Sweets – The Civilized Lunch Project

3 Hacks for Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies

Sometimes I hesitate to blog about baking or cooking because there’s already such a wealth of great info and inspiration available. But other times, I feel motivated by small insights that radically improve what I’m making. These powerful little tricks are worth repeating. I enjoy doing my part to get the word out. So if you love thin chocolate chip cookies with crispy edges and soft centers, I’m here to share 3 hacks for making the world’s best chocolate chip cookies.

Melt your butter
Chill your dough for at least 2 hours before baking
Put the racks in the top and lower thirds of your oven and rotate the pans from top to bottom and back to front at the halfway point of your bake time.

I got these game-changers, along with the recipe, from the queen of cookie baking, Alice Medrich.

Ingredients:

2-1/4 C All Purpose Flour

1 tsp baking soda

16 Tbsp unsalted butter

3/4 C granulated sugar

3/4 C packed brown sugar

1 tsp salt

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 cups chocolate chips (I subbed in a bag of Health Bar pieces)

1 C chopped pecans or walnuts (optional)

Directions:

Set oven at 375F

Whisk together flour and baking soda and set aside

Cut butter into pieces and melt on stovetop

In a separate bowl, mix together the sugars. Stir in the melted butter. Using a hand mixer, beat in the salt, eggs, and vanilla until the ingredients are well mixed and glossy, about two minutes.

Stop the mixer. Continue the next step by hand: adding the flour mixture to the sugar mixture. Incorporate flour, but don’t over mix.

Add chips and nuts. I substituted Health Bar toffee pieces instead of chocolate chips. I love how the caramel in the Heath Bar pieces melts and makes the cookies extra crispy and delicious. I typically don’t add nuts. But if you love them, add them!

Chill dough for at least 2 hours. Medrich recommends overnight, but I get great results if I just wait 2 hours. Remove dough from the refrigerator and let it soften up a bit before baking. I use a large spoon or small ice cream scoop to drop the dough onto the baking sheet.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, rotating pans between shelves and turning them front to back at the half-way mark.

Remove from oven. Cool for about a minute before transferring with a wide spatula onto a sheet of parchment.

Voila! Happy baking. I hope you enjoy these.

Pretty Pistachio Tart

Sweets

While I’ve often seen beautiful green pistachios gracing the top of ooey-gooey baklava in specialty mediterranean bakeries, I don’t ever recall seeing a pistachio tart recipe like this one on Epicurious. What a great alternative to your standard-issue pecan pie. (At least, that was my hope.) Unfortunately, my first effort didn’t come out very well. The filling was delicious, but the crust was lacking in flavor and cakey. I had hoped for buttery and flaky. But before I expand on that, here’s a quick overview of what’s involved:

Bowls filled with flour, an egg, sugar, and butter to make a tart crust.

Make the crust by blending 1 1/3 C flour, 1/4 C sugar, 1 egg, 4 Tbsp butter, 1 Tbsp water.

Pie dough pressed into a springform pan to make a tart.

Press the dough into a springform pan.

Little plates filled with pecans, eggs, pistachios, and brown sugar, alongside a bottle of vanilla and a small pan with two pats of butter.

Make the filling by stirring together: 3/4 C brown sugar, 2 large eggs, 2 Tbsp unsalted melted butter, 3/4 C chopped pistachios, 1 Tsp vanilla (the recipe calls for a vanilla bean, but I didn’t have one). I also didn’t have enough pistachios, so I partially subbed in pecans.

Pie filling poured into an uncooked pie shell.

Pour the filling into the shell. Arrange 1/2 C whole pistachios on the filling. Cover with foil and bake at 350 for 35 minutes. Remove foil and cook 15 minutes more. Cool for 10 minutes and remove from the pan.

As you can see, it’s a very pretty tart. I’m sure the issue of the mediocre crust can be fixed by using a different recipe combined with the filling from Epicurious. I think something more like a traditional shortbread cookie would do the trick. I’ll update this once I’ve found a good substitute and given it a try. For now, this shortbread tart shell recipe on Blossom to Stem looks very promising, especially since the author based it on some techniques from the queen of cookie baking, Alice Medrich. I swear her Cookies and Brownies book is foolproof. I think I’ve made every one of the recipes, and never had anything but absolute success. (Her big hack is that she always melts her butter before blending it into dry ingredients.) The result is crispier cookies with a wonderfully soft center.

If you get inspired to try this and decide to substitute the crust with a different recipe, let me know how it comes out. I do think there’s a really great idea here, especially for holiday entertaining.

Carrot Pudding

Sweets

It’s All About Your POV

One of my favorite things about cooking is when I get a “wild idea” to try something that I’ve never heard of before. It makes me feel like an alchemist magician or a genius chef worthy of my own legion of TikTok followers. There’s also something about the experience that takes me back to childhood and the ability to get lost in the realm of unfettered imagination. Making up recipes uplifts me. It’s transformative. It’s Willy Wonka meets Julia Child. It makes the sun shine on a cloudy day.

When I get these spontaneous ideas I try to resist using Google until after the experiment is over. Later, when I do some actual research, my harebrained schemes typically prove to be longstanding traditions in another part of the world. Case in point: carrot pudding.

This particular adventure began with some leftover cream of carrot soup that I made for Thanksgiving. I was inspired to turn it into a sweet pudding after tasting a bite straight from the fridge. With a generous spoonful of honey and some chopped pecans on top, it becomes a truly ambrosia-like sweet that is downright healthy!

