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.
