So, Grey's Anatomy last night....

**SPOILER ALERT!**

If somehow you managed to steer clear of social media and you don't know what happened on Grey's last night, you should probably stop reading this and just scroll down to the recipe.

Derek Shepherd, the lead male role on the 11 year series, passed away after his car was hit by a truck. It was an emotional, drawn out death that left many grasping for the tissues. So why do we care so much? Is it because he's nice to look at and is married to the lead female character (Grey)? Essentially, yes, but in my opinion, it's a little more complicated.

The show has been on for eleven years. Saying that a lot changes during that length of time in our own lives is probably an understatement. I have wonderful memories of watching the show in it's early years when I was in college. Just as I have been growing and developing over the years so has his character and my relationship with him as a viewer. He transformed from eye candy as my nineteen year old self saw him to an idealistic representation of true love and the love conquers all mentality and lastly, and perhaps my favorite, as a more realistic representation of love as he tried to be a good husband and father despite being flawed having many (many...) bumps in the road. Given that I have been relating to him through the many stages of my own love life, the idea of him suddenly dying and leaving his wife and kids behind is pretty terrifying.

While I'm sure other viewers related to him in different ways, the fact remains that we have aged along side of his character for eleven years. The emotional ties that bonded us as viewers to a character are laced with real world experiences making it extremely difficult to cut the ties and accept his death without real emotion.

All that being said, it is TV. We did not experience a real death, Patrick Dempsey is alive and well and we will get over the death of Derek Shepherd. Also...we can just watch re-runs.

I'm sure you are sick of me rambling on so let's get to the real point of this blog.

I was in Whole Foods the other day looking (unsuccessfully) for vegetarian oyster sauce when I came across a bottle of orange blossom water. I love using new and unfamiliar ingredients so I immediately snatched it up without really knowing what I was going to do with it. A little research informed me that orange blossom madeleines would be both yummy and a fun challenge. Fortunately, my husband is the king of one time use pans and has both the mini and regular sized madeleine pans

There were a lot of failures before coming to this recipe. If you use too much orange blossom water your food will basically taste like soap. Yikes. While I tried to create my own madeleine recipe, I fell in love with Daniel Boulud's recipe and think it would be quite the challenge to come up with something better. I did make a couple small modifications to suit my tastes.

The honey pistachio dipping sauce goes really nicely with the orange blossom flavor. If you decide to forgo the sauce, I would try drizzling honey over the cookies instead of powdered sugar. Honey and orange blossom are quite the duo.