Peru beans, avocado salad, cold rib-eye steak, chocolate chip cookies

Three different things happen at once. Can you handle it? Can you handle it? 

I never saw Peru beans before. One cup swelled overnight to one pint and began to foam.

I bet these things will germinate within just a few days.

I saw them at the grocery in bulk bins for 5¢ per metric ton. Or possibly $1.50 pound, I forget. 

On the other hand, the bacon is incredibly expensive. Nobody pays this much for bacon, it's not even reasonable, so cost-wise the combination of the two ingredients is strange.

The camera worked overtime tonight. Between this and that the camera and phone took shots of the sunset interspersed at forty seconds. It's only 78 frames, and for some reason stopped and had to be restarted.

Ding. Cookies done.

Dark and white chocolate chip cookies

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Have you ever seen cookies made by just dumping things in?

Dumping is a form of measuring.

And following cellular memory like a child down a park lane is the same thing as adhering to printed recipe.

I was munching on these two bags of chips in the pantry like a mouse and I thought, you know what, I better use these chocolate chips for something before they're gone. That's why the bags are so wrinkly.  

I pinched some salt from a box and sprinkled it in the dough but didn't show it. You know, when you have a lot of sugar like this then you must have some salt in there too or else it turns out too one-dimensionally saccharine. Salt gives the whole thing a boost.

Baking soda does more than make things rise when mixed with an acid. It keeps baked things soft. For softer cookies then more baking soda. For crisper cookies such as to dip in milk, coffee, Ovaltine, what have you, then less baking soda. It is not used as a leaven  for this cookie, there is no coacting acid for that, rather, baking soda is used to adjust pH and to affect the behavior of flour and browning. Try a little bit of dough without baking soda and see the difference between them for yourself. The difference is not apparent until completely cooled.

This time I creamed the sugar into the egg instead of into the butter, then added softened butter to that. The result of doing this out of order from printed recipes, while adding flour in increments was the softest cookie dough I ever stirred. I kept adding flour and it kept being soft and luxurious until the dough stiffened but it was a little bit sad having to keep going bit by bit to make such beautiful silky dough more dry stiff and coarse. 

Chocolate chip cookies

Coffee enhances chocolate. So does vanilla. Cinnamon because, eh, why not? 

Tonight, of the reasonable spices considered and rejected were, nutmeg, mace, cardamon, clove, allspice, ginger, cayenne. No mint.

No raisins this time, no craisins, no currants, dried mango, apricot, banana.

I am sticking to a basic recipe this time except for these two things and only in trace amounts. 

Chocolate chip cookies come out of me like breathing, they drip from my fingertips. Were I to spin around there'd be a chocolate chip tornado picked up by Doppler radar. 

Here's the thing, any recipe on the back of a sack of chocolate chips will do. You will notice the amount of chips called for equals one and a half bags of chocolate chips. Clever of them, eh? 

The recipe will also call for two sticks of butter. 

That makes it easy to half the recipe by using one stick instead, and 3/4 bag of chocolate chips instead. One egg instead of two. 3/4 cup both white and brown sugar combined instead of 3/4 cup both types sugar. Resist falling into their trap of producing more cookies than needed. 

Half recipe makes about one dozen nice size cookies. This made fourteen. 

Three bags of chips and double the recipe, and use a whole pound of butter instead of two sticks for four dozen cookies instead of two dozen. 

But why make so many, you got a Cub Scout den meeting to host? 

A family that doesn't get enough sugar? Spin around, another dozen spills out of you.

Just as I am writing this I notice an ad on t.v. depicting a family cheerfully lovingly making cookies, women gleefully making them, impressed males enjoying eating them, everyone smiling,  and then they show M&M type chocolate chips and commercial refrigerator dough as if their dough and candy chocolate chips are the only way to achieve cookies that predated their intervening products. They interject themselves between you and cookies and depict families having homemade cookies insinuating the only way possible by their intervening industrialized commercial heavily marketed products.

Chocolate chip cookies

Quintessentially American, if you do not care for these cookies, you risk forfeiting your U.S. citizenship. That happened to my niece. One little careless Facebook post and BLAM there was Immigrations asking her all kind of questions. 

A big pile of dough calls for two sticks of butter but I did not want that much so I substituted two ounces of lard. The commercial dough that you can buy uses vegetable oil.

Less sugar than online recipes cite, both white and brown, creamed with butter and lard and with two eggs added to that.

Wet ingredients, dry ingredients, chocolate chips, nuts.

Dry ingredients into wet ingredients.

Three pounds of dough. The commercial package of dough used earlier was one pound and the cost was $3.50, thereabouts. So, $10.50 worth of cookie dough if that means anything. They also sell larger tubes but I did not check the cost of those. 

This detail means nothing, it's just that I liked it.

These homemade chocolate cookies are better than the cookies made with the commercial dough that is available and so convenient. 

Mind, I'm not complaining about that commercial cookie dough, making this was a pain in the butt and left a mess for me to clean, but these are qualitatively better. The commercial cookies dissolve in your mouth like sugar melting, you do get the sense the dough is half sugar at least. Too much like cotton candy. These are more substantial.

This dough uses less sugar than usual cookie recipes call for and this has cinnamon added which is not called for. Additionally, the chocolate is much richer than milk chocolate mini kisses and this chocolate has slightly more cocoa fat, thus discs that flatten out and not peaks like chocolate kisses have by being squirted out. These cookies are altogether more robust.