Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt in a separate bowl. Whisking works like sifting; it prevents lumps and incorporates a little air for a lighter product. Set it aside too. Remember not to scoop, then shake the measuring cup when you measure dry ingredients. Lift the flour into the cup with your free hand, then level off the flour with a knife or your finger. If you scoop flour and shake the cup, you will measure more flour than you need and the cookies may be heavier than they should be.

Add both sugars to the butter and mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon. Add the eggs, one at a time, only adding the next egg when the previous one is fully incorporated. Add the yolks one at a time, and incorporate each one fully before adding the next. Add the vanilla extract. Mix well.

Pastry chefs often refer to wet ingredients as “the wets” and dry ingredients as “the dries” for short. Sugar, like here, when added to wet ingredients becomes wet and is often included therefore in the term “wets.”

So now you know the lingo: add the dries (your flour mixture) to the wets (butter mixture) all at once and mix gently until just incorporated. If you are using an electric mixer, add the dries on lowest speed and mix only until just incorporated. Do not over beat or the cookies will be tough. Best bet is to stop mixing in the dries when there is maybe a little flour still to be mixed in so that when you add the chocolate chips, you do not over-mix the dough.

Add the chocolate chips and very gently fold them in with a spatula. Again, do not over mix. At this point, if you want to bake off a cookie or two (or three or four) just take ice cream scoop size balls and gently flatten them into disks on a parchment-paper lined, greased or nonstick cookie pan and bake at 350 degrees F. until golden, about 8 minutes or more. Cool on a rack. The rest we will freeze.

If you have used melted butter instead of softened butter to make your dough, you may have to refrigerate the dough briefly to get it to a consistency for forming logs easily. This is done quickest by spreading the dough on a sheetpan first, then refrigerating it. Check it every fifteen minutes until it is pliable but not sticky and too soft.

Now we will make the logs. Pull out a long length of plastic wrap over your work surface. Alternatively you can use parchment paper if you don’t want to use plastic. Parchment will require some finesse however to get the logs smooth.

Place a dollop of dough onto the plastic wrap, and then another and another.

It will look like this. From this doubled recipe, I always end up with two logs like this so don’t worry if you still have lots of dough left in your bowl.

Pull the near edge of the plastic wrap or parchment over the log until you can wrap up the log completely in the wrap.

The wrapped dollops of dough will look like this.

With both hands on the log, pull the log gently from the center out until it is even and smooth.

That’s it! You can now freeze the log. Repeat the procedure to use up the dough in your bowl. Most likely you will end up with two logs. For the full recipe plus instructions on how to bake it off, click here.

Next Saturday we will make and freeze the dough for One Badass Ginger Molasses Cookies. If you’d like to join me, have these ingredients ready for next week:

3 cups unsalted, sweet butter (1 1/2 pounds, or 6 sticks)
4 cups white sugar
1 cup molasses (for cookies with a more bitter taste, use robust unsulphured blackstrap molasses, for cookies with a lighter taste, use unsulphured light, cooking, or fancy molasses)
4 eggs
8 cups all purpose unbleached white flour
2 T. plus 2 t. baking soda
1 t. salt
4 t. cinnamon
1 1/2 t. ground cloves (this may be increased up to double the amount if you are a clove lover)
4 t. ground ginger
1/4 cup crystallized ginger (available at most supermarkets that carry dried and candied fruit)
Turbinado sugar, or any large crystal sugar for baking

See you then!

see also: How to Freeze Cookie Dough in Logs

canvases that call attention to their physicality with their sheer size and surfaces that are nuanced, painterly, varied, layered, and gloriously worked, surfaces that represent the passage of time, the artist’s hand and his immense ambition.

The placement of a triptych on one curved wall so that it mimicked a feeling of surrounding the viewer was testament to the encompassing feeling Monet wanted to create with these oversize works. He is quoted often as saying that he wanted to communicate to the viewer his experience of nature, to say something about the space between himself and the thing seen.

I was struck by how many viewers stood before the paintings to have their portraits snapped with digital cameras, delighted by the smooth, crisp contours of skin and modern clothing silhouetted against the texture of the painted canvas.

There were also many viewers moving along the canvas’ length holding camera phones up between themselves and the work, the better to capture the surface plasticity up close. The atmosphere was lively with talk and movement, animated by the effect of these large works, and not the hushed, reverence in front of masterpieces that I had anticipated. Something about these objects was not only effective but also affective, animating the space.

I did long to be alone with them, if only to experience them without distraction. Sitting on one of the viewing benches in the room, I spied a young man doing something different than the other visitors. He was crouched before one of the paintings, carefully observing its every detail up close. I suspected at once that he might be a painter too and felt drawn to him with a magnetic pull. I approached him to confirm what I thought I knew of his vocation. Of course I was right.

