I had a craving for cookies a couple nights ago and had most of the ingredients at home. Problem was, there wasn't anything to put in them except for my roommate's oatmeal and some old raisins I had. So I improvised a little and can up with these Middlde Eastern-inflected oatmeals, which are slightly sweeter and more sophisticated than the American classic. I'm not sure how many cookies it actually makes, cause I'm keeping the dough in the fridge and baking off a tray at a time, and cause my roommate keeps eating spoonfuls of dough. She's declared it the best.cookie.dough.ever
Desert Oatmeal Raisin Cookies {makes a standard batch of drop cookies}
soft butter 4 oz/1 stick
brown sugar .75 cup
white sugar .5 cup
salt 1 large pinch
egg 1
vanilla x splash
AP flour 1.25 cup + 3T
baking soda .5 t
baking powder .25 t
walnuts .5 cup to .75 cup
dates .75 cup
golden raisins .5 cup
brown raisins .5 cup
regular oats 1.5 cup
orange flower water splash
Rehydrates raisins in hot water, adding your splash of orange flower water. remove pits from dates and break up into pieces with your fingers. Cream butter, salt and both sugars together. Add egg and vanilla x. Add flour and leavening. Next add oats and dates, and drain your raisins and add them too. Chill dough for half an hour before baking. Bake at 350 until golden brown and crispy-edged.
Showing posts with label cookies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cookies. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
flaky lemon shortbread
Shortbread is a taken-for-granted kind of cookie. It's usually ho-hum, buttery, sweet, nothing too special. It's versatile. You can add spices, citrus zest, vanilla bean, cocoa nibs. Some people really enjoy buttery, flaky cookies and my mother is one of them, so this is what she got for Mother's day. For the record, it shipped well and did not break. Always useful information.
This particular shortbread is flaky, tall, and soft. (There are other chewy shortbreads that are delicious too and this is not one of them). It's adapted from the Tartine cookbook. I've tried it out a couple of times and it's critical to do it by hand, with the butter at a supersoft consistency. As if you've left it out on a humid July day while you went to the corner store for some eggs, ran into your neighbor, chatted for fifteen minutes, and came back home to find squeezable, malleable butter.
If you'd rather make this shortbread, orange, vanilla, (orange-vanilla), fennel, baharat, or anything else, you go right ahead. How do you do this? Add some flavoring (seeds from 1 van. bean, 1 t spices, etc), and then taste the dough. Start small...for obvious reasons.
Lemony shortbread:
(makes one 9-inch round, to be cut into 8-10 wedges)
soft butter: 9 oz.
salt: 1/2 tsp. + pinch (reserved)
lemon zest: 1-2 large lemons*
rice flour: 1/2 c. + 2T**
granulated sugar: 1/3 c. + more for topping
Paddle softened butter with a spatula by hand until creamy. Work in sugar and lemon zest. Add rice flour and mix until dough comes together. Pat dough into baking tin and smooth to level grade. Top dough with granulated sugar and reserved pinch of salt. Bake in 325 degree oven 30-40 minutes. Should be just slightly golden but cooked through in center. Let cool before cutting.
*I used Eureka lemons.
**Cornstach can be substituted for rice flour.
This particular shortbread is flaky, tall, and soft. (There are other chewy shortbreads that are delicious too and this is not one of them). It's adapted from the Tartine cookbook. I've tried it out a couple of times and it's critical to do it by hand, with the butter at a supersoft consistency. As if you've left it out on a humid July day while you went to the corner store for some eggs, ran into your neighbor, chatted for fifteen minutes, and came back home to find squeezable, malleable butter.
If you'd rather make this shortbread, orange, vanilla, (orange-vanilla), fennel, baharat, or anything else, you go right ahead. How do you do this? Add some flavoring (seeds from 1 van. bean, 1 t spices, etc), and then taste the dough. Start small...for obvious reasons.
Lemony shortbread:
(makes one 9-inch round, to be cut into 8-10 wedges)
soft butter: 9 oz.
salt: 1/2 tsp. + pinch (reserved)
lemon zest: 1-2 large lemons*
rice flour: 1/2 c. + 2T**
granulated sugar: 1/3 c. + more for topping
Paddle softened butter with a spatula by hand until creamy. Work in sugar and lemon zest. Add rice flour and mix until dough comes together. Pat dough into baking tin and smooth to level grade. Top dough with granulated sugar and reserved pinch of salt. Bake in 325 degree oven 30-40 minutes. Should be just slightly golden but cooked through in center. Let cool before cutting.
