Mundane, pointless, but I definitely feel the need to share.
Mom had some surgery last week, so she’s been hanging out with me in NYC, so as to be closer to her doctors. The doctors sent her home Saturday, but she has to come back tomorrow (Wednesday) for a follow-up procedure. To make her feel better, I decided to show the love by doing something I don’t often do: cook.
The last time I actually used my stove, other than to heat water for Ramen noodles, was some time last year when I made a misguided attempt to prepare hamburgers. So this should give you an idea of my cooking experience. Still, I wanted to show mom I love her by making something she might actually enjoy. Since we both have a sweet tooth, I thought cookies might be cool.
So I hopped over to Epicurious. I wanted to make something I never made before, so I settled on this recipe for chocolate chocolate chip cookies. I made a list and headed over to Gristede’s for supplies.
I don’t know how many of you have ever shopped at a New York City supermarket, but your selection tends to be a bit abbreviated. I had trouble locating “unsweetened Dutch process cocoa powder” and there was nothing on the shelves that was labelled as such, so I just guessed. I couldn’t find “bittersweet chocolate” either, so I just grabbed a couple packages of gourmet chocolate chunks. I seemed to be able to locate pretty much everything else, though.
When I got home, I scrubbed up and started following the directions. I didn’t have the double boiler that the recipe called for to melt the chocolate (gimme a break, I’m a lifelong bachelor, for chrissakes), so I thought I’d just take the pot I normally use to prepare Spaghetti-Os, fill it with water and put this stainless steel mixing bowl I have on top of it. No dice - I looked through my cabinets and, evidently, little sis kleptoed the mixing bowl. That’s probably justified, because if I’ve ever used the thing, it was because all the cereal bowls were dirty. So I decide to use the nuker to melt the chocolate. After 10 minutes on 30% power, the chocolate was soft enough to stir together. All of a sudden, I realize “Oh, crap! I was supposed to add butter to that!” I sliced in a stick of butter and thankfully, the chocolate was hot enough to melt the butter as well.
So, now I’ve got everything mixed together and I’m chilling the dough in the fridge. I realize that I don’t have “parchment paper” (whatever that is) to line my baking sheet. At that point, I wasn’t even sure I had a baking sheet. So I went through the pile of cooking stuff my mom gave to me as a gift when I moved in and found a flat piece of stainless steel, which I rubbed margarine all over.
After the dough was done chilling, I plopped down some “rounded tablespoon measures” on the cookie sheet and stuck the thing in the oven. Big problem - it wouldn’t get hot. No surprise as I haven’t used the damned thing in over a year. So I figure that the pilot light isn’t lit and that I need to figure out where that is and get it lit again. 10 minutes of Internet research later, I figured it out and the oven is well on its way to being preheated to 350 degrees. Woo hoo!
An hour later, I have a bunch of cookies cooling on paper towels all over every inch of available counter space. The cookie sheet got re-used four times to prepare four batches. Now I have a bunch of cookies that actually taste like they might have been purchased in a store, but they’re so misshapen that they couldn’t have been prepared by anyone other than me.
Mom’s going to be so surprised tomorrow…
Told you it was mundane and pointless, but I was so happy with myself that I had to share. Normally, Bisquick pancakes are about as complex as I get.