“I’ve been thinking about Monet’s paintings in terms of his legacy,” I ventured, hoping for some insight from this kindred spirit, if stranger, “I’ve been wondering if his experience of Nature is the point, more than the objects themselves.”

“Well, painting is one thing, and Nature is another,” he replied, “And Monet knew the difference.”

We had a conversation, entirely facilitated by these beautiful objects, and this experience plus his remark made me revise my assumptions on the spot. Perhaps Monet’s legacy is not contained in the room with these individual paintings. Neither is it limited to the impressively large body of his work, writings and grand property, nor his position as a precursor to modern developments. Instead, Monet’s legacy is partly and importantly the confirmation of the relevance and importance of painting itself, as objects, meaning every uniquely identifying feature about them — their weight and size and materials, their wood and fabric and primer, their scumbled, buttery, brushy, dragged, scraped and built up surfaces, and most of all, their power to engage and create dialogue, even between strangers.

Talk about them all you want, but in the end you’ve got to see them — in person. 

waxed paper and filled with cookies.

I don’t have hens, so I don’t need my basket to collect eggs. As an artist, I love the shadows it throws when the sunlight hits it, and I love the contrast between the thin lines of the wire and the broad expanse of my table. I also appreciate, as I do with all vintage things, the passage of time inherent in its aged surface, its connection to other lives I can only imagine.

Here’s an old recipe I found for stuffed eggs. Farce is an old cooking term for the word, stuff.

To Farce Eggs
Take eight or ten eggs and boil them hard. Peel off the shells and cut every egg in the middle; then out the yolks. Make your farcing stuff as you do for flesh, saving only you must put butter into it instead of suet, and that a little. So done, fill your eggs where the yolks were, and then bring them and seethe them a little. And so serve them to the table.”
---The Good Housewife’s Jewel, Thomas Dawson, with an introduction by Maggie Black, London, 1596 (p. 86)

Shared interests create community; I was delighted when a fellow blogger spied my basket in the photographs from my last post, and wrote to me that she has the same one. You can find them online on sites like ebay. Here’s a link to a page with lots of different ones if you’d like one too.

see also: Vintage Canisters in the Modern Kitchen

a few little tips and tricks.

Make it by hand, gently. Overworking cake batter is the main reason why so many cakes are rubbery and heavy. Don’t let the butter get too soft. If it gets too soft and shiny, refrigerate it until it is pliable but not greasy.

When the cakes are still in the pans and warm, not cooled completely nor piping hot, wrap them completely in plastic wrap to let them steam. You can also do this by placing a pot lid on top and wrapping the cake pan in a towel if you’d rather not use plastic. When the cakes are cool, unwrap and frost them.

Here’s my favorite recipe:

Fudgey Chocolate Layer Cake

For the cake:
1 stick sweet unsalted butter, softened, not greasy
2 cups dark brown sugar, packed
3 eggs
2 t. vanilla extract
3 ounces semi-sweet chocolate, melted and cooled slightly (or alternatively 3 ounces unsweetened chocolate and if using unsweetened chocolate, add 1/4 cup more brown sugar to butter)
2 1/4 cups all-purpose unbleached flour
2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
8 ounces sour cream
1 cup boiling water.

For the frosting
24 ounces (or two 12-ounce bags) of semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup heavy cream

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease two 9-inch cake pans. Line them with parchment paper and brush paper with butter again. Flour the pans and set aside.
2. In a large mixing bowl, beat butter and sugar with a wooden spoon until well blended. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition.
3. Add vanilla and then melted chocolate to the batter. Mix gently until combined.
4. Add baking soda and salt to flour and whisk together. Alternate dry ingredients with sour cream, beginning and ending with dries (adding 1/3 dries, then 1/2 sour cream, then 1/3 dries, then the rest of the sour cream, then the last third of the dries.) Combine gently until batter is smooth and all ingredients are incorporated. Lastly, add the boiling water slowly, 1/4 cup at a time, and mix gently between additions until it is all incorporated.
5. Divide batter between pans. Place pans on a sheetpan and place the sheetpan holding the pans on a rack positioned in the center of the oven. Bake for about 25 - 35 minutes, checking the layers half way through the baking time for doneness. When a toothpick inserted in the center of the cakes comes out almost clean, they are done. Do not over-bake. Cool on a wire rack for ten minutes or so until the pans are not burning hot anymore but still warm and wrap the pans in plastic wrap, or cover them each with a pot lid and wrap them in towels until they cool completely.
6. Make the frosting: Place the chocolate chips in a mixing bowl. Scald the cream, then add it to the chips. Whisk gently to combine, then beat to incorporate a little air and make a spreadable frosting. Place one cake layer on a serving platter and frost it. Place the second layer on top. Frost the outside and top of cake. Serve immediately. If you have leftover cake, refrigerate it or freeze it and always let it sit out at room temperature to soften it before serving.

