The Dinner Files

Have you noticed that I don’t post a ton of sweets here? I’m not a real dessert-y sort of gal. A bite or two of whatever usually does it for me, much to my son’s chagrin. The poor thing has taken to lapping up a spoonful of honey for dessert more than once while pulling a face at the offer of a juicy ripe satsuma or a bitter square of dark chocolate studded with almonds and sea salt.

These pecan cookies, however, whether studded with crunchy bitter cacao nibs or delicate shavings of dark chocolate, are right up my alley, they are buttery and crisp and not all that sweet but perfect with a cup of coffee or a spot of tea, and they aren’t out of place with a dram of whiskey either. They are inspired by cookies from the fabulous Alice Medrich. I once made them with finely chopped chocolate when I couldn’t find cacao nibs. They were, to some palates, even more delicious.

Find other cookies I genuinely adore at this list of potential christmas cookies.

I have two secrets to my favorite chocolate chip cookies. One is an ingredient, the other is a method. I suppose I have guarded these secrets to some extent, but then no one had ever asked for them. People will compliment the cookies and I will say thanks and that tends to be the end of the conversation.

These may not be your favorite chocolate chip cookies at all. If you like crisp cookies, for example, move along, these cookies are not for you. These cookies are soft and a bit chewy and quite thin all at once, which is what I look for in a chocolate chip cookie. No cake-y nonsense here. They have oats in them because, again, that’s how I roll. They do not have nuts because I could take or leave nuts in my chocolate chip cookies but I live in a house simply filled with people who say “no” to such shenanigans.

(I just did a quick search on dictionary.com to make sure shenanigans isn’t one of those phrases with historically racist implications and found it is of “obscure origins.” The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of it in the April 25, 1855 edition of Town Talk in San Francisco. Let it be known that I am local even in my use of comically out-dated slang!)

They have a bit of nutmeg, which even if you don’t like thin-soft-chewy cookies I recommend you try adding to whatever ridiculous cake-like or crispy wafer-style chocolate chip cookie recipe you prefer. It adds a je ne sais quoi that people won’t detect other than that their hand is shoving yet another cookie into their mouth.

And the key to getting that texture I like so much? Melt the butter first. Simple as that.

Chocolate “chip” oatmeal cookies

I say “chip” because I have yet another secret: I don’t use chips. I chop the chocolate. Total pain in the ass? Yes. Completely worth the effort for the improved texture and teeny tiny shards of chocolate that work themselves throughout the dough? Absolutely. To me. You may, and likely will, decide otherwise.

3/4 cup butter

1/2 cup each granulate sugar and brown sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 – 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1 cup rolled oats (for the batch above I used up some quick-cooking oats we had in the cupboard because none of us like those for breakfast; they worked fine but I prefer the regular ones, even in my cookies)

1 – 1 1/2 cups chopped dark chocolate

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Melt the butter and stir in the two sugars so they dissolve. Let this sit until it’s warm or room temperature but definitely not hot. Since I don’t have a microwave I melt the butter on the stove, then transfer it to a large mixing bowl, which helps move the cooling down along.

Stir in the egg and the vanilla.

In another bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg. Then mix this flour mixture into the butter sugar mixture. This really is how you should do it. Seriously. The thing is, you may decide you don’t want to dirty and extra bowl. Full confession: I never mix my dry ingredients first for cookies. I add the small amount stuff (in this case the baking soda, salt, and nutmeg) to the wet ingredients and stir them in, then add the flour. No one has ever complained about the results. Ever.

Stir in the oats and the chocolate.

Scoop in 1-tablespoon balls onto a baking sheet about an inch or so apart and bake 10-12 minutes. Let sit a minute and then transfer to a cooling rack. You’ll get almost exactly 2 dozen cookies this way. Maybe a few extra.

Two things conspired to make me feel oh-so-nostalgic this past week. First, my best friend from high school called from Minneapolis to tell me that my brother was in the local paper. This did not surprise me. He is not regularly in the paper or anything, but he has the kind of job that one can imagine he might end up in the paper every now and again. No, she said. Third-grade Dave.

Our third grade teacher was looking for former students and the Star Tribune ran a story about her search that included (in the print edition only) a picture of my little brother – young enough so he still had his angelic blond curls (in the way of younger brothers he drove me crazy, sure, but he looked like an angel doing it) – and his best grade school buddy with our universally adored third grade teacher.

