Rosemary Cookies with Tomato Jam

Rosemary is one of the best-loved herbs and one of my all-time favorites. I look for ways to use it in cooking and will snap up bath and hair products at the store that contain it (some of it's medicinal uses throughout the ages have been to prevent baldness and heal wounds). I never tire of the fragrance and often use it in cooking, so there is always some rosemary in my garden. Often you can find me sitting next to the rosemary plant on my deck, sipping a glass of wine and reading.

Nostalgia...

We all have our "go to" cookbooks...the ones we've most recently acquired with the slick, beautiful photos (and no grease stains!).  Somehow our old friends like The Joy of Cooking or the Time Life Foods of the World series get relegated to the bottom shelves or packed away in a box and forgotten, their dated pictures and over-the-top calorie dense recipes replaced with the latest food trend.

The other night I was reading David Lebovitz's blog and he has stirred up quite a pot of nostalgia with his latest post about Masterpieces of French Cuisine, how he acquired it, then lost it, then got another copy, and the memories it evokes for him of an old friend who used to visit the kitchen when he worked at Chez Panisse.  Reading the post and the many comments sent me searching through my own collection of books and magazines, like this one I bought many years ago in a used book store and from which I made my very first batch of crepes...