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.