Some cookies are good

Readers of this here blog, you know what’s good? Some cookies.

You know what’s good? Some cookies with like, a whole bunch of shit in them.

You know what’s good? Some cookies with a whole bunch of shit in them that your friends help you make and eat.

Other things that are good include: burritos, the color blue, like some classical piano every once in a while when you’re in the mood?, a grove of trees that’s really shady and cool, and also peonies are quite nice. Right?

Peanut Butter-Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies
from Martha Stewart’s Cookies

3 cups rolled oats
1/3 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp coarse salt
1 cup packed light brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temp
1/2 cup natural peanut butter (i’d increase to a cup, y’all)
2 large eggs
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 cups salted whole peanuts
2 cups (12 oz) semisweet chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350. Stir together oats, flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a bowl.

2. Put sugars, butter, and peanut butter in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix on medium speed until pale and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Mix in eggs and vanilla.

3. Reduce speed to low. Add oat mixture, and mix until just combined. Mix in peanuts and chocolate chips.

4. Using a 1 1/2-in ice cream scoop, drop balls of dough 2 inches apart on baking sheets lined with parchment paper.

5. Bake cookies, rotating sheets halfway through, until golden brown and just set, 13 to 15 minutes. Let cool on sheets on wire racks 5 minutes. Transfer cookies to wire racks to cool completely. Cookies can be stored in airtight containers at room temperature up to 2 days.

Honey I’m a prize and you’re a catch & we’re a perfect match

Yeah, remember when I was all, I’m tired of baking, see you in May? Well. I forgot. I live on the west coast! And here? It’s strawberry and rhubarb season. Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for strawberry-rhubarb season to come back? A long fucking time, my friends. A long. Fucking. Time.

And so I came out of my brief baking hibernation to honor the beginning of strawberry and rhubarb season with a simple crumble. Because remember what it’s like to taste the first really ripe strawberry of the season? It’s like being locked in a sealed chamber for 6 months and then all at once sticking your whole head outside. It’s like being sick and not getting out of bed for a week and then waking up one morning, feeling fantastic, and stepping outside into the sunshine. It’s like drinking warm water for your whole life and then accidentally sipping a glass of ice cold seltzer.

It’s mother-effing reFRESHing is what i’m trying to say here. And my friend Lyd was in town to take a break from being a scientist, and we were having wine and cheese and a big salad, and we felt that we needed to cap the dinner with some sort of delicious baked good. So we made this. And, this strawberry-rhubarb crumble was totally lovely, it was. But here’s the part when I finally learn the difference between a crisp and crumble. Most notably: crisps are crisp. Crumbles are not. I really felt like there needed to be a crisp topping here, and I missed it. The strawberries and rhubarb bake down so nicely into this jammy consistency, and the crumble topping, delicious though it was, was just kind of THERE.

I say this, but then Lyd and I ended up eating 7/8 of this crumble that very night. Between the two of us. Over several glasses of wine, a few games of Pass the Pig, and a grand finale of drunk M.A.S.H. Holler at me girls, am I right? Any and all men can stop reading here, because you’re just not going to GET the rest of this paragraph. Fucking M.A.S.H., yo!!!! Because we could barely remember the categories, we updated them to semi-adult themes. Which is why it was determined, according to my own M.A.S.H. fate, that my husband (a secret) and I will have sex 28 times a week but I will only orgasm 5 times a week. It’s like. I don’t even care that I ended up a mechanic who drives a scooter whose first daughter is named Crystal. 5 per week? That is just…sad.

To bring it back to the food, this being a baking blog, albeit a slightly adult-themed baking blog, TAKE A LOOK AT THAT PICTURE BELOW. I mean, talk about orgasms. If I was married to this crumble, maybe things would be different, do you know what I’m saying here????

Strawberry-Rhubarb Crumble
from Smitten Kitchen

Yields 6 to 8 servings.  <—whaaaaat?

For the topping:
1 1/3 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons Demerara sugar (or turbinado sugar aka Sugar in the Raw)
Zest of one lemon
1/4 pound (1 stick or 4 ounces) unsalted butter, melted

For the filling:
1 1/2 cups rhubarb, chopped into 1-inch pieces
1 quart strawberries plus a few extras, hulled, quartered
Juice of one lemon
1/2 cup sugar
3 to 4 tablespoons cornstarch (some commenters found the flour option a little too, well, floury so this has been updated)
Pinch of salt

1. Heat oven to 375°F. Prepare topping: In a mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, sugars and lemon zest and add the melted butter. Mix until small and large clumps form. Refrigerate until needed.

2. Prepare filling: Toss rhubarb, strawberries, lemon juice, sugar, cornstarch and a pinch of salt in a 9-inch deep-dish pie plate. (I used an oval dish this time, because they fit better in the bottom of a shopping bag.)

3. Remove topping from refrigerator and cover fruit thickly and evenly with topping. Place pie plate on a (foil-lined, if you really want to think ahead) baking sheet, and bake until crumble topping is golden brown in places and fruit is bubbling beneath, about 40 to 50 minutes.

