have to agree, Gourmet was the first food magazine I subscribed to, some 27 years ago.  I kept every one of those issues until just a couple summers ago, when I donated some 300 issues of Gourmet and nearly 1000 issues of Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Saveur, Cook’s Illustrated, Cooking Light, and Martha Stewart Living to the Culinary Program at Scottsdale Community College.  It took two trips in my SUV because of the extreme weight and mass! Gourmet was the granddaddy of them all and it will be sadly missed by foodies worldwide.
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My three-week cooking class series at Les Gourmettes Cooking School is only a little more than a week away and the theme for the first class of the session is “Holiday Open House”.  That seemed all good, until I took a look at the menu (that I developed in the summer and haven’t thought about or looked at since) and saw that it includes Assorted Christmas Cookies. Time to get busy and get some cookies baked and into the freezer!  I’ll be making a double batch so I can get my own Christmas baking out of the way at the same time, see there’s an upside to everything! Baking is not my favorite thing, so all the cookie recipes will be coming from elsewhere, such as this one from the 2004 December issue of Bon Appetit.
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Ingredients to make Banana-Nutella-Granola Cookies!

If you have been to Paris, then you have probably had a Nutella crepe and possibly of Banana-Nutella crepe.  And when you arrived home after your amazing vacation you most likely went to the store, got yourself a little jar of Nutella and came home and made yourself some crepes!  I know that after every trip I make to Paris, one of the first things I want to make are crepes, it keeps the illusion that you haven’t left the City of Light alive in your heart.  It’s been a year and 3 months since I was last there – when Dave, Connor, and I went over to join Marissa for a wonderful 2-week vacation.  Needless to say, we had to bring her home, kicking and screaming, after her magical “semester abroad!”   Plus my mentor and dear friend, Barbara Pool Fenzl, owner of Les Gourmettes Cooking School, just left this very day for France, so in her honor, I made not crepes – since there is no one here to eat them with me :(   But instead cookies.  As we all know,  you can freeze cookies and share with loved ones when the come home to visit from college!

NOTE: In the “ingredients” photo at the top, you’ll notice that the bananas are quite brown.  This is because once bananas become ripe on my counter, and I don’t have the time to bake, I place them in either the refrigerator or the freezer. Either option turns the skins brown as brown can be.  If refrigerated, use within a few days and if frozen, best within a few weeks.

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