Challenging day today, capped by someone breaking the window in the van and stealing Tenacious G’s purse while we were at a party in Santa Monica; so while she’s on the phone to the credit card folks, I’m doing a little blogging…we’re both pissed off at the jerk who did this, and at ourselves because we know better.
The day was tough in no small part, because the boys seem to be a little more restless than usual. Under 6 soccer early, then home, and while we were doing chores (with the supposed help of the boys), Littlest Guy and Middle Guy were streaking around the house. I swear that they not only broke the sound barrier, but that once there were flashes of Cerenkov radiation as they went by.
We got the core chores done, with little help from them, and as I started to go into Wrath of God Mode and think about just putting them into their rooms and just nailing the doors shut for a few days, something clicked and I decided to back off and solve the problem in another way.
We were supposed to bring something to the party, and I’d planned on baking something; I thought about some tarts, but time and energy were short, so I decided to knock out some chocolate chip cookies (I make awesome chocolate chip cookies).
I got Littlest Guy into the kitchen, and we rounded up the ingredients. Brown sugar, white sugar, eggs, butter, flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, imitation vanilla (when you bake with it, you really can’t tell the difference).
We batched the ingredients into ‘wet stuff’ (sugars, eggs, vanilla) and ‘dry stuff’ (flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon), and started measuring everything out. I got him to scoop the ingredients into the measuring cup, and suddenly he wanted to taste everything; so we did. We took a small portion of every ingredient and tasted them as we put them into the bowls.
And suddenly, I wasn’t stressing, and he wasn’t acting out; we were just two guys standing in the kitchen cooking together.
His brother came in and helped get the Kitchenaid set up (he knows that those who don’t work don’t get batter), and we started mixing everything together. MG showed LG how to separate eggs (the recipe calls for one egg plus one yolk), and we only made a small mess while doing this…and when I didn’t get upset at that, all three of us knew that we’d managed to make it into a pretty good day.
Here’s the recipe: the core is from Cook’s Illustrated, hands down the best cooking magazine out there.
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
Melt 1 – ½ sticks of salted butter, and let cool until it is warm
Add 1 cup brown sugar, plus 2 Tbsp
Add ½ cup white sugar
Blend until smooth.
Add 1 egg, plus 1 yolk
Blend until smooth
Add 2 tsp vanilla
Mix in a bowl:
2-1/8 cups unsifted bleached flour (compress slightly when measuring)
½ Tsp baking soda
½ Tsp salt
2 Tsp cinnamon
Add dry mixture to wet and blend until uniform and smooth
Add 1-1/2 semi-sweet chocolate chips (quality counts here – I use Ghirardelli)
Mix until uniform
Cool in the refrigerator for 20 mins (makes it easier to handle the batter)
Flour your hands, and make 1-1/2” spheres; place them on an oiled cookie sheet – give about 1” of space between them.
Cook for 12 – 14 mins at 325. I usually have two sheets worth of cookies, and swap the sheets between oven racks at 7 minutes.
The cookies should be light-colored, slightly crackled, and very thick.
Take them off the sheet and cool on racks.
Try not to get sick on the batter.
Have your kids help you…