Chocolate chip cookies from Baking for Friends

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Despite the fact that I live with three men who love chocolate chip cookies, I don't bake a lot of them. That, however, is about to change, because yesterday I made Kathleen King's Chubby Tates.

King owns Tate's Bake Shop, the revered bakery in the tony New York town of Southampton. I've been there, and I've bought cookies there. Tate's thin, crispy chocolate chip cookies are famous, but not my family's style.

Which is why I was delighted to see the Chubby Tates recipe in King's new book, Tate's Bake Shop: Baking for Friends (disclosure: If you click on this link and buy the book, I get a few cents - so thanks!). I made up a batch of Chubby Tates, was careful not to overbake them, and was blown away. Soft, chewy chocolate chip cookies. Exactly the kind we like.

They didn't last long.

Baking for Friends is just my kind of dessert book. Nothing fancy or overdone. These are the kinds of sweets I bake for my friends. I can't wait to try the rhubarb swirl rolls, chocolate-pear tea bread, and chocolate blood orange marble cake. I've already shopped for the chestnut brownies, with luxurious creme de marrons mixed into the chocolate batter. And my husband has requested the chocolate pecan pie.

With the publisher's permission, I'm sharing the Chubby Tates recipe with you. I'll be as clear as I can: Bake some right now. King suggests freezing balls of unbaked dough - I took her advice and have a zip-top bag of Chubby Tates dough balls waiting for our next cookie craving.

Note: The recipe calls for one tablespoon of corn syrup, which I didn't have on hand. I used honey instead and thought no one would notice. My husband took one bite and said "Is there honey in this cookie? Because it's spectacular!" Do whatever feels right to you.

By the way, my husband thinks this picture looks "like a toadstool." Does it? Be honest.

print recipe

Chubby Tates chocolate chip cookies

by Kathleen King January-3-2013

Thick, chewy, soft chocolate chip cookies from the book BAKING FOR FRIENDS by Kathleen King.

Ingredients

• 2 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup dark brown sugar, firmly packed
• 12 Tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) salted butter, at room temperature
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 Tablespoon light corn syrup
• 1 large egg, at room temperature
• 1 egg yolk, at room temperature
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 2 cups (12 ounces) semisweet chocolate chips

Instructions

Position the oven racks in the top third and center of the oven and preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Line 2 large rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats.In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt. In a large bowl, beat the brown sugar, butter, granulated sugar, and corn syrup with an electric mixer set on high speed until combined, about 1 minute. Beat in the egg, egg yolk, and vanilla. With the mixer on low speed, mix in the flour mixture, just until combined. Mix in the chocolate chips.Using 2 Tablespoons per cookie, drop the dough about 3 inches apart onto the prepared baking sheets. (Or use a 1-ounce food portion scoop to scoop the dough onto the baking sheets.) The mounds of dough can be frozen on the baking sheets until hard, then transferred to a zip-tight plastic bag and frozen for up to 1 month. Bake without thawing.Bake, rotating the positions of the sheets from top to bottom and front to back halfway through baking, until the cookies are lightly browned on the edges, about 18 minutes. (If using frozen cookies, bake for about 20 minutes.) Let cool on the baking sheets for 5 minutes. Transfer to a wire cooling rack and let cool completely. Repeat with the remaining dough, on cool baking sheets.

Details

Prep time: 20 mins Cook time: 20 mins Total time: 40 mins Yield: 3 dozen cookies

Black grape granita recipe with California black grapes

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I'm in the mood for grapes - California grapes, to be exact. I've been buried in Green Black Red: Recipes for Cooking and Enjoying California Grapes, an absolutely gorgeous cookbook I got last month at Camp Blogaway as a gift from the California Table Grape Commission.

Here's the thing: I want to make every single recipe in this book. Every one. Without exception. They're beautiful, they're fresh and healthy (or else luscious and decadent), and I love grapes in all forms. Green grape gazpacho! Grapes stuffed with goat cheese and pistachios! Grape and Brie fritters (be still, my heart)! Seared duck breast with black grapes and port! Slow-cooked pork chops with spiced honey and grapes!

Now do you see what I mean?

This season's California grapes are just showing up in our local markets, a little later than usual, no doubt because of the cold winter we had this year. The red grapes I bought at Bob's Market in Santa Monica this week were perfectly crisp, perfectly round, and just divine.

Green Black Red has a recipe for black grape sorbet, but I never have room in my freezer for the canister of my ice cream maker, so I'm more likely to make granita. It's a tiny bit fussy if you go to the trouble of straining out the skins, but it's the only way to get that pure icy texture. And the color, the color....

Black grape granita

• 3 cups black seedless grapes
• 1/3 cup sugar
• Juice of 1 lemon

Clear a shelf in your freezer. (If your freezer looks like mine, this will be the most challenging part of the recipe.)

