Tag: 250515

Boss man

Ward Hayden & the Outliers bring Springsteen tribute to Pembroke

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

When Pembroke City Limits scheduled its grand opening last year, owner Rob Azevedo had Ward Hayden & the Outliers booked to play, but the debut of the Suncook music bar and restaurant was delayed. Instead, the Boston country stalwarts performed in Azevedo’s barn, the place that gave him the idea to start his own club.

Hayden will finally make it to PCL on May 17, to do a trio show with bass player Greg Hall and guitarist Tyler Marshall. His latest project is two albums of Bruce Springsteen songs done in Outliers style. The first, Little By Little, arrived last month, and the next, Piece By Piece, is due for release in October.

Little By Little is a mix of familiar hits like “Dancing in the Dark” and “Cadillac Ranch” alongside deep cuts, such as the brooding “Youngstown” and “Two Faces.” One track, “Promised Land,” bubbled up after Azevedo gave Hayden a book on tape of Bruce’s autobiography when he complained about not having time to read his hard copy.

“It’s a driving song that Springsteen wrote before he even really knew how to drive, which — I think that is so cool when it comes to creative writing,” Hayden said by phone recently. The episode happened when his band lost a car and driver on its way west. “He has to learn how to drive, but he can’t shift … to be in that moment, and put that song together.”

One bit of inspiration came about when Hayden patiently endured a drunken fan’s attempt to tell him about two stripped down concerts Springsteen did in 1990. “He wasn’t giving up on trying to try to communicate with me, so I put my hand on his shoulder, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Tell me what you’re saying.’”

“Ward, you gotta hear the Christic shows,” came the reply. So he found them on YouTube. “I was blown away.”

For the same reason Springsteen’s Nebraska is revered by many as his best album, the music is spellbinding; it’s raw and revealing. But a story Springsteen told to introduce “My Father’s House,” about asking a therapist to help him understand why he drove around late at night looking at places he once lived and being told he was trying to make a bad thing right is what closed Hayden.

“The value of that song became clear to me at that point, I was so moved,” he said. “I don’t know if that song is going to be a single or anything, but I think it’s my favorite.” That and another song from Nebraska, “Reason to Believe,” will be on the Piece By Piece collection. The latter almost didn’t get recorded.

“I wanted to rock that song … but it just was not coming together in our very last day in the studio,” Hayden said. They got unstuck by reducing the backing track to Hall’s upright bass, a bit of strumming and tambourine. “All it really needed was a very steady and driving bass to tell the story. I was trying to bring it somewhere it didn’t need to go.”

The effort, its names drawn from “Racing in the Street,” came about for a strange but fitting reason. While Hayden and his band were driving to a show in the Midwest a couple of years ago, an interview came on the radio. A former rocker, a tick away from Nickelback, was attempting to jump-start a new country direction by urging people not to listen to The Boss.

“Everyone’s trying to find an angle and work it, it’s the nature of the entertainment business,” Hayden said. “But I felt he was trying to take away something that shouldn’t be taken away. Springsteen’s music has been such a huge part of so many people’s lives, myself included. I think there’s some things of value that should be sacred, or at least protected.”

What followed was “a project without an endgame,” he continued. The initial plan was to record two songs. “The first day we turned two into three … we ended up doing about a week more of recording a little later that month, and then we just didn’t stop. We chipped away, little by little, piece by piece, for about two years and ultimately ended up with 16 songs.”

Along with all the Boss’s songs, he wrote enough original material for a new album. His last was 2023’s introspective South Shore. On his website, Hayden said his Springsteen reinterpretation helped him “say some things that I’ve not been able to say myself yet in my own work.”

Asked to elaborate, he replied, “Some subjects … are hard to face … and not always easy to share. He had a challenging relationship with his father; the autobiography really laid that out. It was important to do a couple songs like ‘My Father’s House’ and ‘Walk Like a Man’ [that] really hit home. There are things I haven’t been able to dive into yet myself, but he did it so well.”

Ward Hayden & the Outliers (Trio)

When: Saturday, May 17, 6 p.m.
Where: Pembroke City Limits, 134 Main St., Suncook
More: wardhaydenandtheoutliers.com

Featured photo. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 25/05/15

Local music news & events

• Mixed media: The Currier’s monthly Art Off the Walls event has Black Pudding Rovers providing music, with their guitarist and keyboard player Mike Becker contributing solo songs, along with visiting artists from the current Nashua Sculpture Symposium in conversation and poetry performances from Slam Free or Die. Ongoing is the exhibition Nicolas Party & Surrealism. Thursday, May 15, 5-8 p.m., Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester — more at currier.org.

