Lilith Saintcrow

I shouldn’t Twitter on a sugar high. Last night I gave some choco-chip cookie tips, and did promise to give my recipe. It’s adapted both from my mother’s and from Better Homes & Gardens.

BE WARNED: this makes a LOT of dough. I’ll tell you why in a little bit.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

2c butter
1.5c brown sugar
1.25c granulated sugar
2.25 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. table salt
5 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla extract
5c cake flour
1.25c-1.5c regular flour
1 pkg. of the best choco chips you can afford (I use Ghirardelli’s.)

OPTIONAL: 2.5 c. chopped nuts, or half a package of Heath toffee bits.

How you do this:

First of all, buy the best butter you can afford. A lot of cookie recipes tell you to use butter and shortening, but to me that is an abomination. (Shortening belongs in biscuits, not cookies.) I know it affects the texture of the finished cookie, I just can’t bring myself to think that change is for the best. I bake with butter unless there’s a compelling reason, taste-wise, not to. And for these cookies, there just isn’t.

Melt the butter in a very heavy saucepan over low to medium heat. (I have a Le Creuset saucier that works very well.) While it’s melting, measure out your sugar and brown sugar into a heat-proof bowl. (I use the metal bowl for my KitchenAid mixer.) Whisk the sugars together.

When the butter is fully melted, pour and scrape it into the heat-safe bowl with the sugar. Whisk it together until it looks like, in the Princess’s words, “swampwater.” (It will smell like caramel, and if you heated it to soft-ball stage it would be.) Now put a plate or something over the bowl to keep any critters from trying to sample the deliciousness, and let it sit for a minimum of 15 minutes. (This recipe owes a lot to the NY Times, courtesy of Pim. But this step–melting the butter–I stole from a Cooks Illustrated magazine.) If you’re like me, you’ll wander away, and come back to it twenty minutes later when you realize you were indeed doing something in the kitchen before you got distracted. Or you’ll clean the kitchen, then move into cleaning something else until the timer rings and you wonder what it was for, then you realize you’re making cookies.

Anyway, once the wait is over, measure out your dry ingredients–cake flour, 1c of the regular flour, salt, and baking soda–in a separate bowl. Mix them together thoroughly. The low-protein cake flour is to give the finished cookie a more tender crumb, and you only need to start out with 1c of the regular flour. Use table salt for this step, too, not kosher. (Kosher salt comes later.)

Now put the butter-and-sugar swampwater (it will have a shiny glaze to it) in a mixing bowl, careful to scrape it all out. (I’m a fanatic about scraping.) Use a whisk attachment and whip it, whip it good. Whip the snot out of it. (This step is to incorporate little air bubbles in there.) Turn off mixer, add the eggs and vanilla, whip on low to blend, scrape bowl, then whip on medium for a minute or 90 seconds to get some more of those air bubbles in there. Those air bubbles help, with the baking soda, the cookie be “fluffy.”

When it’s all whipped, switch to a paddle attachment on your mixer and slowly (like a serving-spoonful at a time) add the dry ingredients. (If you don’t have a paddle attachment, don’t fret. Use what you’ve got. The type of mixer with dual beaters just means you have to go slow and scrape the sides a little more frequently.) When they’re all added, shut the mixer off and test the dough. It will be a lot softer than you’re used to, but you can still judge if it needs more flour. Sometimes humidity seems to play merry hob with my cookie dough. Anyway, add up to another half-cup to a cup of regular flour to make it stick together like a cookie dough should. But keep in mind, this dough will be soft.

I know you’re not supposed to, but I often just keep my mixer on low and slowly dump in the chocolate chips. (Plus toffee bits, if I’m feeling frisky. You can add nuts if you like…but not me. Oh, no. Not me.) Then, voila, turn your mixer off. You have ambrosia.

But some people will want to cook their cookies, and not just get sick on the dough.

Here is an important step: cover the mixing bowl with plastic wrap and put the dough in the fridge for at least twenty minutes while you preheat your oven to 375. (Preheating is important. DO EEET.) This will “set” the dough and make it behave when you shape it.

