The Official Cookie Rating Scale

G is a demanding cookie customer.


To be honest, G likes cookies in a way that I don't really understand. Before I met him, I always thought of cookies as just sort of being nice. Not great. Not terrible. Just nice. The wallflowers of desserts, if you will. There's not enough to a cookie, even a really big cookie, to pack the right punch for me. I have no time for nibbling. Cookies, almost by definition, are made for nibblers.

G sees the world of cookies very differently.

Pie, my favorite dessert, is apparently "gross". Cake is okay—sometimes great, but often just so-so (or worse). Bars and squares? Meh. Ice cream is a take-it-or-leave-it kind of affair, except on really hot days. About the only point we can agree on is that chocolate is fantastic. But cookies... cookies are just a step above.

I've made a lot of cookies over the course of our relationship, and at this point consider myself somewhat of an expert in his favorites. I've made more black and white cookies than I'd care to count. At some point, no doubt, I'll post the recipe.

In fact, I've made so many cookies that we've finally come up with an official cookie rating scale. The standards are high. Despite many, many batches of chocolate chip cookies, they still only rate a 6.5 out of 10. (10, by the way, is defined as the rainbow cookie [also known as a tri-color cookie], which is not so much a cookie as a thin layer cake disguised as one. It's also a hell of a lot of work.)

So when I say that a cookie made it to 6 on the official cookie rating scale, that statement isn't made lightly. This cookie, the newest addition to the official cookie rating scale, comes to you care of Milk and Cookies. It's a sable cookie with chocolate ganache, and was a hit with everyone who tried it. The ganache is too dark for G, but the high sugar content of the cookie itself balanced things out nicely.





I altered the recipe slightly, but it's pretty simple to begin with and delicious either way. Recommended to be taken with milk, once daily. Or more often if prescribed by physician.


Sable Cookies with Chocolate Ganache
225 grams plain all-purpose flour
25 grams cornstarch
200 grams butter, diced and at room temperature
100 grams confectioner’s (icing) sugar
2 egg yolks
Pinch of salt

100 ml (¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons) pure cream
100 grams bittersweet chocolate

Sifter or sieve
Medium mixing bowl
Plastic wrap
Parchment paper
Baking sheet
Rolling pin
Cookie cutters
Saucepan
Spatula


Sift together flour and cornstarch. Make a well in the center of the flour mixture and add the butter and sugar. Work together with your fingertips until no hard lumps remain. Add the egg yolks and salt, drawing in the flour. Work until the dough resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Do not overwork the dough. Roll the pastry into a log and refrigerate for two hours.

Preheat oven to 320°F. Prepare a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

Remove dough from fridge and carefully roll out to a thickness of about 6mm. Cut out desired shapes using a cookie cutter. Place on lined baking tray and bake for 10-12 minutes, or until just golden on the edges. Transfer cookies to a wire rack and cool completely before spreading ganache.

In a saucepan, heat the cream until just before boiling. Pour cream over chocolate in a separate bowl; let stand for 1 minute allowing the heat of the cream to slowly melt the chocolate.

Using a spatula, mix cream and chocolate to make a smooth, glossy mixture. Place somewhere to cool, uncovered, at room temperature. Transfer to refrigerator to slightly set.

Spread ganache over the backside of a cookie, then place another on top to sandwich the ganache between. Return to the refrigerator to set.


Makes about 25 cookies.

Happy Birthday Papa Muffin!

Those of you who claim my father was born in Florida in the 1940's rather than Russia in the 1870's can go to hell.

It was my father's birthday on Friday. He officially has (IMHO) the best birthday, as it always falls on 10/10. Now, I know a lot of people who have interesting favorite numbers: 17 (my mother's favorite number, and apparently the most commonly chosen 'random number'), π, e, 1084... My favorite number, on the other hand, is 10. 10 is finished in a very satisfying way—it almost feels symmetrical. Having gone to all that trouble of counting up to 9, I get to resolve back to 1 (with a zero on the end). It might be a boring number, but I like it all the same. Exciting numbers are overrated. So how it came to be that my father was born on 10/10 and not me, I'll never know.

Anyway, I make the mistake (a few weeks back) of asking him what he wanted for his birthday. "Mumble mumble gurgle," he says. Great. Buying a present for my father is always hard; he's picky but won't provide any helpful clues. The only idea that comes to mind is a six-foot paper-mâché wrench^*. When your best idea involves a giant structure of the variety that might have been constructed in third grade art class, you're in serious trouble.


^*One of the few successful gifts I can recall is the enormous wrench I bought at Sears for Christmas one year. He's never used it, but says it makes him feel more like a man. He likes the idea that he could take down a lamppost if he really wanted to.


Upon consultation with my mother, my only idea is shot down. "Why not just make him a nice dinner?"

Bah. Fine.