• Rock revival: A performance by Zach Nugent’s Dead Set is much more than a tribute. The group grew out of a weekly residency in Burlington, Vermont. Before that, Nugent played with ex-JGB member Melvin Seals, who’s leading a three-night 60th Dead Anniversary show in San Francisco in August. It goes with saying that the guitarist is a lifetime fan of the jam band standard-setters. Friday, May 16, 8 p.m., Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, $40 at etix.com.

• Party weekend: Another harbinger of spring for real is the annual Wake The Lake gathering, three days of live music and revelry at the edge of Lake Winnipesaukee. Among the bands playing on three stages near the pier are Deja Voodoo, a raucous band led by Eric Gagne that mixes ’90s favorites with classic rock, and Leaving Eden, an original metal five-piece fronted by singer Eve. Starts Saturday, May 17, 4 p.m., The Big House, 322 Lakeside Ave., Laconia.

• Funny lady: Here’s proof that telling someone they’re funny can lead to a comedy career. Annie Powell got her start back in 2014 when a guy sitting next to her at a Los Angeles bar asked her, “Can you tell that story on a stage the same way you’re telling it right now?” She did, and 11 years later she’s headlining both coasts, telling jokes about her “bizarre and chaotic life.” Saturday, May 17, 8 p.m., Headliners Comedy Club, 78 Elm St., Manchester, $20 at headlinersnh.com.

• Studious play: Check out the state of youth music in the region as the Perimeter Jazz Ensemble performs an early set. The 18-piece group is composed of the state’s top high school jazz musicians. They’re directed by Peter Hazzard; a former Berklee College of Music staffer who came out of retirement in 2021 to teach in Hollis, he’s currently at the Founders Academy in Manchester. Sunday, May 18, noon, Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, $14 at palacetheatre.org.

Another Simple Favor (R)

Mom-frienemies played by Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively reunite in Another Simple Favor, a sequel to the 2018 movie that lives in a more darkly fantastical world.

Stephanie (Kendrick), mommy vlogger, true crime lady and author, is shocked to see Emily (Blake Lively), the mysterious mom who faked her own death (among other crimes) in the first movie, return after years in prison. When Emily asks Stephanie to be her maid of honor for her upcoming wedding in Capri, Stephanie is pretty sure chic Emily is just taking her to a foreign country to make it easier to get away with revenge-murdering her. But Emily pleads/threatens a lawsuit and Stephanie’s book agent (Alex Newell) says this is excellent sequel material, so Stephanie agrees to go.

Emily’s Italian wedding is as fashion-forward and drama-filled as expected: fiance Danté (Michele Morrone) is the sexy and wealthy scion of a mob family whose rivals he is trying to make peace with at his wedding; Dante’s mother (Elena Sofia Ricci) hates Emily and brings in Emily’s unhinged mother (Elizabeth Perkins) and Emily’s odd aunt Linda (Allison Janney) to needle her; Emily’s ex-husband (Henry Golding) deals with court orders to bring her son Nicky (Ian Ho) to the wedding by staying very drunk, and Stephanie is pretty sure every drink Emily hands her is potentially poisoned. And all of that is before the first person is murdered at this multi-murder affair.

Like the massive sun hat or feather boa robe that Lively’s character sports in this movie, Another Simple Favor isn’t subtle. This is a movie with telenovela-worthy plot points and dramatic ridiculousness but just enough pleasant tartness in the friendship/enemyship of Emily and Stephanie to make the whole thing feel frothy and fun without tipping over into too-much-ness territory. Kendrick does allow us to believe that her character has grown in the ensuing years and Lively is, as always, perfect for this grown-up Gossip Girl-ness. B Streaming on Prime Video.

Drop (PG-13)

A woman on a first date — a first date after years of an abusive marriage and the aftermath as a single mom — finds herself terrorized by an anonymous person via her phone’s AirDrop-like feature in Drop, a well-paced, tense horror-suspense movie.

