Spork or Foon?

New York Times Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

 

There are certain things I love about Christmas and certain things that can sometimes get under my skin during the season. Lets start with the bad, shall we?

Things That Sometimes Slightly Annoy Me About the Christmas Season:

• Crowds.
  
• Tourists.
  
• Traffic. 
  
• Annoying commercials (seriously, Gap, if I see that commercial that says "Go Christmas, Go Hanukkah, Go Kwanzaa, Go Solstice!" one more time, I'm going to put my tree through the TV).
  

This I LOVE About Christmas:

• Listening to Christmas music (starting in September).
  
• Decorating my apartment.
• Watching Christmas movies, especially Scrooged, Elf, and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. 
  
• The Christmas Spirit.  I love that everyone is so happy and giving.
  
• COOKIES.  Endless amounts of cookies. 
  

So now that Christmas season is upon us, I'm in cookie mode. And I'm focusing on the number 1 cookie of the season (in my opinion): The chocolate chip cookie.

Is it too late to jump on the New York Times Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe bandwagon? 

That would be one tasty bandwagon to be on. I can see it now (cue harps and wavy transitional lines to take you into my dream world):

Me, surrounded by the scent of buttery, toffee-flavored cookies with large, slightly melted, creamy dark chocolate disks.  The ride is bumpy, there is a chill in the air, and snow is falling, but I don't notice. Because I am biting through the crisp edges to reach the soft, chewy center of the cookie.  A hint of salt comes through, a nice surprise that startles my expectation for the flavors of the well-known cookie. The scent of butter and chocolate wafts through the air as I ride past an ocean of chocolate milk. Jaques Torres himself comes out to greet me with more chocolate confections and says something in French that I cannot understand, but it sounds like "Mmm. Cookies."  Santa Claus flies into the scene with his reindeer and tries to snatch a cookie from my wagon, but I tomahawk chop him light lightning. "Sorry, Santa. I say.  You'll have to wait for Christmas for your turn."  

And then I wonder why I only receive coal in my stocking that year.  But it was worth it for these cookies. Perfection in a cookie whose flavor develops deeper with every hour the dough is left in the fridge. Instead of conventional all-purpose flour, cake flour and bread flour add a nice lift to the weight of the cookie. Sea salt adds a nice finish to the deep toffee flavor of the cookie.  And of course, lots and lots of high quality chocolate take this cookie from "good" to "oooooohhh".

It is so worth the wait. And the weight. And the coal in your stocking.

Click here for the recipe. 

 

Thanksgiving Central

 

Oftentimes, I go onto websites such as Epicurious.com or MyRecipes.com around the holidays and am bombarded by huge, flashing letters stating (Insert Holiday Here) Central.

Who made them Thanksgiving Central?  Christmas Central?  Presidents Day Central?

It's a little presumptuous, no?

Well, I am declaring Spork or Foon this year's Thanksgiving Central.  I may not have many Thanksgiving recipes in my archive, but if you are looking to have a Thanksgiving dinner comprised of 1 side dish, some rolls, and two pies, then this is the place to be, people. 

We all know my love for the Chocolate Pumpkin Pie (photo above).

But did you see the mess that was my Pumpkin Ice Cream Pie with Chocolate Almond Bark and Toffee Sauce from last year?

 

Please hold your laughter, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  And I was using flash under yellow lighting with my point and shoot before I knew how to take photos.  

Or how about my butterhorn rolls.  These were pretty as a peach. They didn't taste like anything, because I forgot to put salt in the dough. But I gave Pillsbury a run for his roly-poly money right here. 

I remember being very happy with this photo last year. But then Tastespotting and Foodgawker both rejected it and rained on my Thanksgiving Day Parade.

 

And finally, the most amazing Thanksgiving side that ever existed in the history of man. This sweet potato casserole.  Words cannot express the wonder that is this casserole. I am making two this year because one is not enough.  

May I present to you the Sweet Potato Casserole with a Cinnamon Cashew Streusel. Heaven in a casserole Dish. This was finished in about 5 minutes at my house last year. 

Again, don't judge my poor photography skills from 2008.

 

So there you have it, folks!  Happy Thanksgiving and you're welcome! 

