Tomato Kumato

August 15, 2009

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Filed under: Cookies — Tags: , , , — emiglia @ 7:43 pm

America has a smell.

Maybe not America, but definitely New York.

OK… on second thought, scratch that. It’s not New York… it’s JFK. And I’ll go even a bit further to say, it’s not all of JFK, but one specific point, past customs and baggage claim and the desk for lost luggage, where I tend to spend quite a bit of my time. It’s the part right where you exit the automatic doors to where the pickups are. That place right there… it has a smell. Pollution, car exhaust, sweat, steam.

It smells like home.

No matter how far I go, no matter how much I convince myself that I am, once and for all, over New York–a city that truly was a love for me, an unrequited, heart-wrenching, ugly, messy love story over the course of the three years I spent at boarding school and the year and a half I spent in Toronto–I never really am. It was a love affair that had me watching Manhattan over and over and over again on my DVD player in high school and tracking down movie sets meant to be in New York in the biting cold of a Toronto winter. A love affair that made recognizing the buildings that dotted the skyline of my hometown make my heart ache.

I’ve since forgotten about New York: Cannes broke the spell it had on me, quickly replaced with Paris. I’ve become flighty in the true sense of the word, forgetting all the places I was in favor of the place where I am.

But JFK brings it all back.

If you haven’t grasped from the above soliloquy, I am back in America: land of peanut butter sold in vats, 24-hour supermarkets, pharmacies that sell shampoo, and ever-present air conditioning. I’ve stopped thinking of Paziols, the place that had me head-over-heels, except when I’m writing this blog and paging through never-ending photographs that should make it up here, some day.

These cookies should remind me of Paziols: I made them for a neighborhood cookout, where we set up picnic tables along our street–the French equivalent of a block party. I, as the American representative, started cooking at 10 and managed to arrive with a vat of cole slaw, a massive bowl of potato salad, two trays of macaroni and cheese, and these: what we know as chocolate chip cookies and what are translated as simply cookies.


I should remember the endless wine that was poured into Dixie cups and just as quickly knocked over by the Tramontagne wind. I should remember the eggplant appetizer that one of our neighbors is famous for. I should remember the massive platter of grilled meat that was passed up and down the table. I should remember the kids laughing and vying for attention, trying to understand the rapid-fire accented French that was surrounding them. I should remember all of this.

Instead, I think of other things. Of days when I lived back here, days when afternoons were spent at diners splitting plates of fries with ketchup–no mayo to be had. Days when I did my homework at the kitchen table, absently snacking on platters of fruit that were omnipresent in my childhood. Days that were so limited–I only lived at home until I was fourteen–but days that, at the time, seemed to last forever.

I remember–however brief it was–the time when I really, truly was just a regular American kid.

Strange, how much a cookie can make you remember.

Chocolate Chip Cookies (adapted from Alton Brown’s “The Chewy”)

2 sticks unsalted butter
2 1/4 cups bread flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/4 cups brown sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Heat oven to 375 degrees F.

Melt the butter in a heavy-bottom medium saucepan over low heat. Sift together the flour, salt, and baking soda and set aside.

Pour the melted butter in the mixer’s work bowl. Add the sugar and brown sugar. Cream the butter and sugars on medium speed. Add the egg, yolk, and vanilla extract and mix until well combined. Slowly incorporate the flour mixture until thoroughly combined. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Chill the dough, then form with a tablespoon and place onto buttered baking sheets. Bake for 8 minutes or until golden brown, checking the cookies after 5 minutes. Rotate the baking sheet for even browning. Serve with a tall glass of milk, à l’américaine.

May 16, 2009

Cake Day: Cream Cheese Sandwich Cookies

Filed under: Cake Day, Cookies — Tags: , , , — emiglia @ 9:05 pm

I used to think I didn’t care what people thought of me.

I’m brutally honest and wildly sarcastic. I’m high-stress and low-energy. I’m acutely aware of being mildly to moderately crazy, depending on the day and my caffeine intake, and I don’t hide it from anyone. It took me a long time to really get to know myself–I spent most of my years in high school being known as “lobotomy girl” because of my penchant for drastically changing my personality every few months–but now that I do, I don’t apologize for it.

Apparently, my self-confidence doesn’t translate to French.

