Let's try some Cookies!

Before we start with cooking anything, I need to emphasize the key to this whole enterprise and that is…preparation.  If you are planning southwestern style diced potatoes for breakfast, dice the potatoes and ingredients and then mix it all together the night before.  Put your meat out to thaw, get your sourdough starter warmed up, make your salad.  Anything that can be prepared to a point and then finished later should be.  

When I was a kid, we didn’t live next door to a grocery store so if there were things we had to buy; we did so in bulk, often once a month (or even longer).  Neither my Grandmother nor my mother went to the store for meals every day as I see people do today.  They had pantries where weeks or months of supplies were stored.  Grandmother had a “root cellar” where many things were kept.  I remember being sent to the root cellar to get canned (canned at home, of course) goods, potatoes, onions or garlic.  By the time of my memories we had a refrigerator so I don’t have any firsthand experience of how she kept things before that. 

If you plan to bake things for yourself, then plan certain days when that will be done.  My Grandmother had to provide lunches for my Grandfather and a couple of my uncles back in the logging days so she had to have food ready.  She baked bread on Wednesday.  She made enough loaves to go through the week.  Cookies were on Thursday.  Pies and cakes were made the day she planned to serve them.  She had her menu for the week planned out in advance and had all the ingredients for those meals prepared sometimes a couple of days before the meal was cooked.  

I remember that she would boil a pot of potatoes and store them in the refrigerator for later use.  Sometimes they were diced for frying, sometimes made into mashed or potato pancakes or whatever.  The point being, she was prepared in advance.

Ok, now that we’ve got our tools and we’re prepared to productively use part of our day, it’s time to cook something. Let’s start with something easy.  How about Chocolate chip cookies? 

My Great-grandmother’s house always smelled of cookies.  She always had chocolate chip or oatmeal cookies in a cookie jar in the kitchen so when any of us kids would take the time to visit her, it was a rewarding experience.  Maybe she did that just so we would visit more often?  

I remember small grocery stores in our area that had their own bakery and the whole store smelled so great because of it.  That bakery smell would hit me as I walked in the door and those freshly baked cookies were fabulous.  It doesn’t seem as if I find those kinds of places any more.  If you want cookies in the store you buy the prepackaged ones. 

When you walk down the cookie aisle, you’ll see many different brands of chocolate chip cookies; crisp, soft, big, little, bags of miniatures, packages of two together…on and on.  Most of these I like ok.  I mean, is there such a thing as a “bad” chocolate chip cookie? 

But the ones my Mom made were always the best.  I like them about 2” in diameter and fairly crispy but not crunchy.  I don’t want to have to dunk a cookie in coffee to be able to chew it. 

The recipe I normally use is the one on the back of the Nestle’s chocolate chip bag.

 

Ingredients:

·                                 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

·                                 1 teaspoon baking soda

·                                 1 teaspoon salt

·                                 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened

·                                 3/4 cup granulated sugar

·                                 3/4 cup packed brown sugar

·                                 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

·                                 2 large eggs

·                                 2 cups (12-oz. pkg.) chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375° F.

Combine flour, baking soda and salt in small bowl. Beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla extract in large mixer bowl until creamy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in morsels and nuts. Drop by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets.

Bake for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.

Pan Cookie Variation Preheat oven to 350° F. Grease 15 x 10-inch jelly-roll pan. Prepare dough as above. Spread into prepared pan. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown. Cool in pan on wire rack. Makes 4 dozen bars.

For High Altitude (over 5200ft) Increase flour to 2 1/2 cups. Add 2 teaspoons water with flour and reduce both granulated sugar and brown sugar to 2/3 cup each. Bake drop cookies for 8 to 10 minutes and pan cookie for 17 to 19 minutes.

Here’s where you can start making this your own.  Semi-sweet, milk chocolate, butterscotch, cinnamon or whatever chips. M&Ms maybe?  Reeses pieces?  Add chopped walnuts if you want.  How about adding some toffee chips?  How about all of the above?  Remember, though, if you are putting in a couple of different kinds of chips, split it up so you put in about 2 cups of chips total.  To that you can still add a cup of walnuts and not dry out your dough. 