*I used Eureka lemons.
**Cornstach can be substituted for rice flour.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
taza chocolate chip cookies
Once, on a recent trip back east, I biked out through Cambridge, down by Lechmere, to just over the Somerville line. In a big brick warehouse, Taza chocolate was rumored to be some interesting, delicious local chocolate. I locked my bike up, went inside, and wandered around the warehouse unable to find my destination. Either Taza had stopped having an open factory where visitors could drop by, or I was missing something obvious. I could smell the chocolate, but I couldn't get there. With too many other things to do before leaving town, I got back on my bike and rode away.
So when I found a bar of Taza 70% organic stone ground at Zabar's the other week, I took it home. I was entirely surprised by the chocolate when I tried it. The 70% had a smoky, rich flavor. Whereas Valrhona Caraibe or Guanaja usually calls up fruity and smooth, and Scharffenberger an intense red wine note, this one reminded me more of a black tea. The flavor was delicious. The taste?
Grainy. Sugar crystals, I thought at first. Upon reading up on the company I found out they don't conche their chocolate for an intensity of flavor. I wouldn't say I'm a big fan of this decision personally, mostly because it produces a chocolate that I don't really want to eat raw.
In order to get the most out of the Taza, I thought I'd make some basic chocolate chip cookies and melt the stubborn texture away. I made a simple chocolate pecan dough, chilled it, baked it, and was impressed at how the rich chocolate transformed a simple basic.
My main intent in writing this post was to meditate on what happens when you end up with something you don't quite love. Those perfect pears too mushy, too grainy? Did you try to buy out of season berries? Need to use something up before it goes bad? There are a lot, but a lot, of things that a good cook can make from one ingredient. I could have made a silky chocolate pudding, a rich hot cocoa with homemade marshmallows, or seriously special brownies. Pears can be poached or made into cobbler, and old poached pears can be cooked down to pear butter or pureed for a sorbet base. If you aren't quite happy with something take a minute to think what else you can make with it that you might enjoy better, or that might highlight the potential goodness of the thing.
I knew all along that inside of that bar, there was a delicious chocolate that I would enjoy.
Secondly...and take this to heart. Nothing will give you a better product than buying better ingredients in the first place. From salt to butter to chocolate, if you want flavor, you have to start with something that will give it to you.
So when I found a bar of Taza 70% organic stone ground at Zabar's the other week, I took it home. I was entirely surprised by the chocolate when I tried it. The 70% had a smoky, rich flavor. Whereas Valrhona Caraibe or Guanaja usually calls up fruity and smooth, and Scharffenberger an intense red wine note, this one reminded me more of a black tea. The flavor was delicious. The taste?
Grainy. Sugar crystals, I thought at first. Upon reading up on the company I found out they don't conche their chocolate for an intensity of flavor. I wouldn't say I'm a big fan of this decision personally, mostly because it produces a chocolate that I don't really want to eat raw.
In order to get the most out of the Taza, I thought I'd make some basic chocolate chip cookies and melt the stubborn texture away. I made a simple chocolate pecan dough, chilled it, baked it, and was impressed at how the rich chocolate transformed a simple basic.
My main intent in writing this post was to meditate on what happens when you end up with something you don't quite love. Those perfect pears too mushy, too grainy? Did you try to buy out of season berries? Need to use something up before it goes bad? There are a lot, but a lot, of things that a good cook can make from one ingredient. I could have made a silky chocolate pudding, a rich hot cocoa with homemade marshmallows, or seriously special brownies. Pears can be poached or made into cobbler, and old poached pears can be cooked down to pear butter or pureed for a sorbet base. If you aren't quite happy with something take a minute to think what else you can make with it that you might enjoy better, or that might highlight the potential goodness of the thing.
I knew all along that inside of that bar, there was a delicious chocolate that I would enjoy.
