Every February in Portland you can expect a few things: grim-faced locals trudging through the rain sans umbrellas, a case of seasonal affective disorder and the Portland International Film Festival. I know it’s been a while since the festival wrapped up — a little over a moth ago now — but I’m only now writing about it because the festival came and went in the midst of a very busy time: I was taking a class in Seattle and commuting every week and I was interning at the Oregon Historical Society and since the Film Center has become my sole source of (marginal) income, I worked as much as I could. But I wanted to make sure I mentioned it here because of the cookies.

We the theater employees deal with all kinds of stress and abuse throughout the two and a half long weeks of PIFF. You can only put up with so many crabby people declaring that you — yes, YOU! — are an idiot so many times before you want to storm out of there.

That’s where the cookies come in.

Now, cookies can’t take away the crazy lady who assailed the Broadway box office staff with fists and profanity, but it can calm the nerves and give you the strength to power through. Or maybe I’m overstating it. Maybe they’re just yummy and give you something else to think about.

Anyway, I made two batches of cookies, both from the blogosphere and both turned out very well, if I may say so myself. First was Vanessa’s Dulce de Leche cookies which were pretty darn beguiling I have to say. Plus it’s super fun to make Dulce de Leche. I added cardamom and powdered ginger to the Vanessa’s cookie recipe, otherwise it’s the same.

open wide

The second Saturday of PIFF just happened to coincide with Oregon’s Sesquicentennial celebration so I made a batch of cookies with Oregon’s favorite crop, the hazelnut. The recipe comes courtesy of Chez Pim whose Dark Chocolate Hazelnut Bite cookies look a bit more attractive than mine, but at least mine has “grown locally” street cred.

Happy Birthday, Oregon! Why, you don’t look a day over 99.

Oh, and the films? Amazingly, I actually got to see some this year. My favorite was probably “The Beaches of Agnes” a documentary by one of my favorite filmmakers, Agnes Varda. It’s a film about herself and her life and growing old. It’s wonderful.

Other good ones were “Karamazovs” from the Czech Republic (especially recommended if you have a Russian literature fixation) and “Revanche” from Austria which, trust me, you have to watch to the very end.

Since I’m already in the wayback machine I might as well mention some other (sort of) recent food offerings I’ve made. Right before Christmas I saw this recipe for Peppermint-Topped Brownies in Sunset magazine of all places and I immediately beat a path to the oven to start making them. The sad part was that I made them right at the start of the big snow storm which meant I couldn’t get out to give them to the people for whom they were intended. Well, not so sad, I suppose. We wound up eating most of them ourselves as did the mail carrier who really deserved a treat for living up to that “neither snow, nor sleet” deal.

Then right after Christmas, we had a chocolate making explosion in our kitchen all instigated by Aaron who was visiting from San Francisco and traveled with an enormous box of chocolate and chocolate-making tools. We busted a few hundred truffles in a day. It was a ton of fun, though I’m still finding little smears of chocolate on the walls and cabinets.

filling the chocolate molds with white chocolate citrus ganache. other fillings included raspberry, bourbon, thai iced tea and pumpkin pie

it was messy work

the final product

we had a lot of chocolate left over and made a chocolate fish and several buffalo – ’cause those were the molds we had