I moved to France for many reasons, but my main and original motivation was to learn French. I have taken every opportunity offered to me to completely immerse myself in the language. It is surprising, then, that one of the biggest things I miss from living in the States is my native language. There is an ease with English–and an ease that comes with being an American–that makes social situations with other Americans and other English-speakers easy.

I am bold in English, engaging strangers in conversation, telling people exactly what I think of them and making friends with random people in random places. In English, I’m well-read, well-traveled and well-educated. I can hold a reasonable conversation with most people concerning most topics. I am not afraid of being ignorant, as long as it doesn’t make me seem stupid, but I’ve found that admitting ignorance usually makes you look anything but stupid.

I spend a lot of time feeling stupid in France.

Ease of conversation and turn of phrase that come so easily to English are distant verbal memories as I try to remember the proper way to greet each individual: Do I use their first name? Can I use the informal tu? Are they expecting a bise, or just a handshake? If I don’t understand what has just been said, should I laugh along and hope no one notices, or is it an inside joke? If I try very hard to blend into the wallpaper, will they maybe just not notice I’ve entered the room?

I’ve become what I haven’t been in years in English: I’m shy.

Luckily, Alex’s family reminds me of the cousins and aunts and uncles who used to trickle into our open-plan kitchen/den every Sunday when I was growing up. In my family, we yell to be heard, we tell stories over one another without listening to what the other is saying. We laugh at each other, with each other, at ourselves. We make ourselves look stupid, but we don’t dwell on it, because someone else is always making themselves look even more stupid.

I first met Alex’s family as they trickled in, one by one, into my life in Paziols. In Paziols, where I had the safety net of being in the majority as an English speaker but also had the advantage of being one of the few bilinguals. I got to know his family slowly, edging my way into conversations with them, conversations that faded into the end of the summer and picked themselves up in September, in Breuillet.

Alex and I make the trek to Breuillet, his childhood home, nearly every other weekend, usually on the last train out on Saturday, sometimes on one of the trains that lazily take the hour-long journey on Sunday mornings. I usually have something left over from cake day: a few cookies, two cupcakes. Last weekend, I brought these cookies, a product of Alex’s imagination: cream cheese cookies filled with a cream cheese frosting (he was first introduced to cream cheese frosting at a recent birthday, and the combination of this and his newfound love of New York-style cheesecake means that cream cheese is a valid addition to any cake day concoction.

These cookies mark more than one milestone for me: they’re the first cookies I have ever made in my new oven without staring unblinking through the glass window in the front of the oven, waiting and hoping that I’ll catch them before they burn. They also mark the day where I finally got to the point where I could sit at the table and not be a mess of nerves trying to follow the conversation in vain. I laughed along at jokes I understood and smiled vaguely when I didn’t understand the punch line, welcoming explanations. I contributed to the conversation when it came to things I knew about, and sat back and listened when others knew more than I did. It sounds so simple, but to me it was a breakthrough: instead of worrying the entire time over whether I was reacting the proper way, I allowed myself to be myself. I became, once again, myself: honest, sarcastic, high-stress, low-energy, crazy and American.

Cream Cheese Sandwich Cookies

For the cookies:

2 cups plus 3 Tbsp all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
170 g. (6 oz.) unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
225 g. (8 oz.) softened cream cheese softened
1 cup Sugar-in-the-Raw
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a baking pan. Sift the dry ingredients into a medium bowl and set aside.

Combine the butter and cream cheese with a rubber spatula until completely combined. Add the sugars and the vanilla, and combine. Add dry ingredients and stir until combined.

Use a teaspoon to form balls of dough and drop them on the baking sheets. Bake 3-5 minutes, until just browned on the bottom and the tops are set but not firm. Remove and cool completely.


For the frosting:

125 g. (4.5 oz.) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
250 g. (8.5 oz.) softened cream cheese softened
1 tsp. vanilla
several cups of confectioners sugar, to taste

Beat the butter and cream cheese together until completely combined. Add the vanilla and mix well. Add the confectioners sugar by the half cup, whipping it into the cream cheese mixture and tasting as you go. When the frosting is sweet enough, refrigerate it until you are ready to make the sandwiches.

To assemble the sandwiches, take a small spoonful of frosting and place it on one cookie. Place a similarly shaped cookie on top. (I dipped some in a simple chocolate ganache made with melted dark chocolate and cream, but this is optional.)


April 18, 2009

Cake Day: Perfect Peanut Butter Cookies

Filed under: Cake Day, Cookies — Tags: — emiglia @ 2:38 am

I have a secret: I don’t have measuring cups.

