Walnut Shortbread with Local Honey

Start with the butter. Good butter, from cows that grazed on real pasture. This is shortbread, and butter is nearly half of what you are eating. If the butter is not worth spreading on bread by itself, it is not worth baking into cookies.

The walnuts should smell like walnuts. California grows most of the country's crop, and fresh ones have an almost sweet, faintly tannic fragrance. Stale walnuts taste like cardboard and disappointment. Toast them until they perfume your kitchen, then let them cool before folding them into the dough.

Local honey is not a romantic notion. It is a practical one. Honey from a beekeeper at your farmers market tastes like the flowers those bees visited. Wildflower, orange blossom, sage, each carries the terroir of where it was made. Industrial honey tastes like sugar water because that is essentially what it is.

Shortbread asks almost nothing of you except restraint. Do not overmix. Do not overbake. Let the butter and honey and walnuts taste of what they are.