I spent all day yesterday cooking. My father requested:

Salad (tomatoes and radishes home-grown)
Fresh corn
Mashed potatoes
Filet mignon
Key lime pie


My father, generally speaking, likes scary food. He likes to squirt ketchup over everything on his plate, and then mash it all together to make red goop. As a child, I found it impossible to eat dinner with my family unless I carefully averted my eyes. So you might think that I would have the good sense to make something relatively simple, given the terrible red fate awaiting my culinary endeavors. But did I? Absolutely not. The salad was modest, the corn was just corn on the cob. But then came the potatoes and steak. Or should I say, iron mashed potatoes?

I don't have a great recipe for mashed potatoes. Thus the beginnings of iron mashed potatoes. It's a daring contest, pitting mashed potatoes against more mashed potatoes in potato combat. In the arena for the first round we had my mother's mashed potatoes, caramelized shallot mashed potatoes, and garlic mashed potatoes with chives. Only the winner of the first round advances on to round two. Results at the end of the post.

I also made what was, I thought, a very nice filet mignon. Part of it was the recipe, and part of it was just that I did a better job of cooking the steak to G's exacting specifications. I reduced the sauce more slowly than recommended, which was definitely a good idea.

Finally, I made key lime pie. My father is from the Florida Keys, so he's more than a little picky. It's his favorite dessert, and over time it's become mine as well. I was quite pleased when we both said it was officially good key lime pie.





Key Lime Pie
1 package (151 grams) graham crackers
25 grams (2 tablespoons) sugar
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
71 grams (5 tablespoons) unsalted butter, melted

4 large egg yolks (2 whites reserved)
14 ounces sweetened condensed milk
188 grams (¾ cup) freshly squeezed key lime juice
1½ teaspoons finely grated key lime zest
¼ cup sugar
2 large egg whites (reserved)
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar

Food processor
Electric mixer
9-inch pie tin
Saucepan
Medium mixing bowl
Spatula
Whisk
Plastic wrap
Aluminum foil
Flat-bottomed measuring cup
Pastry bag fitted with large star attachment (optional)


Place graham crackers, sugar and cinnamon in food processor. Blend until mixture resembles fine crumbs. Add melted butter and pulse ten times, until butter is well-distributed and mixture begins to clump.

Pour mixture into a 9-inch pie tin. Cover with plastic wrap to prevent crust from sticking to fingers; press crust into bottom of tin. Using a flat-bottomed measuring cup (or another object with a similar shape), lightly pound graham crackers flat. The crust should begin to move up the sides of the tin as the bottom becomes thinner. Continue pounding until thickness is roughly even throughout tin, pressing sides of tin as needed to ensure that crust sticks together and does not run over sides of tin.

Place crust in refrigerator.

Gently whisk together the egg yolks and sweetened condensed milk. Slowly whisk in the lime juice (the mixture should thicken slightly), followed by the lime zest. Continue whisking until mixture is well-blended.

Preheat oven to 350°F; set a rack in the middle of the oven.

In the clean, dry bowl of an electric mixer, whisk egg whites until foamy. Add cream of tartar and continue whisking until soft peaks form. Gradually add sugar, whisking until egg whites are shiny and form stiff peaks.

Measure out 2 cups of egg white mixture, and gently fold into lime mixture. (Any excess may be disposed of or baked to make hard meringue cookies.) Remove graham cracker crust from refrigerator and gently spread mixture into crust. Avoid the temptation to overfill—the egg whites in the mixture will rise during baking (though they will fall again during cooling) and too much filling may lead to disaster.

Bake 20 minutes, covering the top with foil if it begins to brown. Remove from oven and allow to cool to room temperature. Place in refrigerator at least four hours before serving.

Place cream in clean, dry mixing bowl (mixer fitted with whisk attachment). Add vanilla and powdered sugar to taste and whisk to make whipped cream. Place cream in pastry bag fitted with large star attachment, and decorate top of pie.

Serve cold.





And the iron mashed potato winner (round 1) is...
*gong*

Caramelized shallot mashed potatoes

The Un-Diet

G has been on a diet of late. He thinks he has a gut. He's 5'10" and 165 pounds. Say it ain't so!

I have no objections, really, though it means I have to search a little farther afield to find willing consumers of my desserts. Not a problem. It makes life more interesting, and it's a great way to make friends.



Okay, fine. I'm painfully shy and probably wouldn't make friends if you paid me. But it would be a great way to make friends if I were someone else.



That having been said, he seems to have hit diet-tolerance-saturation.

"I'm hungry," he says.
Well, says I, what would you like?

He wants to know what would be fun for me to make. Ha ha ha. Diet food is not generally too much 'fun' to make, as far as chef-me is concerned.

Cookies, say I.
The eyes go wide. "Cookies?"
"I'm kidding."
"No, seriously. Cookies?"
"Um..."





Thus it came to be that I made chocolate chip cookies, fudgies, and
brownie peanut butter cups all in one evening. Ah, the bliss.

The brownie peanut butter cups didn't really bake up the way I anticipated. They were still bubbling through the crust long after the advertised baking time was over (which they maybe shouldn't have been doing at all). So although a toothpick inserted in the center would have come out wet, the top was no so much "set" as resembling a Yosemite boiling mud pot. It was nearly impossible to get them out of the muffin tins—I assume as a result of their oddly volcanic baking activity. It wasn't much to look at, but it was pretty tasty.