In the movie’s opening scene, we see Violet (Meghann Fahy) crawl to get away from her violent husband. Years later, she is a therapist, is raising her son Toby (Jacob Robinson) and is preparing for a first date with Henry (Brandon Sklenar). Her sister Jen (Violett Beane) comes over to watch Toby and to suggest Violet change out of her office-blouse attire and into something zazzier for the date. Violet arrives at the fancy restaurant on the top floor of a skyscraper and has interactions with assorted people as she waits for Henry at the bar. Around the time he arrives, she starts to receive “dropped” notifications (but not “AirDropped”; this movie gives its feature a non-Apple-tech name). She ignores a few and then she and Henry break the ice by trying to figure out who in the restaurant may be sending them. But the increasingly insistent messages tell her to check her home security cams, where she sees a masked figure menace her family. The messages tell her not to involve Henry or anyone else and to follow its directions to keep her family members alive.

Drop does a good job of showing us Violet’s state of fear and aloneness, one that recalls the way she felt in her previous abusive relationship. It also gives us a relatively realistic, non-superhero woman trying to figure out how to save her kid and all the others the messenger threatens with the limited resources she has. Drop is tense and well-paced. B Available for rent or purchase.

Nonnas (PG)

Vince Vaughn dials down the Vince-Vaughn-ness to play Joe Scaravella, a man who opens a restaurant dedicated to preserving the art of grandma cuisine, in Nonnas, a Netflix movie based on a real guy and his real grandma-centric restaurant in Staten Island.

After the death of his mother, Joe (Vaughn) decides to take the insurance money and use it to open Enoteca Maria, a restaurant that will attempt to recreate the food and the vibes of his mom’s and grandma’s Italian cooking. He hires as his cooks grandmas and women of grandma age — pastry and dessert maker Gia (Susan Sarandon), former nun Teresa (Talia Shire) and two grandmas with differing opinions about from whence hails the best Italian cuisine, the Sicilian Roberta (Lorraine Bracco) and the Bolognese Antonella (Brenda Vaccaro). Making the restaurant happen requires the assistance of childhood friend Bruno (Joe Manganiello) and Bruno’s wife Stella (Drea de Matteo). Desperate to keep this part of his mother’s memory alive, Joe pours all his time and money into trying to get the restaurant to work — though he does have a little energy left over to try to rekindle a relationship with decades-ago prom date Olivia (Linda Cardellini).

But the rom is pretty light in this movie that is mostly about the comedy of being a guy with no experience opening a restaurant with very opinionated Italian-American ladies. The titular nonnas and the food they make is the real focus here and the movie does a serviceable job of giving the ladies (and loads of hunger-inducing dishes) a chance to shine. C+ Streaming on Netflix.

A Working Man (R)

Jason Statham is a working man in A Working Man, a movie that is basically “what if Taken but The Beekeeper.”

This movie isn’t quite as good as either of those, but it’s pretty solid for when you want some smooth brain Jason Statham nonsense where he is basically playing, straight-faced, his “this arm has been ripped out completely and reattached with this arm” character from Spy. Levon Cade (Statham) is a construction worker but he was a super skilled commando guy in the British military. His employers — Joe Garcia (Michael Peña) and wife Carla (Noemi Gonzalez) — and workers alike admire and trust him and, a girl-dad himself, Levon promises college-age Garcia daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) that he’ll always have her back. So naturally, during a night out with friends, Jenny goes missing. Joe begs Levon to find Jenny. With some burrowed weaponry and information help from Army buddies, Levon sets out to find her.

Ultimately the bad guys Levon must fight, moving up the echelons in the Bad Guy corporate structure, are Russian mafia types. Well, “Russian” in the sense that maybe the movie doesn’t know the difference between “Russians” and “vampires.” If you told me that actually all the bad guys, particularly the head don with a silver skull on the top of his cane, were vampires, it would track and still work — like it’s always night? And the menace is very theatrical? Jenny also proves herself to be no slouch in the kidnapping victim department — always with a plan to outwit her captors and a sassy comeback when she can’t.

This movie is fine and fun — not as “yippee!” stupid fun as Statham’s The Beekeeper but still dumb, still a good time, still full of violence that straddles the line between “ha!” and “that’s not really how physics works.” B Available for rent and purchase.

