Giorgio stewmari

When I take cookies out of the oven I put the pan down to free my left hand to move the cookies off the spatula (in my right hand) and on to the cooling racks.  I have tried to use just one hand to accomplish this, agitating the spatula in various ways to coax the cookie to slide off, except the hot, moist underside sticks more often than not - I concluded, it could not be done with one hand effectively.  But recently I figured out, that if I keep the leading edge of the cookie hanging off the spatula, I can leverage it off the spatula and on to the rack.  I have to be careful not to move the spatula too fast because the cookies are in even more danger than usual of falling off.  Nonetheless, this a major innovation.  Tonight, I made cookies with shredded coconut, cocoa nibs, cornmeal and finely chopped chocolate - they needed something, more salt, more chocolate, I’m not sure.

The cookie container is full.  Of peanut butter cookies, knock-off chocolate fire cookies and “Stewart pie strips.”  A lot of things came together:  I went to a Passover seder on Tuesday, at which I made almond-coconut macaroons, which are all egg white and so I had six yolks in a jar in the fridge.  Also, I’m going to New York this weekend and hoping to try, at long last, Four & Twenty Blackbirds in Gowanus, my old neighborhood.  I was talking to a friend about it, and we saw on the website, Black Bottom Lemon pie - lemon curd, chocolate, impossibly decadent.  We were also talking about making matzo and mozza(rella) flatbread pizzas but we didn’t plan anything and there we were with all those egg yolks.  My roommate introduced me to lemon curd a while ago, which I wanted to make immediately (because I love lemon anything) until I learned how eggy it is. So tonight, we bought lemons and went to work, we thought on a Black Bottom Lemon pie.  Six yolks weren’t even enough and soon I was left with two more egg whites.  And we made the chocolate ganache but at the prospect of pre-baking the crust, waiting for it all to cool overnight, etc., etc., we just decided to go for the chips and dip approach.  Per my friend’s instructions, I cut the dough into “isosceles triangles” and we baked them into chips.  While we were waiting, I made a full batch of peanut butter cookie dough to use the extra whites.  The strips came out, we put the ganache and lemon curd out and went to town.  We watched The Cosby Show while the peanut butter cookies went in and out of the oven.  Earlier in the evening, I had made a kind of fast and dirty version of the chocolate fire cookies and had a bag leftover.  The extra curd and ganache got jarred and put in the fridge and everything else went into the enamel pot on the counter.  I didn’t eat any real meals today, just cookies.

I made vegan, gluten-free coconut chocolate chip cookies (ack, not quite vegan, I forgot there is milk fat in those Ghirardelli 60% chocolate chips, damn).  Anyway, I wanted to make chocolate chip cookies; I’ve been eating Petit Écolier with my roommate, and once you’ve had one of those you can never get enough chocolate in a cookie.  I am out of butter and used coconut oil in its place; I figured I might as well run with the vegan thing and mixed 1 tablespoon flax seed meal with 3 tablespoons water, let sit for a few minutes, and added it to replace the egg.  And I thought I’d bring out the coconut flavor, so added shredded coconut.  Plus vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves - no reason.  I don’t typically like crunchy (as opposed to cakey) cookies but I realized at Providence Provision in February that with a big group like that, variety in textures, as well as flavors, is a necessity.  Without the spring of gluten, Arrowhead Mills brown rice flour, which has a cornmealy grit to it (as opposed to Bob’s Red Mill brown rice flour, which is smooth like wheat flour), yields an almost Tate’s-like crunch.†  I made a classic half batch of walnut cranberry chocolate chip last Friday and they seemed too doughy, I didn’t like them.  As of this writing, one hour out of the oven, I’ve eaten 6 of the crunchy cookies.  Maybe, my taste has changed.

† I had to buy Trader Joe’s “Highbrow Chocolate Chip Cookies” because I just knew those boxes were repackaged Tate’s, and indeed they were.  If taste and look weren’t enough, water in the ingredient lists proves it.  Maybe the water with the flax seed meal adds crunch too, hm.

I was making these sesame peanut butter cookies that are really fussy: I refrigerated the dough for four hours, formed each cookie into a ball, flattened them with a fork, and then sprinkled their tops with sesame seeds and coarse sea salt.  It took a long time and it was late and I was getting frustrated.  I do not usually use a fork to flatten peanut butter cookies, even though it is the tradition, because my doughs are too soft, but I could do it with the refrigerated dough if I worked quickly (I kept the dough in the fridge between sheets); this frustrated me too, to be hewing to convention without any good reason, just because I could.  That said, the thought process behind my cookie-making is often associative; I was making the peanut butter cookies because:

1. I bought all the ingredients for Providence Provision last week, just in case the three kinds of cookies Stewart and I planned to make weren’t enough or something went wrong.  They were and nothing did.
2. I used 2 egg yolks to try to make Cress Spring chocolate fire cookies in the studio yesterday and I often use only whites in peanut butter cookies to make them less crumbly.
3. After my glasses broke, my friend’s brother sent me his old frames and I wanted to send him cookies in return.