Put the grapes, sugar and lemon juice into the blender. Blitz on high speed for 2 minutes. Pour the pureed grape mixture into a fine-mesh strainer set over a bowl, and work the puree through with a wooden spoon or spatula so the bits of skin stay in the strainer. This may take a few minutes of stirring and pushing, but be patient.

Pour the strained grape puree into a shallow metal baking pan, pie plate or bowl. Place in the freezer and set a timer for half an hour. When it goes off, take the bowl out of the freezer, scrape all the frozen bits off the edges of the bowl or pan, and stir. Put the pan back in the freezer for another half hour, and repeat. As you do this, the mixture will turn from liquid, to frozen around the edges, to slushy, to snow. It will probably take two and a half or three hours of stirring every half-hour or so, but the more you do it, the better the texture of your granita in the end.

When the granita has achieved a true snow-like texture, move it into a sealed plastic container large enough to hold it without having to pack it down, and freeze. Eat within a few days. If the granita freezes solid (and it shouldn't, if you've done it right), let it thaw until you can mash the ice crystals with a fork, and start the freezing process anew.

Giveaway: Mad Hungry by Lucinda Scala Quinn

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Here's a great phone call to get from a cookbook publicist at work in the middle of a ho-hum afternoon: "Our afternoon plans got scrambled, and we've got some free time. Do you have an hour to meet Lucinda?"

In this case, "Lucinda" is Lucinda Scala Quinn, the head food guru at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and author of the new cookbook Mad Hungry: Feeding Men & Boys. And yes, I did have time - as did Kate (@Savour, who writes the lovely blog Savour Fare) and Hilary (@HilaryCable, who pens the LA Baking Examiner column). And fortunately, the three of us work in the same building. So down we went to our local Starbucks, where we sat outside for an hour of girl talk about Mad Hungry with Lucinda on a breezy afternoon.

Mad Hungry grabbed me right away, because, as you may know, I live with one very hungry husband and two very hungry young boys, and feeding them is mostly my job (to be sure, a job I truly enjoy). I had all kinds of questions. Is it true what they say about the bottomless pit of the teenage boy stomach? (Yes.) Do yours eat vegetables? (Yes.) Even salad? (Yes, and in fact, there's an essay in the book about how to get boys to eat salads. The trick, apparently, is keeping pre-washed greens on hand at all times, and we're talking crisp manly greens like romaine, not soft delicate greens like mache.)

One bit of advice Lucinda offers in the book - which I happen to think is brilliant - is to use what boys eat outside the house as inspiration for what you cook at home. Those greasy bacon-egg-and-cheese-on-a-bagel sandwiches you find at every New York corner deli? When one of her three sons started eating those daily, Lucinda started cooking them up at home, minus the extra grease, of course (p. 20). When another came from a vegan friend's house raving about soup, she called the other mom to find out what kind of vegan soup could have her son in such raptures and added it to the family menu (lentil, p. 87). I guess that means I'll be trying to reproduce chocolate old-fashioned donuts and sushi soon - oh, wait, I know how to make sushi!

There are, of course, rules to feeding men and boys. Here are some of Lucinda's:

• Learn to understand the urgency of boy hunger. There's no "I'll get something later." When they're hungry, they need food NOW.
• Lucinda doesn't buy much in the way of clothes, jewelry or cars: She spends her money on quality ingredients for her family. 
• That said, she doesn't serve lamb chops when the whole crew is home. It's just too expensive. She'll wait until there's a night with just her and one boy, and then the lamb chops come out. For the big crowd (that's her, husband, three boys ages 15, 18 and 22, and usually three friends), she sticks to longer-cooking but less dear cuts of meat.
• Lucinda is a two-vegetable-per-meal woman. They'll eat at least one, she says, and eventually they'll learn to eat both. Just keep putting it in front of them, and eventually it will go in. But learn how to cook vegetables so they appeal: No one likes mushy steamed cauliflower, she points out, but if you slice it thinly, toss it with olive oil and salt, and roast it at 400 degrees until it's brown and crispy on the edges, watch how quickly it disappears.
• Always make at least two cups of rice. You can put anything over rice in the morning, and they'll eat it. Fried eggs on rice is a favorite.
  
• Her family has beans and rice once a week. They'll eat a vegetarian meal, but they do prefer their beans laced with a little bacon.
• Speaking of bacon: Never run out.

So now that you know how Lucinda feeds her family, aren't you dying for a copy of this book? Well, you can have a chance to win a signed one just by leaving a comment on this post. In the comment, tell us one tip you use for feeding your family or friends - we've all got good ideas to share! To get an extra entry, tweet about this giveaway, then come back and leave another comment with a link to the tweet (you can get a standalone link to a particular tweet by clicking the datestamp under the tweet when it appears in your list). I'll pick a winner at 5pmPT on Monday November 23, 2009.

Let me tell you, I am feeling generous today, because I really really want to keep this cookbook for myself! But no...my blog friends come first....

Good luck!

Be still, my heart

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I got the following email today. Just as I read it, the clouds parted and the sun came out.