Homestand, by Will Bardenwerper

Homestand, by Will Bardenwerper (Doubleday, 301 pages)

Batavia is a small city in western New York that most people have never heard of, even if they pass it on the New York Thruway on the way to or from a vacation. Like a lot of cities its size, Batavia is remarkable mostly for its reasonably priced homes and comforting sense of community, the latter of which is often derived from sports.

In Homestand, Will Bardenwerper examines what happens when that sense of community is under threat — in Batavia’s case, when the city loses its minor-league baseball team when the MLB decides to scale down its farm teams. It’s a topic that is close to the author’s heart, his warmest childhood memories involving backyard baseball with his brother, under his grandfather’s watch, and his adult experience of being part of a tightly knit Army battalion deployed to Iraq after 9/11.

When he returned home, Bardenwerper writes, “… after those many months living as a member of a small tribe who did everything together, I couldn’t wrap my head around what the ‘real’ world looked like when I returned, face-to-face, real human interactions increasingly giving way to soulless virtual contact.”

Increasingly concerned about how disconnected Americans are becoming from each other, he was also troubled by what was happening economically, with private equity becoming more of a player in everything from housing to baseball. When Major League Baseball restructured the minor leagues in 2021, cutting 40 teams, Bardenwerper saw it through this lens: What the loss of a team would mean for a place like Batavia, where community life was heavily invested in its beloved team, the Muckdogs.

Batavia, however, didn’t go gently into a baseball-less night. It got a new team to play in Dwyer Stadium, one composed of college players who each paid $1,500 for the opportunity to sharpen their skills while enjoying an enthusiastic, ready-made fan base. Bardenwerper decided to join their ranks in the name of journalism, buying a season ticket and traveling from his home in Pennsylvania to embed himself for a season in Muckdogmania.

“I wanted to find out for myself what we, as a country, risked losing, and whether there was any chance it might be saved,” he writes.

Much of the book is structured by games: the Muckdogs versus, say, the Elmira Pioneers, the Syracuse Salt Cats, the Utica Blue Sox and, my personal favorite, Jamestown Tarp Skunks, which honestly makes me want to move to Jamestown, New York, just because, well, Tarp Skunks.

It is an interesting scaffolding for the book, which works except for the fact that, like baseball itself, this narrative lends itself to plodding. Bardenwerper takes us deep into the life of this community and its inhabitants, sometimes deeper that the reader wants to go. We are warned of this at the start of the book, when a list of “Dramatis Personae” tells us that the people we are about to meet include octogenarian season ticket holder Dr. Ross Fanara; Bob Brinks, the popcorn maker at the Elmira stadium’s concessions stand; and Ernie Lawrence, “musician, hospice volunteer, rosary maker.”

Let’s just say that by the end of Homestand you will know a lot about small towns in the Empire State and their inhabitants. And also about why baseball is so important in small-town America.

Coming together to cheer on a team, Bardenwerper writes, makes everyone’s life a bit better at the moment. “The real magic,” he says, is not happening in the diamond, no matter how exciting a game may be, but “found in the bleachers, among the fans.”

This is a romanticized notion of fandom, to be sure; sometimes fans are falling from the stands, ripping balls out of a player’s mitt, throwing things on the field. But to know and love a community is to have spent time in it and gotten to know its people through shared experiences. As a local author (and fellow season ticket holder) that Bardenwerper got to know in the stands, Bill Kauffman, wrote of Batavia, “This is such an unlovely place, yet I love it with all my heart. To visitors, it is a charmless Thruway stop on the Rust Belt’s fringe; to me, it is the stuff of myth and poetry, and of life weighed on the human scale — the only measurement that counts.”

While Homestand is a love letter to community and to baseball, it has its villains: the money counters in MLB, private equity companies that profit at the expense of ordinary Americans, and, increasingly of concern to Bardenwerper, the extraordinarily well-paid professional ballplayer.

At one event in which children with disabilities were playing ball with the Muckdogs, causing everyone around to swell with emotion, Bardenwerper started thinking about how “just a few hundred miles to the southeast, the New York Yankees’ Gerrit Cole would soon go to work to earn his $36 million salary. On this day he would give up nine hits and four runs in a 6-3 loss to the Baltimore Orioles.”

He notes, however, that Cole’s salary was eclipsed by the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, who had signed what was then the largest MLB contract: $700 million over 10 years. (Juan Soto of the New York Mets has since signed a deal that gives him $765 million over 15 years.)