PRESSURE

Pressure. F/A, nRT/V and (apparently) what Billy Joel thinks you can't handle. Also spontaneously produced when your future mother-in-law casually says: "Why don't you make something to bring to my sister's on Friday?"


Not being a very confident person, my solution was to try two recipes. Surely, I thought, they'll like one of them. Right? Knowing me, probably not. But both seemed to go over well, so maybe I just got lucky. The large quantities of wine being consumed couldn't have hurt either.

Sadly, I don't have a picture of my more successful dessert, but I do have a picture of the strawberry white chocolate tart. It's a little hard to explain to said future mother-in-law exactly why you think it would be a good idea to take a picture of your cake just as everyone's ready to leave.





A modest start, but hopefully there are better things to come.

Starting Over

I should probably make some mention of not having posted for over a year. If you happened to have stumbled across my blog in that time, I apologize. The lack of spare time and sanity during my last year as an undergraduate was... well, let's call it prohibitive and leave it at that. I don't really want to write (nor, I imagine, do you want to read) a tome about the past year and a half.


So, fancy piece of paper in hand, I would like to try again.

You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

Yes, well...

veg·e·tar·i·an
/ˌvɛdʒɪˈtɛəriən/
noun

A person who does not eat or does not believe in eating meat, fish, fowl, or, in some cases, any food derived from animals, as eggs or cheese, but subsists on vegetables, fruits, nuts, grain, etc.

The irony is not, in fact, completely lost on me. For once. But before you embark on what would no doubt be an eloquent and biting criticism of my hypocrisy, allow me a moment to explain how a vegetarian's food blog includes recipes for meat. There will still be a world of things left to criticize. I promise.

I should start by saying that I am vegetarian—I've been vegetarian for years. I don't eat filet mignon or chicken or salmon, and I try very hard to outwit the gelatin and rennet maliciously lurking where I might least expect them. It's not religious, or because I don't like meat, or something I learned from my family, but it is something that matters quite a lot to me. I don't want to take a life if I don't have to. End of story.

When I started living with G, the question of cooking meat really tortured me. For months, actually. On one hand, it makes perfect sense for me to cook for both of us. While I love to cook, G is borderline incapable of feeding himself. When he was an undergraduate, I'm told, he subsisted purely on peanut butter for something like a week. So long that his body began producing acetone, causing his breath to smell like nail polish remover. Not to mention long enough to make him really, really sick.

On the other hand, G and I have, shall we say, a difference of opinion when it comes to good food. I like tofu and artichokes and food spicy enough to make me cry. G does not. Emphatically. He's not just not vegetarian, but more of what I might call an active carnivore. Trying to make him eat vegetarian every night would have been a nightmare beyond what I really want to contemplate at this moment.

I thought about it all the same, though. I hope G will forgive me if he sees this. But in many ways, I think I'm just as culpable cooking meat as eating it. What I'm interested in is the 'not killing' part. And so what I object to is, in fact, not so much eating meat as purchasing it—the point at which (it seems to me) I most actively participate. True, this animal is already dead. But in buying it, I'm paying for that to continue. And in the end, I think that's where the responsibility originates.



It took much internal debate to come to any conclusions. Trying to pick out what I thought was actually true from what I wanted to be true. I decided first that I should only cook for myself, since I didn't think it would ever work to somehow force my belief system on him. But the more I thought about that, the less it made sense to me. It would let me feel like I'd avoided getting my hands dirty, so to speak, but it wouldn't actually solve much. Given the choice between between a two cuts of meat of similar quality, G will almost always choose the less expensive one. I, on the other hand, am more than willing to pay for free range/organic/wild/etc., even if the nominal quality of the meat is exactly the same. So that was sort of it, then. Do I participate in something I strongly dislike, but try to make it a little better? Or do I avoid it entirely?

You can see which one I chose. It prickles at my conscience a bit that I ended up making the decision that I wanted from a purely personal point of view—the one that allows me to cook for both of us. But I do think that the decision was also made with the best intentions, trying to step away from the easiest choice. I think G eats less meat than he would otherwise, and almost certainly less meat from fast food joints and the like.

So did I make the right decision? I don't know.

Beautiful Disaster

I'm feeling rather silly here, having started my blog and being more or less unable to post to it. I had the rationale that I ought to start it now, as I have more time—which I still think is a perfectly reasonable idea. But the difficulty is that, having gone to this much trouble, I find that I really want to post something. I'm working out of the country, living in a small apartment, have no bowls or spatulas or cooking sheets or even an oven... but I want to post about the things I cannot make all the same.

So I thought I'd post one more photograph lurking in my archives, which I didn't put up the first time because it was such a complete and utter failure.



I rather think that they're pretty, but they tasted terrible. I served them at a dinner party and sort of wanted to curl up and die. *sigh* Never again.