chocolate chip cookies

i guess it's an urge ingrained in my head by years of consuming pop culture, but sometimes i really need chocolate chip cookies. occasionally i'll wait for someone else to make them, but generally if i want them, i'll go out of my way to get everything i need to make them myself.

i was no longer being productive in studio, distracted by a sudden yearning for chocolate chip cookies; so i went to star, bought chocolate chips (because sometimes i have a yearning for not only chocolate chip cookies in general, but chocolate chip cookies with chocolate-chip-shaped chocolate chips, as opposed to the chocolate chunks i could have hacked off our supply of callebaut), and went home to make cookies.

as it happens, i was trying to be responsible about my eating habits, and got sidetracked on the way to cookies. i needed lunch for the next day, so i made (boiled) some tortellini, and made a sauce, which i only mention because i think it turned out pretty well. it was essentially just onions and tomatoes, with a bit of thyme, crushed red pepper, white pepper, and port wine (plus a little bit of salt and sugar, but that's a given). i didn't think it was going to be that great because i had a few onions and a lot of tomatoes, and i thought the acidity of the tomatoes would outweight the onions, and i'd just have a very sharp-tasting sauce. but cooking the sauce for over an hour helped, as did the port wine, i think, in particular (added to the onions, before the tomatoes). anyway, i'm eating the leftovers for breakfast as i type this, and the early fire from the pepper has mellowed a little, and it just tastes better in general after a couple days.

back to the cookies: i really enjoy softening the butter for chocolate chip cookies, which i always make by hand regardless of how many batches i'm making. it's kind of like prepping butter for croissants: you cut up the butter into pieces and go at it with a meat pounder, or in my case, a wooden spoon. so i suppose i like it because it gets rid of excess tension and aggression.

now, i've tried different recipes for chocolate chip cookies, and i assure you that the tollhouse recipe is actually the best as a base. it has just the right amount of butter, flour, and sugar, and then you can just fiddle with the types of sugar, etc, that you use. i happened to only have white sugar and no brown sugar, which i thought was going to be a serious problem. as it turned out, i like all-white-sugar chocolate chip cookies a lot. they're crispier - perhaps as a result of the butter and white sugar melding better into "candy" than butter and brown sugar - and they spread just the right amount because i didn't bother refrigerating the dough this time. they're slightly more crumbly than your normal chocolate chip cookies, and i wonder if this is because of the elimination of the moisture from the brown sugar.

i'm not sure that i'm a total convert to all-white-sugar cookies; a day later i've still got very crispy cookies, which i like once in a while, but in general i like the chewy kind of cookies. cookies being cookies though, i'm not really going to complain about what kind they are.

a short ode to leftovers.

in the world of restaurant eaters, "leftovers" is a dirty word. it's the moldy mac and cheese festering in a tupperware in the back of your fridge, pushed out of the way by pudding cups and beer. it's the smell of mold spreading throughout your fridge as you put off cleaning it out. it's the stuff you intended to eat, but then forgot about.

in the restaurant world, leftovers become family dinners: leftover chicken parts, excess inventory from a food order, etc. fewer people ordered a dish than you expected and now you have a lot of something leftover.

restaurant leftovers are a little more interesting: it's the food you didn't make that you have brought back with you. the fact that it's from a restaurant - and thus "better" than what you can do yourself - transforms leftovers into a sort of secondary takeout.

but, my friends, if you think leftovers are horrible, then you are mistaken. i am eating my lunch right now: a "salad" of braised red cabbage, roast turkey, ricotta, and olive oil. all of these things are leftovers: the braised red cabbage was leftover from cod that we had last week, the roast turkey was leftover from my mother, the ricotta was leftover from something (...a long time ago but it was still good). the contents of your fridge, in simple combination with your staple kitchen ingredients, can be transformed into joy. combining leftovers is a different kind of thinking than shopping at the supermarket for specific ingredients; it's a lesson in constraints. how can you put these things together so that they'll taste good? and this journey often leads to new discoveries about things that go together. cooking with leftovers in a non-chop suey way will further your education in how and what to eat, and you will be happier for it.

palatal shock + awe

rob has been forwarding me google food emails, and the end result is that i increasingly want to work in what is essentially the google cafeteria. as in, i really, really, really want to work there. here's an email:

We have another new set of menus that culinary team put together for some palatal shock-and-awe action. The menu today features the cuisine of Provence, a French region whose cuisine shares marked similarities with Italian and Greek cuisines more so than cuisine we typically consider French. For example, as a mountainous region bordering the sea with little grasslands, grazing dairy-producing animals are not as common, thus the heavy reliance on olive oil as the preferred fat component. The dish Provence can lay the most claim to culinary fame is bouillabaise, which we have a variation on today. Typically the dish contains several types of seafood in a stew, however we did a filet in a boulllabaise sauce - saffron, fennel broth, etc. It should be delicious. There is also the tuna nicoise salad to consider, which the chefs turned into a quiche, an interesting twist. A wide assortment of salads and veggies are also available.

can you imagine a place where the engineers - but also the culinary team ("culinary team"? at a corporation??) gets to be creative? this is such a rare occurrence that it seems like an opportunity of a lifetime. i would gladly spend a summer working at google as a chef. or even as a food-related menial worker. let me weigh two dream options: working at google-food, or doing a stage at the french laundry...and the winner would be...ok, it would be the french laundry. but there would be a decision to make there.