 

Sugar Cookies Have Hijacked My Life

I know this is not TWD's All-In-One Holiday Bundt Cake.  I know that I haven't blogged in two weeks.  

Life is nuts right now.  I got a HUGE catering gig with the store Theory: 5 stores, 4 days, 2200 cookies. I also am planning my 10-year high school reunion.  Which is tomorrow.  And I am also helping Jack's sister at her newly opened doggy daycare because her partner is getting married and going to Thailand for 3 weeks for her honeymood (JEALOUS)! 

This may be the only time in my life where I wish there were two different voices in my head. I would have liked one of those voices to say:

Are you crazy?!?? Don't plan your high school reunion! You'll have nightmares that no one will show up or that they'll forget to give you the liquor and you have to wander around a house trying to steal liquor from a liquor cabinet and a scary lady yells at you and no one drinks and leaves early once you find a way to steal the liquor! (True story, I had this dream).

I wish the other voice would have said:

YES! Theory! Huge job!  Amazing store! But be warned: 550 cookies a day is a lot of cookies for any one person to make and decorate! You will be up baking from 7 am to 3 am baking straight through! You'll sleep for only 3 hours and then wake up and bake some more! Then you'll spend 7 hours in a car delivering them to the five locations! Who drives from the city to Long Island to Westchester and thinks there will be no traffic, silly rabbit? Trix are for kids! 

 

So I haven't had a lot of time to cook and blog personally. Know I know what people in the food industry mean when they say they come home and don't want to think about food. 

So please bear with me while I try to get through the month of December. November was hard. December is going to be harder because I have many catering orders. So it'll be me, lots of butter, lots of cookie dough, and not enough time spent working out for all of the butter and cookie dough. I already feel my former muscle jiggling. Not cool. 

And I miss getting around to all of my blogging buddies blogs! I will get there! And I will catch up on the TWD's I missed! They are on my Thanksgiving dessert menus. 

More dessert. Sigh. 

Check out TWD and Britin of the Nitty Britty for the holiday bundt cake. And if you want to make the most amazing sugar cookies ever, click here for Dorie Greenspan's Grandma's All-Occasion Sugar Cookies! 

Oh, and these are supposed to be Gingerbread women, but I think they look like big German women who will hold your head in their bosoms while you suffocate. 

Spiced Chicken and Chickpea Stew

In my pre-cooking days, I was not a big fan of flavor.  I ate dry cereal (Lucky Charms, no matter the age, thankyouverymuch), turkey and cheese (one slice each) sandwiches on whole wheat with relish (still do, no shame in that), and any kind of pasta with minimal sauce.  And cookies, of course (of course).

At that same time, I was very into astrology and horoscopes.  Scorpios are fiercely loyal (check), intense (check), intensely private (yup), dramatic (double check), and wise beyond their years (umm???....).  

According to Tarot.com "Scorpio is the only sign that has three animal totems. First, there is the well-known Scorpion with its active tail. Second, as the Scorpio learns to master its passion and hold its instincts at bay, it changes into the Eagle. The Eagle has more perspective, for it flies high above the surface of circumstances, swooping down with its power only to kill prey for food. In its third form, the Scorpion becomes the always-peaceful dove. The real meaning of Scorpio is thus shown. Scorpio is about metamorphosis. Scorpios transform the painful poisons of possessive passion into a higher consciousness based on universal love."

I've got three animal totems?! Holla! Whatever those are they must be special. Because that makes a shape shifter much like Sam Merlotte from True Blood - from a Scorpion who will kill you to an eagle that flies high to a dove!? I'm a hot commodity.

Scorpios are in the 8th House (Transformation aka Shapeshifting Holla) and are ruled by the planet Pluto. When it comes to food, Scorpios are known to enjoy foods as fiery as their personalities:  foods like Indian, Thai, West Indian, etc.

Well, that just isn't true! I would think to myself.  Is everything I stand for a lie? Am I not the Scorpio I thought I once was?  AND Pluto is not a planet??? 

Who am I?

Little did I know that I just needed to come to my senses. Maybe it's because I cook, maybe because my palatte is more refined, or maybe I just realized that one can't go through life eating dry sandwiches with relish and Lucky Charms marshmallows, as much as I tried. 