I don’t have measuring spoons, a scale, a thermometer for my oven… anything. I’m basically baking blind.
When I first started baking, all I had to contend with was my mother’s perfect electric oven. A digital thermometer alerted me when the oven had reached the appropriate temperature, and my first few batches of oatmeal cookies turned out perfectly.

I then moved to Toronto: the oven was an electric, but there was no gauge. No problem… I just preheated for a really, really long time to make sure everything was working. I’m over-cautious… can’t help it.

My oven in my first Paris apartment had a dial in celsius that showed me where it was supposed to be, although I think it ran a bit hot. Oh well… I still managed to get it close to where I wanted it to be.

When I moved in to Alex’s apartment, I was greeted with my first gas oven, complete with a dial that was just a graded line from thick to thin: not even a guess for which temperature I was near.

“No problem,” Alex says. “Just bake au feeling.”

I don’t do anything au feeling, much less bake. I plan out my days on post-its. I color code everything. I buy my plane tickets as soon as they go on sale (one year before the date of travel). I plan my menus weeks in advance. Sure, I might change them, but the plan, the organization, is there in some form. Baking is made to be an exact science. You are not supposed to bake au feeling. I, of all people, should not be baking au feeling.

I burned a lot of cookies when I first moved in here. Cookies that spread all over the baking sheet or burned to a crisp without the chocolate chips even melting. I pulled cakes out of the oven that were gummy on the inside and crisp on the outside. I went in search for an oven thermometer and came back empty-handed.

But this week, I have accomplished something. My oven and I have finally gotten to know each other, and I have baked a batch of cookies that did not spread or burn.

The not spreading may have something to do with the fact that I recently learned that French all-purpose flour is comparable to American pastry flour and is not suitable for chewy, delicious cookies. I bought some organic flour that’s closer to the American grain, and these cookies stayed exactly the way they were supposed to: thick and soft with criss-cross patterns on the top. They taste exactly the way a peanut butter cookie should taste: like peanut butter and nothing else.

Alex watched as I got into my rhythm, forming balls of cookie dough in my palm, rolling them in sugar, placing them on the baking sheet and making the criss-cross pattern with the tines of my fork.

“Can I try?”

It was like watching a kid: so unsure of what he was doing. He took too much dough, rolled it in the sugar before it was a ball. “Here,” I offered, “Let me show you.”

I think you can probably tell which cookies are Alex’s: the ones that look like they were made by an overzealous little boy.

Alex’s version of baking au feeling. He may be better at that than I am.

Note: Please remember that if you would like your weekly baked goods featured here as a part of Cake Day on Saturdays, feel free to send me a permalink to your post, and I’ll include it in my roundup!
Peanut Butter Cookies (adapted from Baking Blonde)

1 cup + 2 Tbsp. peanut butter
1/2 cup salted butter, softened
1/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 egg
2 Tbsp. milk
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 cup sugar (for rolling dough balls, may need more or less)

Preheat oven to 350.

In a large mixing bowl, cream the peanut butter and butter together until smooth. Add the sugars and beat until combined. Add the egg and milk.

In a bowl, sift the flour and baking powder together. Gently add to creamed mixture and mix until just combined. Chill dough for at least 15 minutes.

Run your hands under cold running water to cool them, then roll tablespoonfuls of dough into balls. Roll the dough balls in the sugar until covered all over, and place dough balls on a buttered baking sheet. Carefully press each ball with fork tines to create a criss-cross pattern.

Bake for 5 to 8 minutes in the preheated oven, or until the tops have puffed up and feel cooked through when you touch them. Remove from oven and cool on baking sheets for 5-10 minutes… if you can wait that long.

April 12, 2009

Pierre Hermé

Filed under: Cookies — Tags: , — emiglia @ 5:37 am

Anyone who’s been to Paris and gone to the mecca of the macaron probably recognized the box in the picture I posted yesterday.

Want to see what’s inside?

I thought so.

I had never been to Pierre Hermé before my aunt came. In fact, I was under the impression that I didn’t like macarons. They had always seemed too sweet to me, and so I avoided them and instead bought things like chausson de pommes or palmiers, my favorite French baked good.

But my aunt likes macarons, and I knew that the ones at Pierre Hermé were reputed to be amazing, so off we went to the boutique on rue Vaugirard.