Secondly...and take this to heart. Nothing will give you a better product than buying better ingredients in the first place. From salt to butter to chocolate, if you want flavor, you have to start with something that will give it to you.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
it's almost over...
(or is it?)
We don't do our laundry (so what are we wearing then?)
We don't eat at home, but if we do get to it takes us two days to do the dishes from our morning coffee.
We talk on the phone in stores, as we walk, in between spaces where we put the phones away and maybe crank the music and put our heads down and try to muscle through.
We don't do our chores. We don't make the bed.
We barely sleep.
Our moods oscillate. We are happy and we are tired and we are weary and we are thinking of a hot shower, or a full meal, or how we need to set up our station already but we need to do these eight other things first, yeah?
We haven't bought your xmas presents yet.
We sort of hate xmas.
We know this will all be over after xmas, after new year's. In a week? But each day is so much fuller than a day should be.
We wait. Busy busy busy wait.
Last night at the restaurant we sold seventy five desserts and when my coworker tallied up the amounts and told us we all sort of stopped and tried to take that in. Things are changing. Always changing.
Today I tried to do my xmas shopping and walked around the Haight for a while, bought some really funny gifts for a friend. I'm cooking my xmas gifts for the fam tonight and poaching the quince that's been in my fringe for like two months now. Perhaps it will be finished by the time I go to bed. I'm going to try to get some writing done in the hopes that it will improve my mood a lil. Overly meditative. I get weird these days when I'm not working because I've been working insane hours every day so when I'm not working then what is left of me? What should I be doing?
I spent a good ten minutes trying to think about what my quince would be like if I didn't put sugar in the poaching liquid because I'd just used up all my white sugar. I had brown sugar. Honey. 10x. I seriously almost called my sous chef to ask her what to do but I thought she would just laugh at me. I went through the cupboards but nobody had anything sweet. How can I live with people who don't have sugar? I finally snapped out of it and walked cutie pie down to the corner store so now I'll never know what would have happened.
Some things, they're just beginning. It's a weird transition time. Right now I would really like to be in NYC. That feels very strange. I think it's time for me to drive out to Napa and go to Dean and Deluca's. And pretend that when I walk outside I'll be in Soho. But I don't think that'll work. Maybe I'll just hang out at Arinell's more. That actually made me feel like I'd fled east...
We don't do our laundry (so what are we wearing then?)
We don't eat at home, but if we do get to it takes us two days to do the dishes from our morning coffee.
We talk on the phone in stores, as we walk, in between spaces where we put the phones away and maybe crank the music and put our heads down and try to muscle through.
We don't do our chores. We don't make the bed.
We barely sleep.
Our moods oscillate. We are happy and we are tired and we are weary and we are thinking of a hot shower, or a full meal, or how we need to set up our station already but we need to do these eight other things first, yeah?
We haven't bought your xmas presents yet.
We sort of hate xmas.
We know this will all be over after xmas, after new year's. In a week? But each day is so much fuller than a day should be.
We wait. Busy busy busy wait.
Last night at the restaurant we sold seventy five desserts and when my coworker tallied up the amounts and told us we all sort of stopped and tried to take that in. Things are changing. Always changing.
Today I tried to do my xmas shopping and walked around the Haight for a while, bought some really funny gifts for a friend. I'm cooking my xmas gifts for the fam tonight and poaching the quince that's been in my fringe for like two months now. Perhaps it will be finished by the time I go to bed. I'm going to try to get some writing done in the hopes that it will improve my mood a lil. Overly meditative. I get weird these days when I'm not working because I've been working insane hours every day so when I'm not working then what is left of me? What should I be doing?
I spent a good ten minutes trying to think about what my quince would be like if I didn't put sugar in the poaching liquid because I'd just used up all my white sugar. I had brown sugar. Honey. 10x. I seriously almost called my sous chef to ask her what to do but I thought she would just laugh at me. I went through the cupboards but nobody had anything sweet. How can I live with people who don't have sugar? I finally snapped out of it and walked cutie pie down to the corner store so now I'll never know what would have happened.
Some things, they're just beginning. It's a weird transition time. Right now I would really like to be in NYC. That feels very strange. I think it's time for me to drive out to Napa and go to Dean and Deluca's. And pretend that when I walk outside I'll be in Soho. But I don't think that'll work. Maybe I'll just hang out at Arinell's more. That actually made me feel like I'd fled east...