But it happened. I love food that is packed with flavor. So when I received my daily (weekly? I can't keep track) email from Saveur Magazine for quick weeknight dinners, I immediately headed off to the supermarket to make this dish. And quick it was.  It takes about 30 minutes to throw together, and luckily, I had all of the spices on hand to make the frangrant, complex Iraqi spice mix that is suggested for the dish (you can use curry powder if you don't have all of the ingredients for the spice mix).

No tricky or complicated methods here. Just simple cooking to create a delicious stew of fall-off-the-bone chicken, tender potatoes, firm chickpeas, and a deliciously flavorful broth.

You don't even need to be a Scorpio to enjoy the dish.  But if you want to fly around the streets with a killer tail, you'll have to have been born between October 23 and November 23. Sorry. 

Spiced Chicken and Chickpea Stew adapted from Saveur

1⁄4 cup canola oil
6 cloves garlic
3 small onions, quartered
4 medium waxy-style potatoes, peeled and quartered
2 bay leaves
2 tbsp. Spice Mixture or curry powder
1 tbsp. ground turmeric
1 tbsp. kosher salt, plus more to taste
4 skinless chicken legs (about 1 lb.)
4 skinless chicken thighs (about 1 lb.)
1  19-oz. can chickpeas, drained
4 pieces khubuz al-tannour (Iraqi flat bread),
   naan, or pita
1 lemon, quartered

1. Heat oil in a 6-qt. pot over medium-high heat. Add garlic, onions, potatoes, bay leaves, spice mixture, turmeric, and salt. Cook, stirring and scraping bottom of pot occasionally, until onions and potatoes are golden, about 10 minutes. Add chicken and 3 1⁄2 cups water; stir to combine. Bring to a boil over high heat, reduce heat to medium, and simmer, uncovered, until chicken is tender and cooked through, 20–25 minutes.

2. Add chickpeas; cook for 5 minutes more. Taste the stew and season with more salt, to taste. Line 4 bowls with torn pieces of the flat bread. Ladle stew over bread. Squeeze a wedge of lemon over each bowl and sprinkle with sumac.

SERVES 4

TWD: Sugar Topped Molasses Spice Cookies with Spiced Cream Filling

You know those commercials with two people sitting around a table, racing to see which one eats the Oreo filling the fastest? That was me.  And I was racing against myself. To eat all of the Oreo filling I could in one sitting.  It was sad.

Once, when I was studying abroad in London, I ate a whole sleeve of Oreos one night.  Needless to say, I was very sick after that. 

Oddly enough, I never liked Double Stuffed Oreos.  There was just too much filling-to-cookie ratio.  Nabisco let me down on that one, but, I am sure, made other filling-lovers very happy. 

Alas, my Oreo eating days are gone and have been replaced by raspberries, blueberries, and grapes.  And I even feel bad about eating grapes because I know they are high in sugar.  And the only races I run now are again, against myself... but this time to beat my time per mile when I am running.  

I hate being healthy. 

But these cookies brought me back to my youth a little bit.  Pamela of Cookies with Boys chose these Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice Cookies and I immediately thought back to my sandwich cookie days.  I made a cream filling and added cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon for a little cookie magic.  I wanted to add orange zest, but I didn't have any on hand, and I was too lazy to walk out of my door and one block down to the supermarket. 

Hey, I'm tired. I just moved. 

Even without the orange, this filling is delicious and fits oh-so-well with the delicious, chewy, molasses spiced cookies.  The range of textures is outstanding:  the crunch of the sugar, the crisp edges of the cookies, the soft-pillowy feeling of the interior of the cookies, and the creamy filling make one dynamic cookie.  

I think Nabisco has some competition.

Click here for the recipe and check out the rest of TWD!

Chocolate Pumpkin Pie

I didn't get to talk much about the desserts I posted in the Halloween Desserts post.  The pumpkin spice cupcakes were fantastic, the lollipops were fun to make (although slightly stressful), the cookies soft, sugary and delicious.  But one dessert really stood out: this chocolate pumpkin pie.