The shop itself is, for lack of a better word… quiet. It’s not in a particularly upscale neighborhood like the Champs Elysées, and yet, when we walked into the store and look at the arrangements of chocolate and macarons, I felt that the only appropriate way to signal my order would be to whisper.

The macarons are beautiful to look at: many of them are dusted with a sort of shimmer dust, and I had a hard time not picking out my three just because they were beautiful.

In the end, we had to make a decision, and so, finally, we let the lady behind the counter know which we had selected.
My aunt chose salted caramel, rose, olive oil and vanilla, and jasmine. The picture above is of the first three of hers.

I decided on olive oil and vanilla, jasmine, and pistachio and black cherry. The last sounded pretty good, but I ended up taking the plunge because of the shimmer dust.
The general consensus? Delicious.

The jasmine one didn’t taste very much like jasmine: it was sweet, but that was about it. I think it was the least favorite of the selection, not because it wasn’t tasty, but because it didn’t taste like what we were expecting.

My aunt loved the rose one though, and I thought the pistachio black cherry one tasted great. The olive oil and vanilla one had a subtle olive oil flavor that we both liked a lot.
But my favorite was the one I had considered, been afraid to taste, and then run back to buy because I thought I needed it:

Wasabi and grapefruit. The wasabi scared me off a little in the beginning, but in the end, I decided it was pure genius. The sour flavors of the grapefruit and the hint of heat from the wasabi helped the macaron to move past what had, to me, always seemed like a gratuitously sweet treat to becomes something heavenly.

December 21, 2008

Fluffernutter Cookies

Filed under: Cookies — Tags: , , , — emiglia @ 10:05 pm

Sorry I don’t have pictures of this genius idea, but they were Alex’s Christmas present, and they were devoured pretty quickly.

I had made peanut butter sandwich cookies with Nutella a few months ago, but as I was cleaning out my pantry, I saw a nearly finished jar of marshmallow Fluff and had a stroke of genius: replace the Nutella with Fluff!

Fluffernutter sandwiches are apparently a predominantly East Coast thing… my roommate from Seattle had never even heard of the slightly bizarre concoction. My father, however, had made these sandwiches for us forever, so I was very used to them when I was growing up.

Fluff is something I never crave when I’m home, but the second I’m in France, it becomes unavailable, and somehow I end up persuading my mother to bring me jars of the stuff, along with American chunky peanut butter. Leave it to me to turn a perfectly normal French guy on to one of the weirdest American sandwiches.

Somehow, Fluff (pronouced “Floof” in French), has become one of Alex’s favorite foods, so I knew he would love these cookies. Feel free to use your own peanut butter cookie recipe: the cookies from this one come out sort of flat, which works for sandwiches, but they’re not that pretty on their own.

Fluffernutter Cookies

For the cookies:
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1 cup butter, softened
1 cup plus 2 tbsp. chunky peanut butter
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup sugar
2 eggs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Combine the dry ingredients and set aside.

Using a wooden spoon, combine the butter and peanut butter until well mixed: there should be no visible butter. Add the vanilla and sugars and mix well to combine. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Add the dry ingredients and stir until combined.

Using a tablespoon, make equal portions of the cookie dough. Roll them into balls between your palms (wet hands help), and place them on a greased baking tray. Using a fork (again, a bit of water helps), create hatchmarks in the tops of the cookies. Note: they WILL spread. Make sure to give them lots of room.

Bake cookies 12-15 minutes, until golden brown. Cool completely.

For the sandwiches:

Pair off the cookies so that they are in sets of two that are approximately the same size. Place one tablespoon of Fluff on one side of a cookie, and use its pair to flatten it down and create a sandwich. Note: Fluff will become softer and ooze, so make sure you serve them with napkins!

October 19, 2008

Accidental Hedonist: Nutella and Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies

Filed under: Cookies — Tags: , , , — emiglia @ 5:33 am

Check it out here!

October 24, 2007

Stephen Cooks: Chocolate Espresso “Mayan” Cookies

Filed under: Cookies — Tags: , , — emiglia @ 7:23 am

Wow… this Magazine Monday thing is not off to a good start for me. It’s because of midterms, but I know that’s no excuse… I’ve been pretty lazy with the book reviews too. Oh well… hopefully I can get back on track soon.