These are my Badass Chocolate Chip Cookies, but the ingredients are doubled so there’s lots of dough to freeze:

4 cups all-purpose flour
1 t. baking soda (you may use half this amount if you like a denser cookie)
1 t. salt
1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) sweet unsalted butter, melted
2 cup white sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 T. vanilla extract
2 egg
2 egg yolk
4 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips (or half white chocolate chips and half dark chocolate chips)

See you next Saturday!

see also: One Badass Cookie - Chocolate Chip Cookies

good bitter candied orange peel for the Hot Cross Buns. She even gave me her recipe for the candied peel, which I will make and post this coming Friday. Having no good spice shop nearby, I went online for English spice. My favorite online source for all things spicy and ethnic, Kalustyan’s, had nothing similar. Next I looked for recipes. No surprise: this search yielded as many variations as there are cooks. So I studied them and made up my own.

I have two electric grinders; one for coffee and one I keep just for spices. Some people prefer a mortar and pestle though I wonder how difficult it might be to grind up some of the spices that really are hard and fibrous like the cinnamon stick. For the spice mix, whole cinnamon stick is preferred over ground, and ditto for whole berries or seeds of cloves, allspice and nutmeg if using. Coriander and cardamom were often listed as optional, but since I love them I included some. In most recipes, the ground versions of ginger or mace seem acceptable. Equal parts of every ingredient are included except for coriander and cardamom which are added to taste. The goal is an aromatic mixture of spices like what one finds in apple or pumpkin pie, but ground together rather than measured separately. The end result was quite beautiful in color and aroma.

Here’s what I came up with if you would like to have some too.

Nancy’s English Spice
Note: you want to grind this up well: it would be very unpleasant to get a hard bit of spice in a bite of pastry.

1 T. whole cloves
1 T. whole coriander
1 one-inch piece of a cinnamon stick
1 T. whole allspice
1 T. ground mace
1 T. coriander seeds
1 T. cardamom pods, broken open and seeds removed, hulls discarded.

Grind all ingredients together until the mixture is powdered and has no solid bits left in it. Store in airtight container.

see also: A Search for Hot Cross Buns

When he died, he left her with little.  She got a job as switchboard operator in Sears.  The third husband was a retired longshoreman, at first they got on well, living in his narrow row house.  But then he was not well and she spent some years taking care of him until he died.  Despite all, way into her seventies she was still pretty, dressed flamboyantly with high heels, baubles and perfume.  She had childlike naivete.  But she also had a capacity for joy and laughter.  The husbands disappointed her.  Her favorite place seemed to be at our house. She often came three times a week and cooked for us, as my mother worked.  She loved to cook.  Did I mention she adored me? 

Well, here is the soup that goes with the china cap.  I am relieved to get it out of my notebook, where it is scrawled messily, into a place where I can share it.  We called it The Red Soup as this is the only name we have for it.  You could say that it was a poor person’s recipe because it’s just boiled vegetables, with a piece of chuck thrown in the pot.  But in my opinion the china cap offered refinement.  When it was all cooked, my grandmother removed the meat and passed the vegetables through the strainer—hard work--to make a smooth pureed consistency.  She served it with egg noodles.  Today, you’d probably use food processor or an immersion blender, rather than the china cap, and be perfectly happy with the results.

Some years ago, when I was in the eighth month of a pregnancy, my mother came over and taught me and my sister how to make the soup.  It is a bit of a long ordeal and quite messy.  When she left that day, my mother left the china cap behind to my care.  And now you know why I treasure it. 

The Red Soup

Like many family recipes, this one is imprecise, egocentric, and requires judgment.  I have written it as I witnessed it.  Someday I will codify and measure it.  But I kind of like it as it is.  Warning:  It’s a big mess.  But at least you get two dinners out of it.

2 bags soup greens (parsnips, fresh parsley, carrots, and maybe a leek) chopped into chunks, no bigger than two-inches
3 large onions, chopped
2 or 3 potatoes peeled and cut into chunks
2 large cans of crushed tomatoes
4 or 5 “nice” carrots, peeled and cut in half lengthwise to differentiate from others as these will go to the table
3 “nice” potatoes, peeled and quartered lengthwise, also differentiated from the others as these too will go to the table
4 lb piece of meat, that is a little fatty to withstand boiling, e.g. chuck or rump roast
1 1lb bag of egg noodles
salt and pepper to taste

Quantity:  Two dinners for a family of five. 

1.  Put your soup greens, onions, chunks of potatoe, and cans of tomatoes into a large stock pot.  Fill up the rest of the pot with water, but leave enough room to fit your meat and nice vegetables later.