A few things about baking these cookies: they’re meant to be big. I use my bigger spoons to measure out the dough, not my wimpy teaspoons. Line your baking sheet with parchment paper–it’s cheap, it will keep the cookies from burning, and it makes cleanup so easy. And please use baking sheets with no sides. Jelly-roll sheets with the sides do sometimes prevent the cookies from browning right.

I usually do about six to an oven batch on my huge Ikea-bought cookie sheets. (Oh, Ikea. I love you so, so much.) First I measure out the chunks of dough, then (like the OCD baker I am) I use my fingers to shape them just slightly so they are lovely and round and perfect.

Then I sprinkle each cookie with just a little bit of kosher salt. Kosher salt is finer than table salt, and the extra bit of it makes these cookies GOOOOOOOOOOD. Don’t believe me? Try it. I am such a salt fiend, too. I swear I was a deer in a past life, a deer with a yen for salt licks.

Cook in 375 oven for 8-14 minutes. Ovens vary, and the temperature of the dough makes cooking times vary too. I check the cookies at eight and twelve minutes respectively, and I do three or four batches to varying done-ness because some kids here like crispy cookies, others like soft cookies, and still others just want the sugar. Much of cookie baking is practice–you will be able to smell when these are done. Cool on the pan set on a wire rack, for five minutes, then transfer cookies carefully to another wire rack to finish cooling. (Note: cookies are most fragile right when you take them from the oven. They will cook slightly more and firm up in the first five minutes on the cooling pan. Again, practice makes perfect.)

Now, here’s why I make this dough in job lots. To get the best effects from it, you need to cure it, tightly covered, in the fridge for 36 hours or so. It really does make a difference, but if your ravening hordes demand OMG COOKIES NOW you may have to do a few batches so they don’t tear down your battlements. Plus some people (NOT ME, I SWEAR!) may snitch bits of dough.

I line a big Tupperware bin with parchment paper, scrape the dough into it, cover the surface of the dough with plastic wrap, then put the lid on tight. It sits in the fridge for a day and a half, and after that I measure out batches of cookies, put them on a lined baking sheet, and plop the sheet in our big freezer for a little bit. When the shaped balls of dough are half-frozen, I pile them in more Tupperware and keep them in the freezer. I get the whole chunk of dough frozen like that, in shaped cookie bits. So that whenever we want cookies, I just go out, load up a baking sheet with frozen shaped ones, and bake them–370F for about 12-13 minutes. (That extra five degrees cooler just seems to make frozen dough react better. YMMV.)

And that is why I make tons of dough at a time. If my kids ever move out I am going to go on mad quests for more hungry people to feed.

The cookies are best slightly warm, with milk. I prefer the crispy ones myself, until they’re about a day old. Then I like the soft ones.

There’s some survivors in the kitchen calling me right now, as a matter of fact. I have a proof to eyeball today, too. I wonder if I can get that done on a sugar high?

Over and out.

I’ll keep food out of politics when politics stay out of my food. (nonhipster mom)

I came across this NYT food blog (hat tip to Kitchenbeard for the link.) The comments are the most instructive part of the piece, don’t skip them.

As someone who delights in (you might almost say, is obsessed with) food, I think about this issue a lot. Food accounts for a huge bit of my budget, and I’m supporting three other people. Right now things are pretty easy, because there’s a supermarket within walking distance, a Trader Joe’s ten minutes down the road, and a working car at my disposal. Not to mention a few bucks from the writing to keep us fed and warm.

Things were not always so good. I remember being poor and I suspect, the vagaries of the writing career being what it is, that I will again confront the problems of the hidden costs of food at some time. Those costs include time, transportation, storage. I’ve invested in a secondhand freezer (dude, twenty bucks for a working freezer? Plus delivery to my house? You bet your sweet bippy, neighbor!) and I have high-quality cookware that is going to last a while. Still, the two huge things necessary for “cheap” home cooking are transportation (got to get the food home) and time. The investment of energy is also a function of time. If you’ve worked for fifteen hours and spent two hours on a bus getting home, you’re not interested in cuisine. You’re interested in cramming something in your mouth and getting to sleep. There’s also the problem of keeping the electricity/gas on.

