Extravagant Chocolate Chip Cookies

I should be writing right now. Or at least, you know, writing about writing. Instead, I'm going to write about the batch of chocolate chip cookies that I just put in the oven, basically because I want to. And maybe I'll bring in a writing tie-in later.

I've always loved cooking. I remember back when I was four years old helping my older sister (pregnant at the time) make cookies, which I think may have gone into care packages for soldiers in Vietnam. Later, I graduated to making cookies on my own: chocolate chip cookies without chocolate chips (I had a food sensitivity to chocolate at that time), with which I experimented in various ways: adding an extra egg and a little bit of sage for flavoring, mostly, from what I remember. I never told anyone else that I'd added the sage, and couldn't actually tell any change in the flavor myself, but my mother's told me since that she was quite aware of it. I remain skeptical. (Skepticism about parental knowledge remains a filial prerogative well into maturity.)

I've since gotten over my sensitivity to chocolate (thank goodness), but not over my love of cooking. Indeed, cooking is, of all my creative endeavors, possibly the one I find most simply and uncomplicatedly satisfying. Back when we were dating, my wife and I used to cook together (she also enjoys cooking). In the early days of our marriage, we had to adjust to the notion that even if we weren't up to doing something fancy, one of us had to cook something. There were times when it was well after 10:00 p.m. before one of us would actually bite the bullet and decide on something we would both eat.

Nowadays, cooking — especially for the kids — is more often utilitarian. But I still enjoy making special treats, especially when I'm just done with or taking a break from my writing. This past weekend, it was a batch of particularly extravagant chocolate chip cookie dough.

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My favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe (taken from James Beard's American Cookery and claimed by him to be the original Toll House recipe, though it's different from what I see on the back of Nestle chocolate chip packages) goes like this:

Ingredients

3/4 cup butter
3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed firmly enough to hold its shape after it is released from the measuring cup
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 tablespoons milk
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
12 ounces chocolate chips (semisweet)
1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Directions

Cream the butter and sugars together until they are smooth.
Add the egg, vanilla, and milk, and again beat until smooth and consistent.
Add the flour, baking powder, and salt. Stir thoroughly. (The original recipe suggests sifting the flour and mixing with the baking powder and salt before adding to the sugar-egg-etc. mixture. I never bother.)
Stir in the chocolate chips and nuts.
Drop onto greased cookie sheet, 1 inch apart.
Cook in 375-degree oven until cooked, about 8 to 12 minutes. The lighter the better, so long as the dough is not actually still raw. (Note: The dough will still be very soft when you take it out of the oven. It gets much firmer as it cools.)

This yields a soft, rich, cakey cookie that I very much like. It yields either 4 or 5 dozen medium-sized cookies — I can't remember which.

Anyway. A couple of weeks ago, I varied this by substituting some chopped up bulk Amano chocolate (Amano is a business in Orem, Utah, that makes some of the best dark chocolate in the world — really! They've won several international awards) and pecans instead of walnuts. I used less of both than what the recipe calls for: about 6 ounces of chocolate, by my estimate, and 4 ounces of nuts. It worked out really, really well: much (far too much) loved by me, and by my wife, and by my 10-year-old son (though not my 15-year-old daughter, who doesn't care for nuts). It worked so well that I did it again this past weekend, and just popped a dozen into the oven to greet my wife when she gets back from her visit to the dentist.

It is a truly extravant recipe. Based on my rough calculations, the chocolate alone comes to $7.50 per batch. The pecans (based on a price of $10 per pound; they're expensive right now) add another $2.50. I figure the other ingredients are about another dollar's worth. So $11 for a batch of cookie dough — though it doesn't sound quite so bad when you divide it by 48 cookies, giving a price of 23 cents a cookie.

Somewhere, cooks are weeping at the thought that I'm using Amano chocolate for chocolate chip cookies. To which I shrug my shoulders — though I don't plan to do this terribly often. If nothing else, we need to keep the Amano for snacking during the day. (My wife and I figure that intense dark chocolate is better for snacking than other kinds of chocolate, because you eat so much less of it. Of course, turning it into cookies kind of does away with that advantage…)

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And now for the promised literary tie-in. Except that now that I'm here, I'm no longer sure what I was planning to say. Oh, well. I suppose I can always wing it.

Part of the moral of the story is simply this: As a writer, I find that I need a non-writing hobby. Something more tangible, something yielding shorter-term benefits and praise, something where there's less at risk. The fact that I can eat the results is simply another benefit (and downside, considering the condition of my waist).

If I wanted a life of happy and risk-free creativity, I'd probably be better advised to stick with cooking. Indeed, I tried that for many years. The fact that I wound up writing a novel anyway is, I suppose, conclusive proof that I really am a writer at heart. (I postulate that someone for whom cooking was more than a hobby would find it stressful and risky too. By this way of thinking, the fact that I don't have very much of my ego wrapped up in cooking shows that I don't have it in me to be a professional cook.)

One of the things I've learned about cooking is that it's important to go with the flow. The food speaks to you, telling you what it wants. Recipes, I find, are generally no more than inspirations and starting-places (though it's useful to have the right proportions in front of you for getting baked goods to rise properly). You don't really start to cook until you've started to tinker. Adding ingredients, substituting ingredients, cooking something that has no base recipe at all — these are the essence of cooking creativity.

Experimentation is a necessary component of cooking. You can't be too afraid of failure if you're going to develop your cooking skills. One of my early cooking memories is of a casserole I attempted when I was about 10 years old. It included potatoes, apples, green olives, grapes, and much, much more. It was horrible. More recent attempts have included their share of failures as well, such as the infamous pickle soup of a few years back (based on a recipe from Julia Child) and my periodic attempts to find a good way to cook parsnips. For that matter, my wife took about a year of practice before she mastered the deceptively simple cooking of a Yorkshire pudding.

Practice is essential. Watching my children in the kitchen, I'm amazed at how awkward they are at doing things like stirring and chopping ingredients and turning things that are sauteeing in a pan. But then, I reflect on all the practice I've had with that — experience they haven't had. Sooner or later, it occurs to me, I'm going to have to back off and let them (make them) try these things on their own if they're ever going to become decent cooks.

My last lesson from cooking (for this blog entry) is simply that tastes differ. There are things I like that certain other people will not like, no matter how well I dress them up — and vice versa. I will never like cilantro. I will never like acorn squash. I will never like horehound candy, worlds without end. And even though I've had great success in charming people who thought they hated mushrooms with my homemade cream of mushroom soup, some people will never like it, despite my best efforts.

This is important because it says there's no right way to cook. There are useful techniques you can use, ideas you can pick up, but there's no universal pattern that each good cook must follow. Instead, you cook for the people who are at your table. If (like my children) they prefer boxed macaroni and cheese to homemade macaroni and cheese, you hold your nose and fix that. (And then you make some of the good stuff for yourself.) No cooking advice is going to help you if it's geared toward people with different tastes or geared toward something that's not what you're actually trying to cook.

Anyway. The cookies have been out of the oven for several minutes, my wife just walked in the door (though it will be awhile before she can have any, since she got a fluoride treatment at the dentist's), and I should be getting a call anytime now about one of my current writing projects. So it's time for me to get back to my writing and let you get back to yours, or whatever else you do to pay the bills and give scope to your creative juices. Bon appetit!