Of course this made me think of our neighborhood school and its mostly excellent teachers and walking on our own without adult supervision to and from school about half a mile everyday (well, the moms walked us on the first day of kindergarten, but after that they figured we had enough sense – and neighborhood kids  – to find our way back again). And yes, sometimes this walking took place through truly tremendous amounts of snow (check the snow records for the 70s – those snow levels were high!). And, as my neighbor friend pointed out when we reunited this summer, we had to go over a hill so it really was uphill both ways.

Then this weekend my little family of three snuggled into bed and watched Charlie Brown Christmas and I was back at St. Joan of Arc church in South Minneapolis during Christmas Eve mass or in our living room watching the same cartoon with my brother or walking home from a friend’s house in the dark of a December late afternoon looking into our neighbors’ windows to see their trees. In my mind’s eye, of course, there is a picturesque dusting of snow falling and it is so quiet that the snow crunches loudly beneath my snowboot-clad feet.

People not from there don’t tend to understand how a person can miss snow and cold, but this time of year – as the fog and drizzle of rain more or less set in here in San Francisco – I do. I have no doubt trying to bundle a kid up for months on end would make me nuts, and I’m happy to skip the endless rounds of cold and flu that circulate in the heated indoor air. I certainly don’t miss the toxic gray slush that forms in the streets or that dreary tail-end of the never-ending winter known as March and even April in Minnesota. But I do miss the way the sharp cold air can reach down into your lungs to check to see if you’re really breathing and mostly I crave the peaceful calm that descends on a household when everyone is home and safe and the snow starts coming down.

Charlie Brown Christmas captures so much of this. The kids skating endlessly, catching snow on their tongues, walking here and there as independent as can be – all really speaks to my own childhood (Charles Schultz was, after all, from St. Paul). And when Linus explains the true meaning of Christmas, that sounds about right, too. I was raised Catholic, but a 70s-style progressive Catholic. My mom wasn’t so into the whole “sin” thing and I remember a very intense debriefing after a Sunday school teacher had gone on and on about hell. Sure, Jesus was the son of god, that was always around and about, but what was played up to me was that he had some good ideas about how to be loving and kind to other people. Christmas was about “peace on earth and goodwill towards man,” just as Linus explains, it wasn’t a birthday party.

I’m going to spend the next few weeks creating a little peace on earth and goodwill towards man in my own world. I’ll be spending time with family and friends and seeing that my son enjoys that wonder of wonders – winter break when you’re seven – as much as possible. Then I’m taking off for a week without work or family on this thing called a vacation. I’m thinking that is going to be a fairly awesome way to usher in 2011.

See you back here in January. Check over at Local Foods this week, though – I’ll be posting the Christmas cookie recipes I worked on Sunday with the help of Very Cheery Cousin Katie. It was a bone-tiring day in the kitchen. That may be, however because we cooked up a few New Years cocktails, too.

Walnut buckwheat tea cakes

Swedish tea cakes were my favorite Christmas cookie (other than the rosettes my grandpa used to fry up) as a kid. Then I learned they were also Russian tea cakes and Mexican wedding cookies and Snowballs – everyone, it seems, would like to claim these as their own. I made these with walnuts, but pecans or hazelnuts (roasted and peeled), work, too. I used buckwheat flour because it has such a sandy texture when you bake with it, which is exactly what you want in these cookies. Plus, it gives the interior a cool dark color that contrasts so nicely with the snowy white powdered sugar on the outside. Use regular flour instead, if you like.

1 1/4 cup walnuts

3/4 cup butter

1 1/3 cups powdered sugar (confectioner’s sugar), divided

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup buckwheat flour

1 cup all purpose flour

Preheat oven to 300. Pulse walnuts in a food processor until finely minced. Transfer to a large bowl. Put butter and 1/3 cup of the powdered sugar in the food processor and whirl, stopping and scraping down as necessary, until butter and sugar are combined. Add vanilla and salt and whirl to combine. Add flours and pulse to combine. Turn the dough into the bowl with the walnuts and stir (or knead with your hands) to combine thoroughly.

Roll dough into bite-size (or two-bite-size) balls and place on a baking sheet about an inch apart. Bake until set, about 10 minutes. Let cool a few minutes and gently roll each cookie in the remaining powdered sugar. Set on a rack and let cool completely. Then gently toss each cookie in the powdered sugar a second time. It’s like painting a room – two thin coats are infinitely better than one thick one, which gets gloppy and doesn’t cover as well:

These poor cookies have been forgotten many times over.