On the NYT piece above, the commenters seemed largely split between: Those who thought being poor automatically means you’re lazy and obese and so, your food problems are your own concern, quit whining; those who thought a year at college eating Ramen meant they were qualified to talk about what being poor really means; and those well-meaning souls who wanted to help the poor by suggesting they find the time to make beans and rice.

In the course of this I came across the Nonhipster Mom’s analysis of the whole thing.

I think we should have a real discussion about the politics of food in America’s poorest communities, but I think that when the focus of this discussion is about why America’s poorest communities aren’t growing their own microgreens or baking their own bread, we are missing the point so massively that it makes me sick. I want to talk about why there aren’t incentives for major grocery stores to move into neighborhoods where accessability to fresh, affordable food is a major roadblock. I want to talk about the correlation between food and education, especially early childhood education. I want to talk about why people whose food budget exceeds $1200 a month think it’s okay to tell someone who doesn’t own a car that they shouldn’t eat junk food and only does so because that person is stupid.

I want people to understand something about modern poverty: the solutions to this problem aren’t fixed by organics. They’re fixed by understanding what the problem really is.

The problem is the deck is stacked. The deck has ALWAYS been stacked in favor of the rich, and even in countries with social safety nets the game is still rigged. (Incidentally, we like to pretend America has a HUGE social safety net. Thanks to well-fed conservatives dismantling a ton of programs from Reagan’s time to today, we really don’t.) The rigging of the game happens in various ways–John Scalzi wrote about what it’s like to be wrenchingly poor, and Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about the hidden costs of being poor. There are hidden costs everywhere when you’re trying to live on $8-$10 an hour.

The problem is manifold, and it includes (but is not limited to):

* The idea we have that in America, if you’re poor it’s your own fault. Against-all-odds success stories do not prove this any more than spending a dollar guarantees you a lottery jackpot. We have (from most conservatives) the idea that the poor are all lazy, shiftless assholes and (from some liberals) a woolly-headed “Noble Poor” thing, not to mention (from other liberals) the idea that organic or microgardening is the solution. Sound bites like this don’t help, and our social habit of sound bites over reasoned, nuanced analysis doesn’t help either.

* A prohibition against safe, cheap, effective birth control for all women. Don’t even get me started on this. Plenty of people who go on and on railing against abortion and birth control don’t give a damn once the baby’s actually born and needs to be fed and raised. And then there’s the Mommy Tax.

* Decades of corporations and the top 1% of the wealthy systematically throwing money at their interests in our government, and getting concessions to make them richer and the rest of us poorer. Money well spent for them, reasonable to expect them to spend it, not so reasonable for the rest of us to roll over and let them buy the advantage.

* The idea that it’s filthy to organize for better working conditions, and that it’s just “natural free trade” when corporations outsource to countries where worker protection is even more dismal, because it improves their bottom line in the short term. Don’t even get me started about this, either.

* Complete and utter separation from, and ignorance about, how most of our food is produced.

* A collection of junk-food and huge agribusiness lobbies that throw a bunch of money at Congress to make things more comfortable for themselves, and consumers who, due to the above separation and ignorance, don’t see how they can begin to protest.

That’s a very short list. I could go on and on. I have ranted about this many a time in the privacy of my home. I’ve struggled with my weight and with the cheap junk that was sometimes all I had energy for, sometimes all I could “afford” because I didn’t have the time to cook cheaply. I’ve also been poor enough to have a bag of flour and that’s IT, to somehow feed myself and another person on. Right now I’m staying up late at night, going over and over the fact that I have the money now, but if I get sick and can’t work…or if someone in the house gets sick and we get medical bills…or, or, or. Right now this is only a passing fear, one I save against.

I’m goddamn lucky it’s not a reality. I know what it’s like to feel that fear every day, to have it gnaw at your vitals. I understand both that I am in a position of privilege now, and that I may not always be. I’m lucky to have decent cookware, access to the raw materials for cheap cooking, and a freezer. I’m lucky that I don’t have to make those choices. But that does not mean I think those who don’t have all those things are lazy, or stupid. I think the majority of people are doing the best they can and looking out for their own interests. The rich just have more money to throw at their interests, and in our world that speaks louder than altruism or justice most of the time.

