so hungry boyfriend has been working like a crazy man the past couple weeks so i have been cooking like a crazy woman cuz thats what i do to occupy my time constructively. the past week i have made pie crust, quiche, the best damn chocolate chip cookies ever, muffins, primavera sauce, salsa, strata, bagels….and i can’t really remember what else…oh yea- strawberry cake! busy busy culinary me!
out of these projects i feel like the chocolate chip cookies were def. one of the top picks in yummy-ness. i read the nytimes (best newspaper ever! i’m a totally nytimes junkie even though i live 800 miles from nyc…) food section expose on the ultimate chocolate cookie recipe and this was it….they surveyed top fancy-schamncy bakeries about their cookie methodology and they all had one trait in common- real butter and overnight refrigeration. so i had to try it. they recipe i made had sea salt both in the dough and sprinkled over the cookies which kicked ass! totally set off the sweetness for that intensity of sweet flavor. soft, chewy, chocolate-y; this is my new standby cookie recipe. i think this week i am going to try to adapt this recipe to a peanut butter cookie. i made the joy of cooking peanut butter cookie recipe a few weeks ago, and they lacked the chewy softness that i need in a cookie….this nytimes recipe, however, could be just the thing i need. i’ll keep you posted!
another top pick in yummy-ness would have to be the bagels. i love bagels. i am a yankee from the tri-state area. this is our culture’s standby choice for breakfast every day. i would be perfectly satisfied if i ate a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast every single morning for the rest of my life. it is a northern thing. hungry boyfriend likes them too. i like to pack him gourmet breakfasts & lunches for work. he has the best lunches among his co-workers, i am certain of it! all those other scientists with their cold pizza….poor them…only the best for my man! it is a good culinary challenge for me too…this week i am going to experiment with wrap sandwiches…anywaaaaays, back to bagels. i have been in a rut of muffins lately- it was time to mix it up and get back to my bagel-eating roots. so i tried my hand at bagels, cinnamon sugar bagels to be specific. and they turned out awesome! i took a workshop on bagels and bialys at the bread festival last year, and i learned how to commercially make bagels. very valuable skill, but it is simply not logistically possible to make 6 dozen bagels with my lil’ kitchen aid artisan mixer and my petite oven that won’t even fit a standard half pan (i have a mini-kitchen- all appliances are 30% smaller than normal- thats whatcha get with a one bedroom apartment in the avl). so i had to do some major culinary math to tone down my yield. i ended up making 8 bagels…perfect! it was really fun and surprisingly easy…it is a bit time consuming, i.e. the longer you let the dough rise, the better; but those are not labor intensive hours by any means. the trick with bagels is boiling them in a sugar water or malt syrup water to get that chewy interior before baking. then you must move them from boiling to the oven as quickly as possible to get maximum rise. i had to do two batches, so the boiling and baking process took about an hour; but for an individual with a normal sized oven, it would have been half that. my bagels could have risen a bit higher i think, but not bad at all for a first try! they taste pretty damn good too 
i am looking forward to a week of homemade bagels!!!
well, i better get to packing hungry boyfriend’s lunch…mondays are super early days blahhhhrrrgggg….
love ~ s