So much can go wrong with meringue. If not beaten enough, the whites will collapse. If beaten too much, the water will break away from the protein strands and leak out. If the sugar isn’t incorporated properly it will settle, creating a solid raft of caramelized mess on the bottom of whatever shape you’ve made. If the oven is too hot, the meringue will brown and take on a flavor that isn’t caramelized sugar and isn’t burnt eggs, but a rancid combination of the two. If there is too much humidity in the air, well, just don’t even try to make meringue. The mixture will just keep on soaking in moisture from the air, getting sticky all over again, no matter how long or how many times you dry it out in a low oven.

There is no rushing meringue. You can’t really turn up the temperature in the oven (it will brown), and however long it takes to dry out, it takes. There are no shortcuts to perfect meringue.

I didn’t know all this one day in March of 2000, after I’d finished grad school and was fitfully starting a career as a food writer but making my living doing curriculum development for a continuing education company. I was thumbing through the latest issue of Saveur magazine – at that point a highlight of each month for me – and I came across a recipe for “Forgotten Cookies.” They were little meringues, studded with chocolate and chopped pecans, baked long and at a low temperature, as one would expect for meringues, and then left in the turned-off oven overnight to finish drying (that’s the “forgotten” part, get it?). They sounded good. I dog-eared the page and promptly forgot all about them.

A few months later a friend had me over for tea to celebrate my birthday. On the table was a plate of little meringue cookies studded with chocolate and chopped pecans.  “Forgotten cookies?” I asked. They were delicious.

So about a month later I pulled out the recipe, separated some eggs, and left cookies in the oven overnight. First thing the next morning I pulled a pan of cookies out of the oven thinking a little egg white cookie would make a nice accompaniment with my morning coffee. I picked one off the pan, expecting the light airiness of the cookies I’d had on my birthday. Instead the little nugget stuck to my fingers and the pan. The outside of each cookie had turned into a thin layer of sugary egg white glue. I quickly realized that they hadn’t dried properly and turned the oven back on. They were dry in about an hour, cool a bit after that, and made a lovely mid-morning snack. I stacked them in a cookie tin, cleaned the pan, and continued with my day. After dinner I pulled out the tin to offer a few of my creations to my dashing husband for dessert. Instead of the little puffs I’d put away earlier that day I had a tin full of gooey stuck-together globs. I extricated the baking sheet from the cupboard (our small San Francisco apartment kitchen required master puzzle skills to store my large assortment of cookware), turned the oven back on, gently worked the cookies apart and onto the sheet, and dried them out yet again, even going so far as to leave them in the oven overnight again to cool and dry.

When they were sticky again the next morning I felt the tears welling up in my throat. No, I thought, there is no crying over sticky cookies. I set the oven to 200°, dried the cookies again, and hit the books. I soon realized that summer in San Francisco – dreary, foggy, ever-so-slightly damp summer in San Francisco – is no time to make meringue. I tucked the recipe away for the bright, dry days of fall.

I’d forgotten all about them until an abundance of egg whites and a burst of clear dry weather last weekend brought them back to mind.

Forgotten Cookies

I’ve made many modifications from the original recipe. I find a second drying is necessary to get them from getting sticky within a few hours (although if you live in the dessert or it’s winter and you inhabit an overheated apartment the second drying may not be necessary). Also, I switched out the chocolate and used cocoa nibs instead – a bit more bitter and perfect against the sweet meringue air.

6 egg whites

¼ teaspoon salt

1 cup powdered sugar

1/2 cup cocoa nibs

1 cup chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 225. Put egg whites in a large bowl and beat until very frothy. Add salt and continue beating until the egg whites form stiff peaks – that is, when you lift a beater out not only does a peak remain in the bowl of whites, but you can turn the beater upside down and the peak on it will hold its shape against gravity. This is tricky stuff because you are beating the whites to their limit. You are taking them right up against over-beaten territory. They should not in any way look dry or start to pull apart. If they do, start over.

Reduce speed of the beater or mixed to medium-slow and add sugar 3 or 4 tablespoons at a time. Let each addition dissolve into the whites before adding another. Once all the sugar is added the whites should look glossy and as smooth as ice.

Gently fold in cocoa nibs and pecans. Seriously, fold these in a gently as possible, trying best you can not to deflate the egg whites you just painstakingly inflated.

Line three large cookie pans with parchment paper and drop spoonfuls of the mixture on the pans. They don’t spread and bake into the shape they are going into the oven. Bake for 25 minutes, rotate pans, bake for another 25 minutes, and turn the oven off. Let the cookies sit and slowly but surely dry out overnight. In the morning turn the oven back on to 200. Let it come to temperature, bake the cookies 15 minutes, turn the oven off, and let them sit until the oven is completely cool.