But it doesn’t have to, and the solution starts with you and me.

Like I said, I could go on and on. But I’ll content myself with offering a couple of links about cooking on a budget, even though it largely doesn’t approach the problems I’ve been ranting about here. And a couple links about hidden costs:

* CookForGood. If you’ve got access to the raw materials, this is a good site about cooking cheaply.
* The BrokeAss Gourmet: Advice on how to stock a “pantry” and then make meals for under $20. The pantry-stocking section is great.
* The hidden cost of cheap food.
* Nickel and Dimed. Really, if you haven’t read this and you think poor people are “just lazy”…please, please consider reading.

Now I’m going to go hug my kids. Over and out.

Cross-posted from Deadline Dames, where you can find other writing advice, contests, giveaways, and unicorns! Okay. I’m lying again, about the unicorns. But go check it out!

A happy Beltane, and a happy Friday to you, dear Reader. If you are here for writing advice, well…I have just one piece of it this Friday.

Sometimes it’s good to take a little break. Of course the work goes on inside my head whenever I step away from the keyboard–I’m always juggling plot or mulling over a nasty word-choice problem. But some days, you know, it’s good to toss the whole effing thing in a mental trashcan and…

…bake cookies.

This is the best oatmeal cookie recipe I’ve ever found. It’s adapted from a recipe off a package of Snoqualmie Falls Lodge Oatmeal, which happens to make very good cookies. I can’t tell you what it’s like for oatmeal, since I almost never eat the stuff unless it’s in cookie form.

Luscious Oatmeal Cookies

You will need:

1c (2 sticks) of the best unsalted butter one can afford
1c plus 3Tb packed dark brown sugar
3/4c Turbinado or cane sugar (or both, or just plain sugar if you don’t have either)
2 eggs
1 1/2t vanilla extract
2c all-purpose flour
1t to 1Tb cinnamon, depending on taste
1t baking soda
1/2t baking powder
1t kosher salt (1/2t if all you have is table salt.)
3c oatmeal (NOT instant!)
1 pkg. 60% bittersweet baking chips (I prefer Ghirardelli)

Notes: Do not skimp on butter or on the choco chips. Everything else in this recipe you can get cheap, including oatmeal–but not instant oatmeal, and for the love of God get the best butter and bittersweet chocolate chips you can afford. You can also add up to 1c cake flour in place of all-purpose flour, depending on if you like your cookies soft-the cake flour’s lower protein content will soften them up. Start with 1/4c cake flour for 1/4c all-purpose and work up from there.

Put oven rack in the middle and preheat oven to 350F. Get out a nice heavy saucepan (my saucier works wonders both for this and teriyaki sauce) and melt the butter over medium to medium-high heat, stirring frequently. Don’t do this in the microwave–it gives the butter a metallic taste I don’t care for, and it can superheat butter in the wrong way. Stovetop is best.

While butter is melting, measure out sugars and vanilla in heatproof bowl (the metal mixing bowl on my smaller KitchenAid works well.) When butter is melted (you can keep the butter going until it foams or browns, for different tastes), pour it into heatsafe bowl with sugars and vanilla, mix thoroughly with heat-safe silicon spatula or sturdy wire whisk.

Now, set that bowl aside and set a timer for ten minutes. In another bowl, mix flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. I also add a few shakes of white pepper. (Pepper is a secret ingredient in cookies with choco chips.) Then, goof off until the timer rings. (I recommend dancing around the kitchen to flamenco music. No, seriously. I DO.)

The butter-and-sugar mixture should be cool and glossy now. Dump it in your electric mixer’s bowl (if it’s not in there already) and use the paddle attachment (if you have one) on low. Crack the eggs into the bowl and turn it up to medium to whip it good.

Turn mixer back down to low and slowly add flour mixture. When incorporated, stop mixer and scrape down sides of bowl, then add the oatmeal slowly with mixer on low. Add chocolate chips after oatmeal is all gooshed in, and pray to God your mixer doesn’t overheat. (Mine never has yet, but I worry.) Then, let the dough rest for five minutes.

Line your baking sheets with parchment paper. Look, it’s a couple of bucks and it’s a baker’s Sekrit Weapon. You don’t have to change the paper between batches or anything, and it makes cleanup a snap.

