New quilt on XENA, cookie table

I was up early on Friday (5/26) and got 2 days worth of blog entries out before making my tea and starting to load up XENA again. I got 4 yards of fleece loaded, and then the first quilt:

This is the fabric I got in Ohio on the secret vacation. Michael ended up going golfing, and I made a tour of local quilt shops. I think it is absolutely gorgeous…and it really gets to shine with the simplest of quilt patterns.

I’ll tell you….I’m going to be sweating the entire time I am quilting these 2 quilts. I have not yet adjusted to the post pandemic price of fleece at Joann’s. I found a fleece place in the mid-west with a better price, and ordered a bolt. The quality is nice….but I’m here to tell you….SIZE MATTERS!!!! This fleece is barely 58’’ wide….60’’ is so much better….I don’t hit my side clamps when quilting with 60’’. So, I’m gonna have to monitor this quilting all the way….and I won’t order this fleece again. Even with Joann’s, I don’t order on line (because fleece is listed as 58’’ – 60’’)…I go into the store with my tape measure and I only buy it if it is the full 60’’ wide.

Anyway, I had a nice long talk with Mary Lee in the afternoon….she sounds so happy….it is wonderful to hear it in her voice after all that she has gone through over the past few years.

By then it was time for Michael to head out to the golf banquet, while I headed upstairs to have my own dinner and work on picking up rows on the front of my ruana….I told you about that right? Even though I thought I counted my rows correctly on the back and front…when I went to sew the 2 fronts to my back….the fronts were about 4’’ too short!!! Oh well…

Michael got home from the banquet around 8:30 PM; he said a lot of people asked about me, so I guess if he is in the tournament next year….I’d better go to the dinner! It looked good:

but the cookie table looked better:

Michael said all of my cookies went….you know that always makes me happy!!! They had a nice sign indicating everyone who baked:

as well as all of the winners of the tournament:

I got a lot of questions about the Pittsburgh cookie table, so here’s more info…..full article and pictures can be found here: https://theincline.com/2022/06/29/the-pittsburgh-cookie-tables-history-mystery-and-etiquette/

Ever wondered why there are a dozen cookies per guest at a Pittsburgh wedding?

At a Pittsburgh wedding, the cookie table is as important as the first kiss, but finding the true origin of the tradition is as challenging as making the perfect pizzelle. Some say it’s a custom brought to Pittsburgh by immigrants (and everybody from Italians to Polish people claim its heritage). Others say it grew out of a Depression-era need to save money on cake. And yet, there’s very little published documentation of cookie tables at weddings until quite recently in the 1990s.

The cookie table always draws a crowd. But no matter the roots, this enduring tradition of sharing dozens upon dozens of sweet homemade confections at weddings is baked into Pittsburgh culture — and it continues to perplex newcomers to the city.

So how did it get started?

The answer is “murky,” according to Lauren Uhl, Heinz History Center’s curator of food & fitness. But one thing is clear, she said: With the exception of Youngstown, Ohio, it seems to be a uniquely Pittsburgh tradition. Dating back into the 1900s, the concept of a cookie table was a fixture at church socials, PTA meetings, and card games but not necessarily at weddings, Uhl said. The cookie table’s association with weddings didn’t start popping up in publications until the 1990s, she said. But perhaps the concept didn’t show up in newspapers and cookbooks, she added, because everybody was doing it, so it wasn’t seen as newsworthy. As the sign instructs: “Eat some now and take a box for later.”

Certainly Pittsburghers feasted on wedding cookie tables well before the ’90s, with local bakers saying they recall cookie tables at their family’s weddings for as long as they can remember. “Growing up in Penn Hills, the big talk was — even more than, ‘how was the wedding?’ — it was, ‘how were the cookies?’” Marc Serrao, owner at Oakmont Bakery, said. “They’d start baking a month before the wedding. We’d have cookies in our closet and in our freezers.” For many local families, preparing a cookie table has become a cherished experience, when family recipes are shared and each cookie is truly made with love.

“Whether you’re showing your prowess at making cookies or this is your love to somebody because this takes a long time and it’s something to be proud of, you want to bring your best and your finest to the table,” Uhl said. Indeed, many cookies spotted on a Pittsburgh cookie table — ladylocks, kolaczki, pizzelles, pesche con crema, peanut butter blossoms, nut rolls, the list goes on — demand time and painstaking attention to detail. Generally, family members prepare the cookies, though couples often order from professional kitchens, like Moio’s Italian Pastry Shop, Bethel Bakery, and Oakmont Bakery, who rely on their own family recipes, to add a supplement.

For Katlyn Doolin, manager of the wedding department at Bethel Bakery in Bethel Park, the Pittsburgh cookie table tradition has been a must for years in her Irish and Slovak family, with family members diligently preparing cookies and spending weeks mapping out the cookie menu. “What I love about the story of the cookie table is this that there is not a singular story. Just like the best traditions in life, everyone has its own unique spin on it,” Doolin said. She’s most familiar with the origin story surrounding frugality during the Depression.

“The cookie table has sprung from our roots, meaning we’ve had a lot of immigrants come into Pittsburgh during the turn of the century and especially around the Great Depression,” she said. “It became also a cost savings tool for the couple, so they weren’t shouldering the cost of dessert or cake because money was so tight.” It’s usually not just a cookie table — it’s multiple cookie tables. Serrao, who is Italian, always believed the tradition had Italian roots, and it fits in well with Pittsburghers’ kind hearts.

“I know Slovak women, Polish women, Eastern Europeans, Greeks come in and say it’s their thing,” he said. “A Greek family said, ‘We have to have a cookie table. It’s our culture.’ And I’m thinking, ‘It’s everybody’s culture.’ But I think more than culture, it’s about hospitality and generosity.” Though he’s noticed the tradition since the ’70s, Tony Moio, who owns Moio’s Italian Pastry Shop in Monroeville, has seen a change over the years. “When I first came in with my Dad and my Grandfather, if they did do cookies at a wedding, it was one to two per person, and then over the years it started to go up,” Moio said. “Ten to 15 years ago, it exploded, and it became a thing that you had to have a cookie table.”

There’s no exact number for amount of cookies at a wedding. The bakers agree it’s somewhere between six per guest up to one-and-a-half dozen per guest.

But some exceed even that generous amount, covering multiple tables with trays of sweet delicacies. Moio even remembers a wedding at the now-closed Monzo hotel in Monroeville with 5,000 cookies. Yes, that’s about 416 dozen. He’s shipped cookies to Pittsburgh expats from California to Texas to Florida for their weddings.

*** People who like my blog are happier, more intelligent and better looking than those who don’t; according to a study I made up :~). ***