Bardenwerper acknowledges that many fans aren’t troubled by athletes making money like this, but says he has come to believe that “the extreme economic inequality personified by Major League Baseball (and all professional sports) was corrosive to a healthy society — and, for me at least, was becoming an almost insurmountable obstacle to my desire to remain a fan.”

The more he gets to know the people of Batavia and the devoted minor-league baseball fans in nearby cities —in Elmira, a man now in his 90s has been sitting in the same seat since 1974 — the more Bardenwerper is troubled by the cost-cutting decisions made by wealthy people who live far away. “Baseball,” he says, “has already begun to resemble yet another extractive industry where dollars are transferred from small towns to big-city owners and investors.”

In some ways, Homeland is a follow-up dirge to a book that Bill Kauffman wrote about Batavia in 2003, Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive. For a small, unremarkable city, Batavia gets remarked upon a lot. It might yet survive, as might baseball.

The Muckdogs of 2022 can be quite a long season for the casual reader, but Homestand pays off for those who love baseball — and aren’t prone to fidgeting when the game runs long. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 25/05/15

Malphas, Tales from the Olden Realm (self-released/Bandcamp)

From the murkiest depths of Michigan comes this sixth album from a one-man black metal band who calls himself Lord Moloch (you know how those guys like to roll by now I’m sure; it’s all fine by me). He’s been quite prolific in the manner of Bathory’s dear departed Quorthon, but he tends to tack in a more sword-and-sorcery direction; his raison d’être involves incorporating much slower tempos than Bathory toward an effort to put a more legitimate “epicness” into his “epic black metal.” His vocals sonically alternate between Quorthon’s spastic-demon squalling, your basic Cookie Monster and, well, David Byrne, to be honest, which isn’t as ridiculous as you might think. Lyrically, where Quorthon unleashed Hell’s hordes upon humanity, Moloch reads as more inspired by the art of Frank Frazetta and such, that is to say heavily muscled Conan-ish barbarians fighting crusades for such-and-so. Melodically it’s quite good; Moloch certainly isn’t shy about testing creative boundaries, as heard in his side project Vetust, which released a World War I-focused album titled 1914-1918 that I’d put up there with some of the most ferocious stuff coming out of Relapse Records. Tons of raw potential here. A —Eric W. Saeger

Ches Smith, Clone Row (self-released)

Eclecticism, thy name is Ches Smith, a San Diego-based drummer who’s spent his life concocting his own bizarre pan-jazz/world patchwork styles, incorporating such things as Haitian Voodoo music in order to produce all-but-unclassifiable records that read like Martian mash-ups. Wayne Coyne has nothing on this guy, which you’ll notice if you test drive any of these tunes, for example “Ready Beat,” where alternative-universe dubstep is combined with the sort of skittish, near-unintelligible guitar noodlings heard at the beginning of Yes’s “Close To The Edge.” This all isn’t to say he’s a lonely kook; after all, he’s collaborated with Nels Cline (granted, I’m at the point now where I automatically think “who hasn’t?” when I see that on an avant garde musician’s resumé), Vijay Iyer, Xiu Xiu and a cast of dozens of others who’ve been mentioned in this column. No, there is a very unique accessibility to this stuff if you’re up for a challenge; if I had a lot more leisure time I’d happily get to know this album more intimately. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• May 16 is awash in new albums, I’m up to my neck in stuff to review: The height of the summer is in sight, when it will be roasting and singularly uncomfortable, and so all the rock stars and wannabes are pelting us rock journos with new albums to talk about, or so they hope, look at them all, begging for word-scraps from my table, thinking that if I mention their new records it will help them, when, little do they know, it probably won’t because, as you know, my tastes are eclectic even if some people think I’m a sellout to corporate record companies. Yes, the life of a brutally honest (and multiple award-winning) arts critic is a lonely one, which is how we like it; it sure beats having to pretend that Elbow, Wire and Skinny Puppy (whatever’s left of them) aren’t the only good bands out there, which would surely lead to my bonding with people, so let’s get started, by talking about the newest album from transgender art-popper Ezra Furman, Goodbye Small Head. To be honest, I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Furman over the last many years, probably because every time I turn around I’m getting spammed by her handlers, who want me to know about some local show she’s playing in Portsmouth’s Press Room (I’ve only been there once, for the record) or in Lowell, Mass. (you just missed her there in April at the Town and The City Festival) or whatever, I’ve honestly lost track. I’m told that she’s got a real punk edge to her stuff, so I shall now listen to something from this upcoming new album, on the YouTube box, for your edification. Right, at this writing the newest advance track is “Power of the Moon,” and it’s indeed decent, but not in the least punky, that is if by “punky” you mean something that sounds punk-rock-y, because this doesn’t, not that that means it’s bad. Well, it’s peripherally punky, awkward, jangly and frazzled, like if Clinic were trying to sound even more ’60s than they do in their most annoying moments, without the Doors-style organ in there (I really wish they wouldn’t do that). What does all this mean? It means I like it enough to recommend it to hipsters and nothing more.