Anyway, two days late, my first Magazine Monday, which is really a blog (I told myself I could use blog recipes as well, because I have just as many recipes to try from y’all as I do from magazines.)

This one comes from Stephen Cooks, one of my favorite sites for food porn. I made these Espresso “Mayan” Cookies last week… but I think I did something wrong. The flavor was delicious, don’t get me wrong, but the texture left something to be desired, and mine didn’t look like Stephen’s. I tried some the next day, and they had softened a bit, which I liked. This one’s going to need a little bit of tinkering, because I loved the flavors… maybe I’ll try for something that rises a little bit more…

At any rate, the newspaper staff loved them, and when the Planet staff is happy, I’m happy.

October 2, 2007

“Forget Me Not” Sambusik Cookies

Filed under: Cookies — Tags: , , — emiglia @ 1:10 pm

“What sort of person am I? Where are my loyalties? And who will I remember when I grow up?”

An interesting note on which to end September. I meant to get through so much more of this book… post some kebab and baklava recipes, and really get into Middle Eastern cooking. I felt a bit like a failure, to be honest. But then I realized as I was rereading this passage in The Language of Baklava what Diana Abu-Jaber wanted us to understand: food is not just nourishment. Not just food for the sake of food. Food is about the rest of your life. Which brings me to this quote.

It’s a scary thing to have to think about. What kind of person am I, really? I project an outward image… I can’t think of anyone who would think of me as a bad person, per se, but I know that there are bad things I do, and more importantly, bad things I think that no one will ever know about but me.

Sometimes I start thinking about choices I’ve made along the way, friends lost but not forgotten. So it’s for them that I post these sambusik cookies. To Diana Abu-Jaber, this is what they meant. I’m hoping they can mean the same for me and for you.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Stir together one cup of clarified butter and half a cup of sugar. Add 3/4 cup of milk at room temperature. Add 4 cups of flour in small batches and knead the dough by hand until it is smooth. Roll out the dough to 1/4 inch thick and cut with a 2-inch cookie cutter. Combine 1 1/2 cups of ground walnuts, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, and a grating of nutmeg for the filling. Place a good mounded teaspoon of the filling on each round, fold it over, pinch the edges closed, and form into a crescent shape. Bake at 350 degrees for 15-20 minutes, until the cookies are lightly browned. Remove from the oven and sprinkle liberally with confectioner’s sugar.

December 9, 2006

Anne’s Food

Filed under: Cookies — Tags: , , , — emiglia @ 3:28 pm

I found the recipe for these Chocolate Chai Snickerdoodles on Anne’s Food. To be fair, they’re not her recipe, but her presentation of them made me want to try. I’ve been reading her blog for a long time. She’s Swedish, and she posts a great mix of Swedish and other dishes with easy to follow recipes and great reviews.

I love that she posts so often too. Almost every day, I can stop by and find a new recipe to try out. I definitely recommend stopping by to check it out, and while you’re at it, try these cookies!

You start out with a combination of classic chai spices including cardamom, cinnamon, allspice, ginger, and pepper. I had to make a few changes: I didn’t have white pepper or allspice, so I subbed black pepper and cloves. They still turned out delicious!

December 7, 2006

Ginger Cookies

Filed under: Cookies — Tags: , , — emiglia @ 9:39 am

“Is this gingerbread?”

“No.”

“It looks like gingerbread…”

“It’s not. It’s a cookie.”

“Are you sure?”

Yes… I’m sure, Michael. I baked them. They’re not gingerbread. They’re Bon Appetit’s Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice Cookies, and they’re delicious.

They were really easy to make: the dough took about five minutes, and then it needed to chill for “at least an hour and up to four days.” I went with two days… mostly because my baking kick died after an hour and didn’t come back until two days later.

As usual, I gifted my friends with my treats. My friend Rachael trekked the two blocks to procure some for her and her roommate, Mel, which is a lot, if you know Rachael. (I think some of it had to do with the fact that Rachael had just finished the last of the Chips Ahoy. I sure hope these were better.)

They stayed soft in the cookie jar for five days, long enough for most of them to be gone, and even now, they’re just developing a pleasant crispy texture, kind of like a ginger snap.

Mel, Rachael, and my roommate Mike all gave rave reviews, and even I, who do not usually have a sweet tooth and tend to venture more towards cheese and pickles as a snack, haven’t been able to help myself from snacking on one or two.

The secret? You wanna know? REALLY?

Black pepper.

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