Chocolate and pumpkin are a beautiful marriage, albeit on that can raise eyebrows if people are not familiar with the combination.  

I saw this cake in Martha Stewart's Halloween Issue and doggy-eared it to make. And I actually made it and didn't lost it in a pile of other doggy-eared recipes!  

First thing is first.  I am IN LOVE with this chocolate tart recipe.  Sweet,tender, with hints of spice, it is topped off beautifully with a layer of melted bittersweet chocolate that adds the perfect, unexpected layer of chocolate delight.  The tart is a perfect vessel for the creamy, spicy pumpkin pie, the recipe of which is my favorite recipe to date. I did not use the Martha Stewart Recipe, as I did not have sour cream on hand, so I found a recipe on Joy of Cooking, and yes, it was a joy to cook this. 

Bad joke? OK. Sorry. 

Let me tell you a little secret: I had never even tasted a pumpkin pie until last year, because throughout my childhood pumpkin pie seemed unnatural to me. Pumpkins were for carving on Halloween, not for eating! You all must be mad, I thought! Actually, the whole concept of pie seemed unnatural to me. Why have pie when you can have cake, I thought?  And why have cake when you can have Carvel Ice Cream Cake?  It has crunchies in the middle!

But I digress. I do now love pie (although I still prefer Carvel Ice Cream cake. Seriously. I have no shame). And I do love this pie. It was perfect for Halloween, decorated with a festive chocolate spiderweb (my first successful spiderweb decoration!).  But sans spiderweb, this will make a fabulous Thanksgiving dessert. Unless you have some weird Scary Thanksgiving theme going on.  If so, web away. 

Click here for the pie recipe.  Click here for the tart recipe. 

Moving Day!

Sorry, once again I'm a bad TWDer. I am moving for the second time in three months.  Although Jack and I knew that our current (former) apartment was only a temporary one (we knew we'd be moving again in 3-6 months while we looked for a permanent apartment once we knew what our lives shaped up to be when we got back to NY, ie. where we'd be working and how much we could afford), we didn't know that it would be on the 3 month end of that spectrum rather than the 6 month end. But we found our dream apartment. Gorgeous location on the Upper West Side, stunning prewar building (we love prewar) built in 1901, high ceilings, a big kitchen (Yes! In Manhattan! With an Island!) and a working fireplace. A working fireplace, people! In Manhattan!  Le sigh.

Another thing about moving in Manhattan, and any New Yorker can relate, is that if you find a place on Friday, you're moving the following Tuesday. Turnover is fast, people, even in these tough times.  If you call a broker in Manhattan, your conversation can go a little bit like this:

Broker: When are you moving?

Prospective Tenant: Well, our lease is up in 6 weeks. 

Broker:  Call me in 4 weeks.

That's New York living.  And I did find my apartment on Friday, only to move on Tuesday.

So again, all of my things are packed. My Halloween extravaganza was the last thing I baked before I packed up all of my equipment. Which means that again I cannot complete my assignment. But I vow to make both this week's and last week's desserts this weekend. Until then, look at this cute skull cake I made! It is a Devil's Food Chocolate Cake with Vanilla Buttercream Frosting. I didn't get to taste it because I didn't have the heart to cut into it and I left the party before anyone else had the heart to cut into it either. But I heard that it was gobbled up pretty quickly, so I'm pretty happy.

On another note, isn't this the happiest skull you ever did see?  Not very intimidating. 

Click herehttp://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/moist-devils-food-cake-with-mrs-milmans-chocolate-frosting?comments_page=1 for the Devil's Food Cake Recipe. 

Click herehttp://www.recipezaar.com/Vanilla-Buttercream-Frosting-From-Sprinkles-Cupcakes-222188 for the Vanilla Buttercream Recipe (courtesy of Sprinkles Cupcakes. Although I have never eaten a Sprinkles Cupcake, I use their recipes for frosting as if their frosting is the frosting of the gods who only refer to the King Sprinkles version of the Frosting Bible. Sprinkles 31:24. And so it is said.)

And I really don't know why my hyperlinks have been acting up lately.

Click here to check out the responsible TWDers in their versions of the All in One Holiday Bundt Cake! The holidays are here! Merry Christmas Everyone!