Be aware of what they look like when they are done the way you want them so you can make them the same way next time.  I like mine a little golden brown and crispy.  Light tan is a little softer and more chewy.  You can deliberately make them a little thinner and more crispy by adding a half stick more butter to the recipe. For light and cakey cookies use 1 ¾ sticks of butter.  That’s another positive about doing this yourself.  It’s ok to experiment!   

If you are making cookies for a varied group, you might want to either skip putting in nuts or at least ask the group if anyone has nut allergies. 

At a Roundup camp in Nevada one time, the dough in my first batch of cookies turned out really thin.  Just a film of cookie with lumps of chocolate chips in it.  I called it cookie leather.  It still tasted good but the cookies were super thin and crunchy.  As I was watching the first batch in the oven and seeing this happening, I realized my problem and fixed the rest of the dough.   

The cookhouse was at a higher elevation than even my home in Montana so my 4000ft elevation recipe didn’t have enough flour in it for my almost 6000ft location.  I added a half cup of flour and some water so the rest of the cookies came out the way I wanted.  We ate all of them anyway!

This is where a thin metal spatula is nice as it will easily slide under the hot cookies so you can take them off the pan.  If you’re kind of folding the cookies up because the spatula is sticking, just spray the spatula with a little pan oil each time.   

I like to lay the cookies out on waxed paper or even a clean counter until they cool and get a little more solid, then I can stack them on a plate or in a container and they keep their shape. 

Try it.  Make your own cookies.  It’s really easy, takes very little time out of your day and you not only have better cookies, the way you and your family like them, but the people you are cooking for think you’re a hero.   

Maybe the grandkids will visit more often, too.

Winter musings

Interesting winter this year. 

First, those who don't live here in the Great White North may not be aware that we consider winter as being from November to at least March.  Autumn is usually long gone by a snowy and cold Thanksgiving and spring is just a dream until mid-march; sometimes later. 

This also depends on where you live in Montana.  If you are in West Yellowstone or Wisdom you can pretty much add a month on each end.

Anyway, our winter started out kind of warm.  I was only lighting a fire in the evenings all through November as it was too warm during the day to bother.  Once December got here, though, the Gods looked around and said: Oh!  Winter!  Sorry, we forgot." and took away all the heat from the sun.  Here in Townsend on December 17 we were at 26 below zero.  That's not wind chill, folks. That's the temp before wind chill.  West Yellowstone was the official cold spot in the nation, a distinction they "win" many times each winter, at minus 43.  The unofficial (I don't know who the officials are) cold spot was near Butte, MT at a place called Elk Park...48 below...

Then, we got some decent temps with a little more snow and it was starting to look as if things were going to be ok for a while.  Sorry.  The Gods were watching again.  Single digit and sub-zero temps for almost a week.  The worst I saw here was -16 but, again, West Yellowstone got into the -30s and won at least one more cold spot designation.

This wouldn't be so bad but I live in a rusty old trailer house and my water lines run inside the furnace ducting so when it gets really cold I let the wood stove go out and allow my furnace to run.  So, I lie in bed listening to the nickels blowing around in my house!  The happiest people in Montana this time of year are those at Northwestern Energy!

Growing up in West Yellowstone made me kind of blasé about cold temperatures but now I think back on the ice and frost climbing up the INSIDE of our door and going a month or more with subzero temps.  I remember the bus drivers standing around in the motel parking lots with little fires under the oil pans of the busses so the oil would thaw enough to start the bus.  I think about these things and then wonder what our heating bills must have been back then.  When you're a kid, you don't think about that kind of thing but I sure notice the heat bills now!

Well, the temps are climbing a little today.  We're already up to 10 above and I'm going to get the woodstove fired up, at least for the day.  If we can stay above zero, I'll let the furnace rest for a while.