Store cookies in an airtight container. Since they are just meringue and chocolate and nuts they keep forever, or at least several weeks. Why you wouldn’t have eaten them all by then I have no idea, but they do keep very nicely. If it’s humid out or starts to rain they may start to stick. Just dry them out in a 200-degree oven all over again.

I had a dream. As much as I love sweet crêpes, I’ve always been a bit more of a fan of galettes – crêpes’ hearty, buckwheat flour, savory older cousins. Once when making galettes and crêpes, I made myself a dessert “crêpe” using the buckwheat galette batter. The French people present were horrified, to say the least, but I was thrilled. I didn’t know if my dessert got in my dinner or my dinner got in my dessert. The nutty buckwheat and dark chocolate were my own chocolate and peanut butter: together at last.

These cookies are way easier to make (less than 30 minutes from pulling things from the cupboard to a warm cookie in your mouth if you pay attention) and will, I hope, find a wider audience.

Chocolate buckwheat cookies

These cookies are soft, chocolate-y, and have a decidedly but undefinable nutty taste and slightly sandy texture that makes complete sense if you know there is a generous amount of buckwheat flour in them. Don’t over-bake these; the texture goes from divine to ho-hum if you do.

4 ounces bittersweet chocolate

1 cup buckwheat flour

3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour

1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar

1 egg

2 teaspoons vanilla

Preheat oven to 350. Chop chocolate and melt it. (I like to put mine in a small bowl, fill a slightly larger bowl with boiling water, and set the small bowl in the boiling water and just let it sit. It melts and it can’t scorch and I can start on other things.) Let it cool a bit before using.

Combine the buckwheat and whole wheat pastry flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. Set aside.

Cream butter and brown sugar until fairly light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla. Make sure the chocolate is cool enough to touch comfortably (go ahead, stick your finger in there!) – you don’t want it to melt the butter or start cooking the egg when you add it to the batter. Beat into the butter-sugar-egg mixture.

Add the dry ingredients and beat to stir just to combine.

Dollop generous tablespoonfuls of the batter on one cookie sheet if you want less clean-up but more cooking time (two batches) or on two cookie sheets if you’d rather rinse an extra pan than deal with a second batch. Bake 5 minutes. Turn/rotate pan(s) and bake another 5 minutes. Let cool slightly on the sheet(s) before transferring to a cooling rack.

You should get 2 dozen cookies.

I didn’t bake cookies yesterday because it’s Christmas and I didn’t bake cookies yesterday because it was so cold out that running the oven for a while just seemed like a good idea. No, the reason was more classic, more practical, more time-honored than either of those. I baked cookies yesterday to cheer up my kid. A much-aniticipated playdate turned into a much-postponed playdate and the result was heart-breaking. At least for me.

We were both much cheered by these Swedish Rye Cookies* from 101 Cookbooks. I couldn’t keep Ernie away from them. Last night my dashing husband wondered if I could estimate how many calories were in each cookie. I told him that I couldn’t, but that there weren’t very many in any one cookie for the simple reason that they were so small and thin, but that there were, essentially, butter cookies (with some cream cheese thrown in for good and effective measure) meaning they were composed of flour, butter, and sugar. This morning I noticed the vast majority of the cookies were gone. Over coffee my dashing husband mentioned that “those cookies were really good.” When I offered to make them again he begged off, saying that, perhaps, the cookies were “too good.” He is not usually such a cookie hound. But then, he’s a good New Yorker who loves his rye.

Part of the magic of these cookies is how easy the dough is to work with which translates into how easy it is to roll out which means you can get them extremely thin, if you’re so inclined, which I am. The recipe calls for a much more reasonable and sanity-saving thickness of a 1/4 inch. I was getting into the 1/8 if not even the 1/16 area (is that even possible?). I acknowledge that’s nuts, but I would also assert that a super-thin cookie sprinkled with coarse sugar is a magical thing. And we needed a bit of magic around here yesterday afternoon.

The downside, of course, is you do need to roll them out and cut them, and that’s a pain. The other downside – for me anyway – is the the much postponed playdate showed up about 5 minutes into cookie making. So instead of a mellow, mother-son cookie baking session we ended up with an episode of crazy boys each cutting out a few cookies, running off to construct legos, and me in the kitchen rolling and cutting and baking by myself for over an hour when I really had other things to do. I realize, of course, that this last complaint has nothing much to do with the recipe….

*Please, I beg you not to tell my Norwegian grandfather that I baked anything Swedish. If he asks, tell him I whipped up some Norwegian rye cookies. If that seems like too much of a lie, just call then Scandanavian rye cookies.