April showers bring May flours, probably

Heyyyyyyyyy guys. I’m going to give it to you straight here: I haven’t been baking. I have a very short list of incredibly lame excuses, but basically it just boils down to: I haven’t had time, I haven’t really felt like it, and I’m just plain lazy. So I’m writing you this sweet note to let you know that it might be a bit before you see another recipe. Not forever! But maybe another week or so.

What I’m going to do here is post something I baked a REALLY long time ago, just so there is some sort of purpose to this little missive. The recipe is for Anadama bread, which to be honest, I feel exceedingly neutral about. Some people go apeshit over Anadama bread. I like it, sure. I like it with some butter and honey, yes please. But it’s a corn-mealy molasses-y bread. It’s not the love of my life. This bread and I were not meant to be together, procreate, complement each others’ traits, pick each other up when we’re feeling down, split the diaper-duty, sigh when one of us brings home a brand new big screen tv because the superbowl is just a few weeks away, baby, and it would be a crime to watch it on that little set we have, and also i invited all my friends over and god forbid i had to sit through the embarrassment of joe and jimmy and frank seeing the pathetic excuse of a television set i’ve been viewing, and anyway it’s ours in just a few easy payments of $199 per month for the rest of our lives and now you’re giving me that look you give me when i’ve done something silly, and, well, honey, i wouldn’t have to give you this look all the time if you didn’t keep doing silly things, honestly, it’s like some days i feel like i married a child!

But I mean, it’s a pretty good loaf.

Anadama Bread
forgive me, i know not from where

1/2 cup coarse yellow cornmeal
1/2 cup molasses
6 tablespoons butter, softened, more for greasing bowl
1 1/4-ounce package active dry yeast
4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Oil for greasing.

1. In a bowl, stir together the cornmeal and 1 cup water. In a saucepan over medium-high heat, bring another cup of water to a boil. Add cornmeal mixture and cook, stirring constantly, until mixture is very thick, about 10 minutes. Stir in the molasses and 2 tablespoons butter. Transfer mixture to bowl of an electric mixer and cool to tepid.

2. In a small bowl, stir together the yeast and 1/2 cup water until yeast has dissolved. Add to cornmeal and mix on low speed with dough-hook attachment for several seconds. Add flour 1/2 cup at a time, mixing for several seconds after each addition. Sprinkle in the salt and nutmeg, and continue mixing until dough completely comes away from sides of bowl, about 7 minutes.

3. Lightly butter a bowl. Form dough into a ball and place it in bowl. Oil a sheet of plastic wrap and loosely cover dough. Allow dough to rise for 1 1/2 hours, or until it has doubled in size.

4. Lightly grease 2 9-by-4-inch loaf pans. Press down dough and divide it into 2 equal pieces. Shape each piece loosely into a loaf and place each in a pan. Cover with plastic wrap and allow to rise for 30 minutes, or until loaves have doubled.

5. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake loaves for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until bread is a dark golden brown and sounds hollow when tapped.

6. Allow bread to cool in pans for 5 minutes, then turn out onto wire cooling rack. Brush all over with remaining softened butter. Serve warm if possible.

Yield: 2 9-by-4-inch loaves.

To make ahead: Bread can be frozen after baking. Let thaw in refrigerator overnight; reheat loaves wrapped in foil for 30 minutes at 325 degrees before serving. Dough can be refrigerated overnight after shaping into loaves (cover pans with plastic). Allow dough to rise at room temperature for 2 to 3 hours before baking (it will double in size and fill the loaf pans). Bake as directed. Dough can also be frozen after shaping for up to 2 weeks (wrap well in plastic). Defrost it in refrigerator overnight, then let rise at room temperature for 2 to 3 hours, or until doubled in size. Bake as directed.

A pizza of my mind (wah wah)

It occurred to me midway through making this recipe that I might want to share it with you, so forgive the lack of process pictures. Not that you can’t deal with the fact that you’re missing a picture of yeast. In ACTION! Life doesn’t GET much more exciting than that, does it, reader? Organisms eating sugar and expelling gas! Science! Bill Nye! Mr. Wizard! Rock Candy! Geodes! Stalagmite, stalactite!

Now that free association science word time is over, let’s talk about pizza dough. So, hi, I live in San Francisco. There are several decent pizza places here (east coasters, please quiet your rages for like ONE MOMENT while I explain what that means), and few of those serve what this Long-Island-born-and-bred girl would call “New York pizza.” That being said, I’m no New York pizza purist. When I lived in Eugene I used to frequent this place called the Pizza Research Institute, and they put potatoes on their pizza. And canned peaches. And ricotta. And asparagus. All at once! Because they were god damned dirty hippies with no respect for the traditions of gruff accent-heavy Italians from Brooklyn. Here in San Francisco, the burrito has replaced pizza as my quick, cheap, go-to meal. Pizza here is more of a gourmet event, as only San Francisco would have it. Slightly snobby, yet in actuality quite tasty, still rarely worth the money, too-crowded and after a period of exaltation on Yelp, a slow steady stream of hipster criticism until the place has become passe, and why would you go there, don’t you know about this little hole in the wall with no store sign out front run by a couple of foreigners, but I swear they got their recipe from some old Italian dude in Brooklyn and they play Pakistani music in there and it’s kind of divey but it’s AUTHENTIC, you know?