p.s. i thought "palatal" couldn't possibly be a word (though thinking about it now, it's pretty logical that palate (n) --> palatal (adj), but the oed confirms that it is indeed a word, and it is used in the correct context here.

the dinner party

what i have realized as i've gotten older is that i am, in fact, like my mother. every time she cooks for large groups of people (ie family), she spends almost the entire time in the kitchen. no level of exhortation gets her to stop jumping up every ten minutes to tend to whatever is cooking on the stove.

i am not quite the same, but when i surmise about why i like dinner parties as much as i do, certain similarities suddenly reveal themselves. i like dinner parties for two reasons: i like to feed people, and i like to mix my friends (to varying levels of success). but...i don't particularly like to join in the festivities myself, because the high point for me is really the cooking part. is that strange? perhaps. but no matter how well i plan, no matter how done i am with cooking when people arrive, i'm somewhat distracted at the end of the cooking, and all i really want to do is watch everyone else have fun. in fact, since i've already had my fun, i'd go as far to say that i'd cook for everyone and then go to sleep while they eat.

that said, last night i had some people over. i didn't set a menu until the day before: carrot-ginger soup, roast chicken and risotto with some sort of green veg (which turned out to be beet greens: "great alternative to spinach!"), and a pear-gingerbread trifle. as is wont to happen when i cook for large groups, the most important part is dessert, and everything else takes a backseat. the menu wasn't quite the most harmonious combination of flavors that i could have had, but given several factors: budget, how much i could carry back from star, how much i had left to give to the dinner mentally, which supermarkets i'd have to go to, etc. i worried a little that there were too many herbs and spices: ginger, then thyme (because a roast chicken should always be roasted with thyme), then ginger/cinnamon/star anise. kind of a lot, yeah? usually when i do a roast chicken, i overdo thyme because carrien and i love thyme - there's thyme in everything. but i attempted to show some restraint this time, so only the chicken (and the accompanying chicken gravy) had thyme in it. i think that given my weaknesses, i did rather admirably: the risotto was nice and simple, just rice, butter, onions, and stock.

now for some conclusions from the evening. the soup was a little chunkier than i would have liked, though i blendered it, so i should probably invest in a food mill (or rather, i should have just sieved the whole mixture). but the flavor was pretty good - it was very ginger-y because i probably threw in more than i was supposed to. the chicken was pretty good, though i'm still horrible at carving and i put a little too much paprika in the rub for the skin. gravy: check. i always forget how much spinach and beet greens shrink when cooked, so i think i should have probably gotten more, but oh well. for some reason the bit of cream i added didn't thicken quite right, so they were more liquidy than i like them. however, the risotto was really good - it was 1/3 wild rice mix, 2/3 arborio rice, which was quite a nice combination. the "really wild" (ie, with the skin on the outside of the rice grains) rice was a little crunchy still, which usually is a huge, looming, obvious sign of failure in terms of risotto, but which was fine by my book because it added a little texture. hard arborio rice in risotto: cardinal sin; hard wild rice: somewhat acceptable.

so let me talk a little bit about this dessert. i wasn't sure it was going to work: would the gingerbread overpower the pears? would the pastry cream set? would the pears actually taste pear-like (it's almost winter and pears are not a winter fruit by any means)? i made the pastry cream first: i tried the julia child recipe again because i wanted to see if i could get it to work again. the last time i made it, i didn't quite cook the flour long enough, and this time i made sure i did. where by "i made sure i did," i mean that i accidentally cooked if for long enough. i accidentally left the stove on low when i really meant to turn it off, though, so it thickened even a bit more than i wanted to, and became more like a cold pate a choux, rather than a thick-but-creamy pastry cream base. the trick with julia child's pastry cream is that you have to add things to it (beaten egg whites, whipped cream, you name it) in order to get it into a servable state. knowing this, i bought cream to whip. but man - folding that stuff into the pastry cream was a nightmare because i just didn't know if it was going to actually lighten up. luckily, four or five cups of whipped cream later, it did. so now we have an enormous amount of pastry cream. if it were summer i would just make copious numbers of fruit tarts (how can you resist anything that is essentially ripe berries resting on pillows of whipped cream?), but it's not and the fruit's not really worth having. so...if you have suggestions for what we should do with a large amount of pastry cream, i'm all ears.

back to the dessert....it turned out quite well! i am no good at estimating how much alcohol should go into these things, and given that the gingerbread was slightly denser than what i am used to using for trifle, i should have used a bit more alcohol (i used a half-rum, half-amaretto mixture). ah well. the unsurprising but surprising thing was that both trifle and risotto tasted better the next day as cold leftovers: it was unsurprising in that i like leftovers so i would automatically like them, however it was surprising in that both were an order of magnitude better the next day. i will say this: i love salt and pepper as seasonings, and i make sure i do it right every time (although since there is white pepper in our pepper mill right now, it's a bit harder to get the pepper correct).

in retrospect, i think that what i like even better than these informal dinner parties is cooking for two or three people who will come over and chat with me while i cook. they sit, occasionally do some small thing like chopping, but really they're just there to hang out with me while i make us food. besides, then you don't have the issue of only inviting some of your friends to the type of event where you would normally invite all of them if it were logistically and monetarily possible.