And because everything else was just-so, I felt I had to let the trays cool between batches, another annoyance.  While I was waiting, I started working on a second dough because tomorrow I am going to a memorial service for the mother of a friend whose family is vegan.  For this I was making banana walnut chocolate chunk cookies.  I hurried through the ingredients and was chopping the walnuts when I found an almond!  It made me pause and smile.  This must be a fairly common thing to happen at the nut sorting plant but I can’t remember seeing it before; it felt like a good sign, a spirit touching down, leaving an almond-shaped footprint on the walnut ground.  And it made me think that I love making cookies.

Today, a visiting artist was teaching class in the studio so I asked if she had any allergies. No, she told me, I can eat anything.  So I made everything cookies.  I brought some to give to Aki Sasamoto who was also at Harvard today.  These are everything cookies, I explained, I hope you’re not allergic to anything.  Just cats.  Are there cats in them?  The complete ingredients:

coconut oil

butter

sugar

molasses

extra-large egg

homemade green apple sauce

almond butter

vanilla extract

coconut flakes

sesame seeds

sunflower seeds

golden flax seeds

currants

white flour

whole wheat flour (I should have used brown rice)

baking soda

cats

semisweet chocolate chips

apricots

My professor is in Chicago today so I was teaching class alone and I thought it would be nice to make my students cookies. I thought, straight forward chocolate chip cookies would be a crowd pleaser BUT I don’t like the chips we have (Ghirardelli semisweet, I prefer the 60%ers, but the semis are dairy-free, more inclusive). AND I’ve been wanting to try a recipe without leaveners (no baking soda) because I’m having cookies made in Lahore, Pakistan, and I’m not sure what’s available there (long story) SO it can’t be too weird or the variables will overwhelm the experiment. Oatmeal raisin, I thought, next best thing after chocolate chip and I’ll put in walnuts, no, pecans. I went to the fridge for butter and saw that we are down to our last stick, this is in the sculpture studio, and I don’t want students to feel like they can’t make cookies on their own because we only have weird ingredients (same reason we have those semi-good chips). Instead, I decided to use Earth Balance, and if they were ALMOST vegan anyway, I’d just as soon use the apple sauce I made last week instead of egg. OK, Earth Balance, sugar, molasses, homemade green apple sauce, vanilla, cinnamon, flour, NO baking soda, oats, raisins and pecans, they couldn’t be more straight forward. My students ate them all.

Stewart gets back in less than a week, then the real experimentation begins.

Stewart and I were feeling low today, Providence’s been hollowed out by this snow storm; we walked a friend to the train station and walked back to the apartment and it wore us out, the sidewalks are unplowed and my socks got wet from the holes in my boot heels.  I napped and we baked bread and made plantains and finally resolved to bike, despite the slush, to the supermarket for butter and eggs and ginger (Stewart’s idea) to make cookies.  Cookies would cheer us up.  But my back tire was flat and it was too late to walk and La Perla market down the street only had margarine and eggs in Styrofoam cartons.  Defeated, we returned home, but seeing our upstairs neighbor’s light on, we decided to knock on her door to beg her help.  She gave us a stick of butter and an egg and a wizened ginger nubbin.  But first, she invited us in and listened to our troubles.  It is getting near the end of the lease and Stewart especially is sad to say goodbye to this place.  It has been a good clubhouse, at its best when it is full of people and we are baking.  I need to make a change too but I am not sure I have the wherewithal.  It helped to be above ground for an hour in a well-lighted place.  We returned to the basement, Stewart diced the ginger and we threw it into a half batch with oats and semisweet chocolate chips (Stewart’s idea).  They puffed up, maybe because I worked the dough so much, to “release” the flavor of the ginger (a trick I boosted from the cornmeal lime recipe).  There wasn’t much ginger so the flavor was subtle and Stewart remarked that the smooth look of the cookies did not give away that there were unusual flavors inside.  We are tired now, Stewart is washing the dishes, I may watch a “indie drama” that Netflix describes as “romantic, understated, feel-good,” that’s what I need.

UPDATE: The Exploding Girl is a horrible movie (no offense Zoe).  We left a bag of cookies outside our neighbor’s door.