Dear Erika,

Penzeys Spices is coming to Santa Monica! Our second Southern California store (located just one block east of the Third Street Promenade) will be opening soon. With construction underway, we'll be heading your way in the next couple of weeks to put the finishing touches on the place and to look for a staff to work with us. We have full and part time positions available for people who Love to Cook and Cook to Love. The ideal candidates have a fantastic customer-oriented personality, a love of food and spices, and enjoy a physically active work environment....

Etc.

Is there any possibility that a job at Penzeys would pay enough to make it worth doing? Probably not. But it sure would be fun. For me.

This should come in a brown paper wrapper

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I don't know what all you other people read late at night when you're having a little, shall we say, quiet time...but, me, I reach for the Penzeys Spices catalog. When it showed up in today's mail, my day got a whole lot better.

Sweet. Savory. Aromatic. Exotic. They've got it all. And, in my opinion, they do a good job selling their wares. Their stuff is extremely fresh. You can buy it in small or large quantities. Their prices are good. Their selection is huge. And, in addition to individual spices and herbs, they do these fantastic spice blends that have really livened up my recipes.

Here are a few of my favorite items from this gem of a booklet:

• Bangkok Blend (sweet peppers, garlic, ginger, black pepper, galangal, hot peppers, lemongrass, basil, cilantro - add it to noodles or mix with cooked rice)
• Breakfast Sausage Seasoning (salt, sugar, paprika, black pepper, sage, dextrose, nutmeg, cayenne pepper, thyme - mix with ground pork or turkey, shape into patties, and fry or broil)
• Garden Salad Seasoning (Romano cheese, poppy seeds, salt, sesame seeds, onion, garlic, chives, white pepper - sprinkle on salad or a baked potato)
• Ozark Seasoning (salt, Tellicherry black pepper, spices and herbs, granulated garlic, paprika - good on roast chicken)
• Parisien Bonnes Herbes (chives, dill weed, French basil, French tarragon, chervil, white pepper - excellent in omelettes)
• Sandwich Sprinkle (garlic, coarse salt, basil, oregano, rosemary, thyme, marjoram, black pepper - my older son will not eat a chicken sandwich without this)
• Shallot-Pepper Seasoning (coarse salt, Tellicherry black pepper, shallots, tarragon, bay leaves - great with sauteed chicken or veal cutlets)
• Soup Base and Seasoning (comes in beef, chicken, ham, pork, seafood, turkey and vegetable flavors - among the best soup stock concentrates I've found)

And there are more, many more, I haven't tried yet. When my birthday rolls around this year, will someone please remember that what I want more than anything else is a gift certificate to Penzeys?

You can shop there too - it's all available here. (And no, they aren't paying me anything. Quite the opposite, I'm afraid.)

My favorite cookbook you've never heard of

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You know how sometimes you find a random item on sale at a random store, and you buy it because you think, well, it looks interesting, I have a little cash in my pocket, why not? And then it turns out to be something you treasure for years?

This has happened to me with shoes (ah, the tapestry-topped boots I bought at Botticelli in Rockefeller Center in 1988, on a whim, and wore to holes); with clothing (oh, hot-pink-and-wine silk skirt and tunic that saw me through more than a decade, I wish I had you in my closet right now!); and, more recently, with this cookbook.

I was in Palo Alto about eight years back, killing time between meetings, so I stopped at the mall. Which mall? Don't know. Some mall. A big one. With a bookstore, not a big chain, as I recall, something more local. As I thumbed through the stacks on the remainders table, this book, The Cafe Pongo Cookbook: More Than 220 Recipes from the Hudson Valley by Valerie Nehez, caught my eye. Looked homey. The few recipes I glanced at looked fine. It was on sale. So I bought it.

I think I have made more recipes from this book than from any other cookbook I've ever owned, and that includes Julia Child, Martha Stewart, The Joy of Cooking, and many other mega-hits.

There's something about the way Nehez writes that really grabs me. I think it's because she's telling the story, through these recipes, of her largely accidental entry into the restaurant and catering business, which sounds so appealing - the life I wish I had had, maybe. Also, being a native New Yorker who spent a lot of time upstate, I have a soft spot for the Hudson Valley. In fact, last summer when we were passing through the area on our way to Vermont, my nine-year-old son almost convinced me to detour through Tivoli so we could stop at one of the restaurants begat by Cafe Pongo (which, sadly, no longer exists).

I changed the way I cook steak because of this book - cast-iron skillet heated to smoking, kosher salt in the skillet, five minutes on the first side, two minutes on the second side. And the corn-and-scallion pancakes are a summertime staple. The marinated red onions, soaked in a sweet-sour spiced vinegar, add zip to any sandwich and are almost always sitting on the top shelf of my refrigerator in an old pasta sauce jar.

I think the book is out of print, but if you come across it - snap it up. And Valerie Nehez, wherever you are, thank you.