After a quick search, it turned out that there are many carrot pudding recipes out there. The one that really appeals to me, and that is somewhat similar to the way I made my carrot pudding, is a North Indian sweet treat called Gajar Ka Halwa. I’m so excited to discover this recipe because I think it will be even more delicious than what I made. I can’t wait to buy more carrots.

In the meantime, there are some intriguing aspects to my own tangential culinary approach, so I’m going to share a couple of observations. Since my pudding began as a cream of carrot soup, my initial steps were to roast two cooking sheets full of carrots and combine them in a blender with a cup full of caramelized yellow onions. I blended these together with some beef broth, salt, cream, garlic powder, and cumin to taste. My onions had a bit of unintentional char, but that added a nice smoky note to the soup.

I really, really love caramelized onions and try to have a container full of them in my refrigerator at all times. They can be time intensive to prepare and require some patience, so I find that cooking them ahead in big batches is the way to go. I know that my carrot pudding would have tasted quite a bit different had the onions not been present, and I’m willing to venture that after further experiments, I may decide that onions are a necessary ingredient. It’s a bit like the effect of sea salt on caramel ice cream. You know?

Part 2. Carrot Pudding, Indian Style

Well, so much for speculation! I made the OG carrot pudding Gajar Ka Halwa, mentioned above. It is terrific and highly superior to my crazy concoction. (Certainly, no onions are required or desired, although it might be worth a third experiment.)

Like Butter

Sweets

I’m frustrated that my efforts to eat a proper lunch every day, and to write about this simple pleasure, have gone off the rails . I mean, what could be more basic than heating up some leftovers around midday, sitting down in a civilized fashion to enjoy the meal, and writing a few quick words?

Well, in the modern-day work paradigm, it’s the basic civilities that seem to go by the wayside. I vaguely recall an era (five years ago?) when it was generally understood that work meetings during the Noon-1 pm zone were to be avoided. The lunch hour was sacred. It was not only a time to nourish oneself, but to stretch one’s legs—and to step outside the office for a glimpse of the sky and the greater world at large.

Today, in the working remotely Zoom era, lunchtime meetings are unapologetically scheduled on the regular. Maybe the widespread belief is that you can always just turn off your video and mute yourself while cramming food in your mouth? The excuse (which is no longer even offered) is that it is “the only time when everyone is available.” No duh! Why? Because it’s lunch time. Sigh.

No matter how exasperating, I see little hope of dissuading this terrible new trend. The only “solution” is accepting the situation and shifting one’s lunch time accordingly. Sometimes lunch might have to be at 10:30. Other days at 4 pm. Just go with it workers! Do you feel me? You’re lucky to be employed. Be grateful.

Oh, and another thing: your window to eat lunch might only be five or ten minutes, so you’ll need to have a lot of things that reheat quickly, or maybe don’t need any heat at all. And maybe broaden your definition of what constitutes lunch entirely. For example, have you considered cookies? Cookies, in certain situations, can be almost as good (or better) than a power bar. Case in point: the oatmeal cookie!

Aside from being absolutely delicious, the oatmeal cookie may offer a heavy dose of emotional comfort. That is certainly true for me. No cookie (or food, really) more vividly recalls my grandmother Margaret’s limitless love and affection than an oatmeal cookie. She adored oatmeal cookies and made sure that there was always a ready supply.

So, if I’m ever feeling blue, or just craving a treat, it’s no surprise that making some oatmeal cookies is one of the first things that comes to mind. Just the scent of cinnamon, vanilla and brown sugar filling my kitchen as I make the dough brings her presence to life. I can still conjure the feeling of my cheek snuggling against her soft cotton dresses when I was a little girl. The best all-encompassing feeling of pure love in all of this world!

I’m not entirely sure what recipe my grandmother used, or if she even used a recipe—some members of my family swear it came from the back of the iconic Quaker Oatmeal box. That sounds right to me. I can easily picture her starting with that and modifying it as she saw fit, meaning extra raisins and nuts, and maybe a heavy hand with the brown sugar, too.

Given that there’s not a signature oatmeal cookie recipe in my family history, I feel no guilt in saying that I have found a recipe (or maybe just a methodology) that is even better than my grandmother’s. If you really, truly want to make the world’s most heavenly cookies then you need look no further than Alice Medrich’s Cookies and Brownies. Seriously people!

This is the cookie book that will change your cookie-making game. What’s Medrich’s big secret? Melted butter! Almost every one of her recipes advises melting your butter before adding it to the dry ingredients. And having made nearly every recipe in her book more than once, I can testify to their deliciousness.

Melting the butter versus creaming room-temperature butter into dry ingredients yields thin cookies with a chewy center and crunchy edges. In my view, that’s cookie perfection.

However, the perfection of Alice Medrich’s cookies in no way undermines my grandmother’s most powerful ingredient: her unconditional love. The memory of making cookies in her warm, cozy kitchen fills me with joy.

Her love is inextricably linked with oatmeal cookies whether I’m using her recipe or not. And it’s why oatmeal cookies are the ultimate comfort food for me during these sometimes lonely, sad and exhausting times of remote overworking from home during the Age of Covid.

So if you have a cookie craving, or like me, you’re short on time for a proper lunch, or just feeling a bit down, order a copy of Medrich’s book and give her oatmeal cookie recipe a try. Having a batch (or two) at the ready is the ultimate defense.