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
cookies to go places with
Ai, miho, there are so many things I want to tell you right now.
Today (and tomorrow as well) I pull on the old battered checks and drive somewhere in Marin and pretend to be a prep cook. It's daunting at times but more educational and at times amusing. I know the savory rhythms are so different from the sweet world and I know why that is supposed to be so, but I've never worked that way.
I won't tell you about the rest of today just yet, but I will say this: there was a little lesson. And it represents just about every possible difference between my world and that world as I have experienced them. What happened was this: the chef handed me a list of ingredients and asked me to make a BBQ sauce. The list was simple: honey mustard cider vinegar soy sauce salt sugar onion chili powder. First I diced and sauteed the onion, rounded up the dry goods from storage, and because he knew I was a baker he said we could make it together, so he poured a good amount of mustard in a pot and showed me how much honey he wanted, and then told me to add the rest of the seasonings. I dumped in some chili powder, then more. I heaped salt, pinched sugar, lightly sloughed soy sauce from the bottle. I was overly cautious.
Everything is measured in pastry and precise. Cups of dry goods (if you are even using cups and not metric) are leveled off with a knife or other flat edge. There is a precision most people liked to call scientific, as if every baker's mind works tha way. Mine doesn't.
So the chef let me play with the sauce and then I went back to prepping some vegetables. He called me over to taste it, and we tasted it together and it was nasty, nothing bland. So he started adding huge quantities of the things I'd meekly put in, instructing me not to be afraid of the salt, or the heat from the chili. He wanted me to understand that because we weren't going to be shoveling spoonfuls of sauce in our mouth, that because of the nature of its end use, it could take such large amounts of these things.
It was interesting for me to be in a place where I knew so little, and to have to ask for so much. Because in pastry if I'm in a position of acquiring information it's usually about something I'm already familiar with, so I can contextualize my knowledge. I can ask intelligent questions. I have a past, my hands have a history.
More on savory cooking tomorrow. To taste memories now, and cookies...I'm making molasses cookies right now. I just put the first batch in the oven. I should be doing other things bow like sleeping, but we are...oh...six days through a nine day stretch of work and well, no longer ill, so whatever. I would give you the recipe for these cookies if it were mine to give, and I suppose I could, since it was given to me freely.
These cookies were made for me right before I left Boston, on the last day of my Oleana stage. I'm not sure why we decided to make them, only that Maura, who thought if you were going to make cookies they needed to be perfect, loved them. At the end of the day she packed me a large sack of cookies, which I stuck in the freezer until the end of February. I took them with me, and Brandon and I munched those, plus my mother's chocolate chip cookies, through snowstorms, hail, traffic, loneliness, darkness, the night of utter freezing hardcore-ness in Ohio. And in the spirit of giving, I gave them to a friend when I arrived here {or, in Oakland}. I was so betwixt when I left Oleana. Finally I had found someone I could learn so much from, and someone I wanted to work beside, and I was just skipping town (although, she knew that when I began). Working at Oleana made me believe I could do restaurant work from a good place in my heart. The cookies were a comfort line into the abyss.
I've been melancholy lately, what with all the coughing and taking-to-bed of Saturday till Monday. And the questions. The things I want. The various routes that have me all confused. I feel I'm at a crossroads and it scares me. I don't want to have reached that crossroads yet. So, the cookies. Keep my hands busy and my mind occupied, and focus me back on the little things, like the taste memory of perfection on a bright wintry day, and all of those deep traits that pull you through the fear.
And this too, the cookies: I am not alone. I think that I am and sometimes I act like I am, but I'm not. Not even out here in SF. Good timing for the cookies, since Leah's coming to town again Friday. And for the Thursday trip to Oakland, to pawn off some cookies on some friends I may not see again before their travels take them away from this place.
What with all these cookies, though, I really like CMON MAN want some malted vanilla ice cream. Ummm. Maybe I just want it regardless of the cookies, but I think it would pair well. Malted vanilla, you're nowhere in this town and I know it, ok, maybe on someone's menu somewhere conceivably, but you are not getting in my mouth unless I make you up, and sigh, I was kinda saving that freezer space for honey-rosemary, and I'm not quite sure where to buy malt powder, but...I just want you so bad.