• Maryland rapper Rico Nasty is interesting and, well, nasty, and definitely more punky. Her third studio album, Lethal, is on the way, featuring the single “TEETHSUCKER (YEA3X),” a supremely bratty track consisting of muddy Melvins-sounding guitars, some thankfully understated trap and enough over-the-top Joan Jett attitude that I won’t even bother researching her history of beefs, if one exists, because sometimes it doesn’t matter. She’s a badass, folks, just look at her nails.

• Also on Friday, the godfather of rap, Chuck D, releases Enemy Radio: Radio Armageddon, which includes the advance track “New Gens,” a call-out to Zoomers built atop an absolutely filthy noise-beat that I loved at first listen. How does that guy stay so awesome, someone please let me know this instant.

• Finally it’s British indie-rock kid Matt Maltese with his sixth LP, Hers. The lead single “Always Some MF” is a vehicle for his hilariously soft, languid voice; it’s something you’d picture playing from the boombox while you floated around in a raft on a frog pond. As always, he makes Bon Iver sound like Screaming Lord Sutch. —Eric W. Saeger

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Image: Malphas, Tales from the Olden Realm (self-released/Bandcamp) & Ches Smith, Clone Row (self-released)

Guava & Goat Cookies

These cookies are adapted from a recipe in Bodega Bakes by Paola Velez. The idea of cheese in a cookie might be somewhat revolutionary to traditionalists, but fruit and cheese go well together.

1 cup (2 sticks) salted butter

1 cup (200 g) brown sugar

1/3 cup (66 g) white sugar

Zest of 3 limes

1 egg

2 2/3 cups (370 g) all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ cup (120 g) soft goat cheese

1 cup diced guava jam (240 g, about half a tin) – Guava jam is really popular for Caribbean people, especially Cubanos. It comes in a very short, very wide tin. Look for it near the fruit cocktail at your supermarket. You don’t have to dice it very finely, maybe chunks half the size of your thumb.

Beat your butter, sugars and lime zest with your mixer. Start at a slow speed, then bring it up to Wicked Fast, and beat the mixture until it is light and fluffy. Add the egg to the butter mixture, and beat it on high for another minute or so.

If you have a kitchen scale, place your mixing bowl with the butter/egg mixture on it, then add the dry ingredients: the baking soda, baking powder and flour. Otherwise, mix the dry stuff in a medium bowl, then add it to the mixture, about a third at a time. Beat everything until it comes together.

Add the goat cheese and guava jam, and mix for just a few seconds, until the guava breaks up a little. If there are still streaks of goat cheese, rejoice and do a goat cheese dance. If not, don’t worry; these cookies are not a reflection on your character.

Chill the cookie dough for at least half an hour.

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Line three baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone mats. If you are a rational person and don’t own that many baking sheets, you’ll have to slide the parchment or mats off the baking sheet between batches.

Place six golf-ball-sized balls of dough on each baking sheet per batch, about 2 inches apart. This should make a total of 18 cookies. There would almost certainly be more cookies than this, but we both know that you’re going to eat some of the dough during this process. Flatten them slightly, then bake for 15 minutes or until they look toasty on the edges.

Conveniently, these cookies take about 15 minutes to cool.

Like almost all their brethren, the G&G cookies are excellent with a glass of cold milk, especially when they are warm. There is a background flavor of limes, and small pops of guava, especially when the cookies have cooled. The goat cheese adds a savory quality to the operation. If you are brave, you might want to use an especially tangy goat cheese.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

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