Sand Cookies

These lovely little melt-in-your-mouth bites of buttery bliss are Sand Cookies from Good to the Grain...or Sables as the French call them or just plain ol' butter cookies 'cept there's nothing plain about these. I made Sables from an Americas Test Kitchen recipe for the first time around Valentines Day and they were pretty freakin' awesome. Dangerous too...I had to bring the rest of them to work to get rid of them because I could not stop eating them.
I read somewhere...on amateurgourmet.com I think, that making butter cookies with European butter makes a significant difference, soooo.... I gave these a shot with two new-to-the-kitchen ingredients: Kamut flour and European butter.
Kamut flour is described as "a little bit nutty". I'm likin' it already. It comes from a whole grain, twice the size of wheat, indigenous to the Middle East...and European butter has a higher fat content thus tasting butterier. nuttier and butterier. Nuthin' wrong with that.
FYI: Trader Joes has the Irish butter for less than $3. I paid almost $5 for the exact same thing at Mollie Stones. The upshot is, know your audience. My co-workers will eat ANY thing. Inexpensive Smart and Final or Trader Joes butter and all-purpose or whole wheat flour is just fine and they taste pretty great.
I was at Sur la Table last week and bought a bunch of cookie cutters. My next cookie venture will be to make Shaped Sand Cookies....baseball mitts to bring to the the Giants games for my girlfriends. Cacti and howling coyotes for what? dunno but they were cute.

 I8