Now, here’s something a lot of oatmeal cookie recipes won’t tell you. Get your spoon out and take a spoonful of the dough. Slap it in your palm and roll it into a nice little ball. Then drop it on your lined baking sheet. This not only shapes your cookies, but it also means you don’t get a panful of some undercooked and some overcooked. You’ll get a buttery sludge on your palms, but it won’t hurt you, butter is a great moisturizer and sugar is an awesome exfoliant.

If you like bigger, softer cookies use a bigger spoon to measure out the dough. Plop them on the cookie sheet with at least 2in between them. Slide them in the oven.

Here is the tricky part to cookie baking. These suckers will take anywhere from 8 to 14 minutes to cook, depending on humidity, the quirks of your oven, cookie size…you get the idea. Start at 8 minutes and check them every two minutes thereafter until they are nicely browned around the edges and not shiny in the middle, and the first and second batches will tell you how long to cook the rest. (After a few batches you’ll be able to smell when they’re done, too.) Take ‘em out and cool the pan for a couple minutes (usually while throwing the next batch in the oven) on a wire rack. (This is when cookies are most delicate.)

Some people like to slid cookies off the pan with a wide spatula and let them land on the wire rack. I scoop them off and slide them onto the rack with the spatula, since I think it tears the delicate structures inside the “setting” cookie less. Your mileage may vary. Let cookies cool until they will no longer scorch your throat, then dunk in cold milk and bask in the appreciation of your children as they proclaim you the Best. Cookie-Cooker. Evar.

Okay, maybe that last one is just me.

These cookies keep for a nice while if you cool completely and stow in airtight Ziplocs or flat Tupperware (with parchment paper between layers and a paper towel under the bottom parchment, trust me.) But they hardly every stay around long enough to get stale.

Sometimes it is good to take a little time off from the writing. Most often, I end up cooking something during that time, and when I get back to the work it is fresher and more delicious. (Or maybe that’s just the magic of foodening.) Plus, it’s spring. The world is waking up and the trees are dressing themselves again, and baking cookies on a warm spring evening was just the thing I needed after a stressful week.

Mrppphlgrb! (That’s a “Over and out” with a mouth full of chewy, yummy oatmeal cookie.) Enjoy!

Oh, my Muse. Let me sing to thee.

Oh my gal is a high part stepper
Ginger with salt and pepper
She’s a fancy stepper when she dances
Go and see her as she kippers and prances
My gal don’t do much talking
Dances even when she’s walking
One and two and three and four she dances all day long…

–Bugs Bunny

Yes, my dear Muse. That ornery little magic-strewing wench. Here I am, having cleared my calender and wanting to settle down to write the next effing book I’m contracted for, and she just capers around with flowers in her hair. Serving up bits and pieces of Sekrit Project, but nothing for the Book I Must Write.

I know I’ll be able to put the pedal to the medal soon–I really have no choice, which means the Muse has no choice. But today I’m wanting to whine. See, the Muse pouts if I don’t pretend she’s a slavedriver instead of a twittery little weenie wench who just happens to know where the magic is.

In any case, I roasted a chicken last night–what’s that? You want recipe? Okay, it’s super easy, I got it from Nina Merrill. Take one whole chicken, frozen or not. Plop it in your crock pot–I like a wide one instead of a tall one–and dab it with butter. Sprinkle spices of choice over the top–I like Trader Joe’s poultry blend, Nina likes Mrs. Dash.

Now, you turn the crock on high for an hour and then turn it to low right before you go to bed. When you wake up in the morning the house will smell awesome and you will have a tender, juicy, nommable roasted chicken. Be ready to pick it clean–what’s that? How do you do that?

It’s also easy. I have a wide shallow Tupperware pan that I lift the chicken out into. By now it’s falling apart, which is good. I spoon it out, usually in pieces. Get out another bowl or two–one for the meat, and one for skin etc. if you don’t want to throw the skin into the crock pot with the bones for stock. Some people like just bones in their stock; I boil down the bones and skin and skim it later.