Today (and tomorrow as well) I pull on the old battered checks and drive somewhere in Marin and pretend to be a prep cook. It's daunting at times but more educational and at times amusing. I know the savory rhythms are so different from the sweet world and I know why that is supposed to be so, but I've never worked that way.
I won't tell you about the rest of today just yet, but I will say this: there was a little lesson. And it represents just about every possible difference between my world and that world as I have experienced them. What happened was this: the chef handed me a list of ingredients and asked me to make a BBQ sauce. The list was simple: honey mustard cider vinegar soy sauce salt sugar onion chili powder. First I diced and sauteed the onion, rounded up the dry goods from storage, and because he knew I was a baker he said we could make it together, so he poured a good amount of mustard in a pot and showed me how much honey he wanted, and then told me to add the rest of the seasonings. I dumped in some chili powder, then more. I heaped salt, pinched sugar, lightly sloughed soy sauce from the bottle. I was overly cautious.
Everything is measured in pastry and precise. Cups of dry goods (if you are even using cups and not metric) are leveled off with a knife or other flat edge. There is a precision most people liked to call scientific, as if every baker's mind works tha way. Mine doesn't.
So the chef let me play with the sauce and then I went back to prepping some vegetables. He called me over to taste it, and we tasted it together and it was nasty, nothing bland. So he started adding huge quantities of the things I'd meekly put in, instructing me not to be afraid of the salt, or the heat from the chili. He wanted me to understand that because we weren't going to be shoveling spoonfuls of sauce in our mouth, that because of the nature of its end use, it could take such large amounts of these things.
It was interesting for me to be in a place where I knew so little, and to have to ask for so much. Because in pastry if I'm in a position of acquiring information it's usually about something I'm already familiar with, so I can contextualize my knowledge. I can ask intelligent questions. I have a past, my hands have a history.
More on savory cooking tomorrow. To taste memories now, and cookies...I'm making molasses cookies right now. I just put the first batch in the oven. I should be doing other things bow like sleeping, but we are...oh...six days through a nine day stretch of work and well, no longer ill, so whatever. I would give you the recipe for these cookies if it were mine to give, and I suppose I could, since it was given to me freely.
These cookies were made for me right before I left Boston, on the last day of my Oleana stage. I'm not sure why we decided to make them, only that Maura, who thought if you were going to make cookies they needed to be perfect, loved them. At the end of the day she packed me a large sack of cookies, which I stuck in the freezer until the end of February. I took them with me, and Brandon and I munched those, plus my mother's chocolate chip cookies, through snowstorms, hail, traffic, loneliness, darkness, the night of utter freezing hardcore-ness in Ohio. And in the spirit of giving, I gave them to a friend when I arrived here {or, in Oakland}. I was so betwixt when I left Oleana. Finally I had found someone I could learn so much from, and someone I wanted to work beside, and I was just skipping town (although, she knew that when I began). Working at Oleana made me believe I could do restaurant work from a good place in my heart. The cookies were a comfort line into the abyss.
I've been melancholy lately, what with all the coughing and taking-to-bed of Saturday till Monday. And the questions. The things I want. The various routes that have me all confused. I feel I'm at a crossroads and it scares me. I don't want to have reached that crossroads yet. So, the cookies. Keep my hands busy and my mind occupied, and focus me back on the little things, like the taste memory of perfection on a bright wintry day, and all of those deep traits that pull you through the fear.
And this too, the cookies: I am not alone. I think that I am and sometimes I act like I am, but I'm not. Not even out here in SF. Good timing for the cookies, since Leah's coming to town again Friday. And for the Thursday trip to Oakland, to pawn off some cookies on some friends I may not see again before their travels take them away from this place.
What with all these cookies, though, I really like CMON MAN want some malted vanilla ice cream. Ummm. Maybe I just want it regardless of the cookies, but I think it would pair well. Malted vanilla, you're nowhere in this town and I know it, ok, maybe on someone's menu somewhere conceivably, but you are not getting in my mouth unless I make you up, and sigh, I was kinda saving that freezer space for honey-rosemary, and I'm not quite sure where to buy malt powder, but...I just want you so bad.
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