Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies

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I can’t wait for another Cookie Swap.

It’s when bakers carefully nestle their sugar melts, gingersnaps, lemon iced, molasses, oatmeal, snicker-doodles, bars, balls and sandwich type cookies in scrubbed up tupperware containers lined with fresh waxed paper.

Everyone clusters together until a pre ordained starting time before circling the table and selecting an assortment of cookies to take home.

A swap is never described out loud as a competition. For starters that kind of thing would put off all but the boldest. The classic swap, like-minded people agree,  is an efficient way to wind up with an impressive array of cookies to easily pass off as their own to family and friends.

That said, seeing any of your cookies left-over at the end of one or two circles is much like seeing a dog at a pound waiting hopefully for its family.  

Use this recipe: Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies – Cooks Illustrated the next time but tuck away some because every one of them will be gone.  As far as the non competitive part, I say, leave ’em in your flour dust.

Second Day of Spring

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At the front door today, the buzz is not UNI defeating KU last night as you might expect, but rather the hisses and sighs of having to dig out of the snow when almost ready for the ball called spring.  March is roaaring in the neighborhood.

Useful, Maybe

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A cat threw up on a stack of new magazines sitting on the piano. Annoying.

I like my magazines to be unwrinkled and clean and after I read them I like to pass them on. I can’t do that with these — so I cleaned them up best I could, let them dry and read them quickly. Here’s stuff worth passing on. 

Good ideas: Spray snow shovel with non stick cooking spray so snow will slide off.  Light candles with raw spaghetti. Hang Christmas lights on a tree vertically instead horizontally of round and round.  Put a just washed/rinsed cashmere sweater in a salad spinner to get out excess water. (Yeah, make that thing work harder for taking up so much space just for drying lettuce!)

In the wonder if it works category: Put a dryer sheet in the bottom of a tough-to-clean pan, fill with warm water and soak overnight. Then clean it some time on the second day.

Just plain silly: Buy a brightly colored wallet so that you can find it quickly in your purse.

Sunday

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Some days just hold more promise than others. Today is one of them.

I have so many choices: go to a movie, rake leaves, play Free Rice, read Billy Collins, enter a contest, order something online, sort through my desk, get a bag ready for Goodwill, try out a recipe, read the fiction in the New Yorker, do the Sunday cross word puzzle, take photos, re-arrange the mantel, download music, go to the health club, wash the car and — I’ll start with Billy Collins.

Vade Mecum

I want the scissors to be sharp

and the table to be perfectly level

when you cut me out of my life

and paste me in that book you always carry.

I looked up vade mecum. It means handbook or manual small enough to be carried along where ever. And vade is pronounced, vadee, it’s latin meaning “go with me.” I took three years of Latin in high school, had it started, “All of Gaul is divided into three parts,” I would have nailed it.

Free Rice

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I like to while away a few hours on the computer every once and awhile. My go-to game used to be Spider Solitaire. But I have not progressed in expertise with any kind of vigor. In fact, I’m stuck in intermediate land with a 20% win ratio. 

Pretty bad, I know. My average took a huge dip when unbeknownst to me, I was playing in the advanced level and lost every game for a straight 6 weeks. (Now, there is a humbling experience.)

I tried Farmville, but after having to babysit three plots of strawberries with no harvest in sight, I moved back to the city.

There is always FreeRice, the site where idle time can sharpen your wits and benefit others.  Definitely worth it.

Soup’s On

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The eve of St. Patrick’s Day is a great time to troll for recipes fit for friends.  What else do you do after the parade but eat and drink like it’s the last supper? Well, not the Last Supper just a last supper.

Here’s a tasty and easy potato soup.

It starts with deliberately curdling milk. Curdled milk in most lexicons means rotten, “Do not drink.” ” Sure why not,” the Irish say as they add lemon to the milk. As the milk keeps itself busy on the counter, do the prep work: peel and chop potatoes, onions, and mince a couple of cloves of garlic.

Cook the potatoes in vegetable broth and saute the onions and garlic in butter. Puree the potatoes in the pan. Add the milk, and parmesan cheese and sour cream to ramp up the flavor factor.  Salt, pepper and green onions on top and it is ready to slurp Up.

Here’s a link to the recipe and credit to the Cook, who isn’t Irish at all: Party like you’re Irish, even if you’re not – KansasCity.com.

My tips: Set aside some of the cooked potatoes before you puree for a little less bisque and more chunk and salt to taste rather than putting in two tsp of salt in one swish.

When Salubrious Met Lugubrious At Weight Watchers

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After sign-in, weigh-in, check-in, they herded in a semi-circle to share. “Stop the palaver,” she shouted in her head. Then slumped on her fold-up chair seeing her salubrious future with a round lugubrious face. As the group droned, she imagined the taste of a red velvet cake.

I Invented The Rice Cake.

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Watching the food network has lulled me into thinking that great cooks can simply toss things into a mix and with a pinch of this and that turn out a company dish. So I figured I could make a chicken and black bean burrito without consulting a cookbook, for crying out loud.

I had already cooked the chicken and I was using black beans from a can. I decided to add brown rice to add another nuance. I only needed one serving; the box told me 1/2 cup both water and rice in a bowl, microwave for 7 minutes.

I added chopped tomatoes and green onions to the black beans and chicken and I threw in some cumin. By that time, the microwave had signaled that the rice was ready.

Oh, yeah — it was. I had invented the rice cake. Not an atom of water remained, the rice lifted from the bottom of the bowl in one piece. I thought to myself, what would Julia do? Cook rice on the stove, probably.

I crumbled the rice cake into the main mixture. I figured the taste would be the delicious crunchy/soft sensation you get when you wrap a hard shell taco with a soft shell tortilla.  (Visit Taco Bell, if you don’t know what I mean.) A little cheese and everything was wrapped up tight in a whole wheat tortilla for one last microwave jolt.

I won’t make those again. The rice tasted raw, hard and tasteless. The onions really needed to toned down with a little pre saute. And the cumin was frankly worthless. Sig said he was full after the first one.

Good Ju Ju

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Around here the first weekends of the month are when the flea markets open up. Good Ju Ju is down off 12th street in the KC bottoms,  where cattle used to come on their way to dinner, so to speak. What’s left in the area are a couple of good restaurants, warehouses, and Kemper Arena, home of the American Royal — a big deal horse and livestock show.

A number of the warehouses come alive around Halloween with names such as Chamber of Horrors and Macabre House. But once a month the perennially crafty recyclers who run Good Ju Ju pull some of their best stuff outside, pouf out their vintage aprons and turn on the music.

Today I bought square orange bake-lite clip earrings and a paper mache reindeer bucket annnd a tall metal lifeguard chair. I drug the chair out to the back yard close enough to the bird bath where it can welcome the opening of the pool season. I noticed a couple of upcoming trends: paint old furniture bright primary colors, rub them while wet so that the a little bit of the finish shows through and drape lamp shade skeletons with net petticoats.  Doncha just love commerce?