2.  Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat to a low bubble and let cook for an hour. 

3.  Add your “nice” carrots and potatoes, and then the meat.

4.  Remove your “nice” vegetables when they are done. 

5.  Continue to cook the soup until the meat is done.  (Use a meat thermometer if you are not sure.) Remove meat from the soup. You may wish to trim away some of the fat.

6.  Put on another pot of water to boil your egg noodles. 

7.  Pour all the ingredients remaining in the stock pot through the china cap or other strainer of your choice.  Use the pestle (pressing and rotating) to press the softened vegetable out through the holes into a puree, and scrape down as necessary with a spatula.  Or, put the remaning vegetables into a food processor in batches, with some of the soup and puree to achieve an almost creamy consistency.

8.  Put the soup back in the pot and keep hot, while you boil your egg noodles in the other pot. 

9.  Serve soup in bowls with noodles.  Put meat on a platter in the middle of the table, surrounded by any extra noodles, and the nice potatoes and carrots.  Slice and serve with the option of mustard for the meat. 

silicone pastry brush, for instance, that never loses a stay brush hair in my pastry crust, and washes squeaky clean after each use. You might have noticed it in the photographs I took in my posts demonstrating how to make chocolate croissant without devoting an entire day.

Laura and I also have a mutual preference for pairing sleek modern design with old things for a cool, eclectic look in our homes. If you’d like to try a brush like this, you can purchase one like it here.

With its rich hue and sleek lines, this new brush has great style, and complements my vintage red-handled food mill, a find from a friend’s yard sale. Her 111-year-old Dad, who passed away last year, once owned it — can’t help but make you wonder what futuristic tool will complement them both 100 years from now.

see also: How To Make Chocolate Croissants Without Taking An Entire Day

“What is it you really want when you want those old things?” It took me a while. Then I thought. The time my Grandma Selma mixed up her canister of scouring powder with the one containing baking soda and served us all mandlebrot cookies that tasted like soap. The way the canisters seemed to float on the counter in the afternoon sun, casting saucer-like shadows as my grandmothers baked, a delicate apron bow tied at their waists. I painted them once, and now that painting is our logo for Antique Recipe Roadshow.

I don’t want to be back in the 1940’s. I know that life wasn’t better, or simpler, or more meaningful then.

What I really want when I want those old things, I realized, is my grandmothers back, alive again. I can’t have that of course. But I can run my fingers over the dents in my vintage ones where maybe someone’s fingers from back then also lingered. These days, my Rubbermaid containers do a better job of keeping my flour air-tight and fresh, but I organize my kitchen counters with an old canister that Laura bought me for my birthday one year, pictured above, by keeping unsightly junk drawer cords and coins in it.

If you’d like a cool old canister to keep your cell phone charger in too, here’s a link to an ebay page where they have some really great ones.

see also: To paint a canister

when I mentioned it to Laura, she said, “Can you believe I have that book too?” One day I found it by serendipity on a shelf at a local bookstore, and was lost in its pages within minutes. If you love poetry, it’s a great gift, and an engaging tea or coffee break companion. So far, every poetry lover I have shown it to has been touched by it and moved to order one of their own. Here are a few lines for you from “The New Wife” by a Chinese poet of the ancient world, Wang Chien (768 - 830)

On the third day she went down to the kitchen,
Washed her hands, prepared the broth.
Still unaware of her new mother’s likings,
She asks his sister to taste.

Translated from the Chinese by J.P. Seaton

“One of the great writers of the twentieth century and one of its great witnesses thought, in the ninth decade of his life, that he ought somehow to make a philosophical reckoning with the world and an aesthetic summing up — a book perhaps, of sober prose at the end of this violent century; instead he decided to gather together poems, to give the world a book of luminous things.”
Robert Hass quoted on the back cover of A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry by Czeslaw Milosz

that piqued my curiosity, so I went spelunking on the internet as I usually do when on the hunt for a certain food or its uses. I found them easily at Whole Foods, so maybe you can too.

I also found to my delight that our gardening zone in the Northeast supports the plants which gardeners report are easy to grow and have enormous yields. I have a teeny garden in my back yard, and Laura has one in her front yard, as some of our readers know from her previous posts. I’m looking forward to ordering some plants here when they ship this spring.

Incidentally the name Jerusalem artichokes may have nothing to do with the city of Jerusalem and more to do with the corruption of the word “girasole” which means “turning to the sun” in Italian. Apparently the small tubers, part of the Sunflower family of plants are also called sunchokes or sun roots in some cultures and have a history reaching back to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, possibly having been cultivated first by Native Americans.

If you’re lucky enough to find them near you, here’s a simple recipe.

see also: Tomatoes at my Front Door