Anyway, now you start picking. I usually get a meat fork and use that in my right hand, since the chicken is hot hot hot and the bones can burn you, not to mention the steam. I poke with the fork and only use my fingers when absolutely necessary. Pick the meat, ignore the bones, toss the skin and nasty bits in the third bowl if you don’t want to boil them down.

When you’re done, you will have greasy half-burned fingers, a pile of roasted chicken meat, and a shallow bowl full of bones and icky bits and grease. I dump the bones and icky bits (Note: NOT the giblets. You should have taken those out prior to cooking^[1]; cats love them) back in the crock pot and keep it on low for a while to make ZOMG to die-for-low-salt-chicken-stock. Now the meat can be divvied up in Ziplocs and frozen for use in other recipes. Or you can drench it in half the teriyaki sauce you made last night–no, I’m not giving that recipe until later, when I know if I did it right and if it works–and put it in the fridge for dinner.

What? You were wondering about the Muse? Well, this recipe stuff is all part of my Big Sekrit Plan. I ignore her and pretend like I’m having fun writing, and pretty soon she throws a pretty shiny across my path. Like any woman, she hates to be ignored.

As a matter of fact, she’s giving me an idea right now. See you guys in a bit…

^[1] When the chicken’s frozen I leave them in and take them out prior to the picking. I know you’re not supposed to, but Jesus, the name of the game is “easy” here.

A short run today–I’ve worked up to running five days a week, but two of those days are going to be short 20-min sessions (not counting warmup and cooldown). I was considering leaving the house today, but after yesterday’s cook-a-thon (we had MakeMe and her boyfriend over for dinner) I’m kind of nixing the notion. Besides, I need to get revisions out of the way so I can write, both on contracted stuff and on the New Shiny Project. After a long bout with revisions, all I can think of is creating anew.

I am waiting with bated breath for my next issue of Cook’s Illustrated. The kids love Scientific American and I like it too, but there’s just something about CI that makes me so so happy. I hear the next issue has a chocolate-chip cookie recipe. You can guess what I’ll be baking soon.

Someone asked me about cookbooks yesterday, so here we go. The first one–the one that started this whole thing–was Baking with Julia. After I actually started producing good bread, I got a couple other bread cookbooks too, the best of which is this one. Then I got Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, which actually goes into the chemistry of foods and why they behave the way they do. Just like CookWise and BakeWise, which I consider essential.

This was a revelation to me. I had viewed cooking as some weird alchemical art whose secrets were only given to the few with the proper handshake, kind of like some people view getting published. And after being told over and over again that I was no good at it, the way I was no good at anything practical because “your head is always in the clouds”, I’d given up.

But “cookbooks” that tell me WHY food behaves the way it does, and how to tweak recipes? ZOMG. The idea that I could learn how food reacted so I could put recipes together and get consistent results was a complete and very gratifying shock.

If I had to tell someone one cookbook to get, I’d recommend the McGee even though it isn’t technically a cookbook, because understanding how and why food behaves the way it does is way more useful than a list of ingredients. Then I’d recommend CookWise and BakeWise; then this vegetarian cookbook (since the UnSullen tends toward vegetarianism). With those you’re pretty much covered.

I do also occasionally rely on my faithful old red-plaid Better Homes and Gardens, and my old Joy of Cooking when I’m looking for something kind of fancy-dancy. And now I’ve started branching out–I did a cheesy-chicken-rice thing from leftovers the other day that vanished in a heartbeat. If I’d had sour cream it would’ve gone even more quickly.

So there you have it, my list of “essential” cookbooks. Still, all the cookbooks in the world won’t help without the willingness to get in there and make mistakes, experiment, and have some fun. (Just like writing. Okay, I’ll stop flogging that point…for now.) The kids love watching and learning and helping to cook, a valuable life skill that will contribute oodles to their adulthood. And I don’t eat out as much as I did now that I’m enamored of the process of cooking itself. Quelle disastre, right?

Right. All that money I’m saving is probably going to go toward some Le Creuset. I keep telling myself it’s quality cookware that the Princess can have after I’m gone, therefore it’s an investment…

ETA: Thanks for telling me about the broken code. HTML, she is trying to keel me…

See? I’m hopeless. Completely hopeless.