So it’s not like there is a dearth of pizza in San Francisco, not by any means. But all those gourmet places, and even some of the hole-in-the-walls, they don’t produce anything that I can’t make at home. There, I said it. I’m no Italian. Not even close. Not even one blonde hair of mine ever whiffed the air in Italy (and in fact, my grandfather has a lifelong ban on Italian food–he won’t touch the stuff ever since Italy beat out Finland for the agricultural seat of Europe [shocker, what with all the NOT GROWING of vegetables Finland does]), but I have in my possession the following items: instant yeast, water, sugar, salt, and flour. So pizza dough is like, within my grasp.

So on Saturday when I decided to walk from my house across the Golden Gate Bridge and back (a cool 15 miler), after I stopped at a pizza joint on the way home, my craving was not yet satisfied, and as soon as I stepped in the door I mixed together the small amount of ingredients that constitute nearly all pizza doughs. Because pizza dough? It’s easy. Sure, according to most New Yorkers I’ll never be able to create authentic pizza, because of some lack of something in the water, or some sort of natural yeast that is present only in any one of the 5 boroughs. But, here on the West Coast, where I can travel 20 minutes and be in the wilderness, where my morning run takes me through one of the largest urban parks in the US, where I’m 15 minutes from a surfing beach, where In-N-Out exists, where the farmer’s market is open all year round, here where I live…well, that doesn’t really bother me at all.

And with a nominal amount of mixing, a short period of rising, and minimal fuss, I can have homemade pizza dough with whatever toppings I damn well please, which in this case is pancetta, spring onion, spinach, and mozzarella. It’s not Tony’s Pizza, but it’s pizza, and fuck-all it’s good.

Perfect Pizza Dough
from the Bread Bible

Ingredients

¾ cup plus 1 tablespoon flour (4 ounces), preferably unbleached all-purpose

½ tsp. instant yeast

½ tsp. sugar

½ tsp. salt

⅓ liquid cup water at room temperature (70 to 90 degrees)

4 tsp. olive oil

1. In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, instant yeast, and sugar. Whisk in the salt (this keeps the yeast from coming into direct contact with the salt, which would kill it).

2. Make a well in the center and pour in the water. Using a rubber spatula or wooden spoon, gradually stir the flour into the water until all the flour is moistened and a dough just begins to form, about 20 seconds. It should come away from the bowl but still stick to it a little, and be a little rough-looking, not silky smooth. Do not overmix, as this will cause the dough to become stickier.

3. Pour the oil into a 2-cup measuring cup (to give the dough room to double in size) or a small bowl. With oiled fingers or an oiled spatula, place the dough in the oiled cup and turn it over to coat on all sides with the oil. Cover it tightly.

4. If you want to use the dough soon, allow it to sit at room temperature for 1 hour or until doubled. For the best flavor development, make the dough at least 6 hours or up to 24 hours ahead, and allow it to sit at room temperature for only 30 minutes or until slightly puffy. Then set the dough, still in the measuring cup, in the refrigerator. Remove it 1 hour before you want to put it in the oven.

5. Preheat the oven to 475 degrees 1 hour before baking. Have an oven shelf at the lowest level and place a baking stone (or a baking sheet) on it before preheating.

6. With oiled fingers, lift the dough out of the measuring cup or bowl. Holding the dough in one hand, pour a little of the oil left in the cup or bowl onto the pizza pan, and spread it all over the pan with your fingers. Set the dough on the pan and press it down with your fingers to deflate it gently. Shape it into a smooth round by tucking under the edges. If there are any holes, knead it very lightly until smooth. Allow the dough to sit for 15 minutes, covered, to relax it.

7. Using your fingertips, press the dough from the center to the outer edge to stretch it into a 10-inch circle, leaving the outer ½ inch thicker than the rest to form a lip. If the dough resists stretching (as will happen if you have activated the gluten by overkneading it), cover it with plastic wrap and let it rest for a few minutes longer before proceeding.

8. Brush the surface of the dough with any remaining olive oil. Cover it with plastic wrap and allow it to sit for 30 to 45 minutes, until it becomes light and slightly puffy with air.

9. Set the pizza pan directly on the hot stone and bake for 5 minutes.

10. Remove the pan from the oven and spread toppings over the dough. Return the pan to the stone for 5 minutes or until the toppings have melted and the crust is golden; or, for an extra-crisp and browned bottom crust, using a pancake turner or baker’s peel, slide the pizza from the pan directly onto the stone. After 2 minutes, slip a small metal spatula under one edge of the pizza; if the bottom is golden, raise the pizza to a higher shelf.

11. Transfer the pizza to a cutting board and cut with a pizza wheel, sharp knife, or scissors. Serve hot.