Yesterday at the natural food store in Flagstaff, AZ, Aurora and I came upon Spirulina "cookies," mostly green, containing no flour or eggs or diary, they were square, squishy, refrigerated, wrapped in cellophane -- we didn't have the guts to try them (not at $2.99 per).

With stress on the momentary rise here because Aurora's parents had to prepare to attend a pot-luck mystery party (set in the 1980s financial crisis), I decided a half batch was in order. Again I was deeply satisfied by the reliability of the recipe. Unfortunately, Aurora's parents left before the cookies were ready and we ate them all (except for a token two out of eighteen) before they returned home.

While they were out and I was preparing tomato sauce and pasta, I received a phone call from David and Stewart, still on the road, staying at a boarding school where a friend works in the administration. They wanted to know a bread recipe, which we couldn't remember either, and the talk quickly turned to cookies and previous posts here in particular. David agrees with me, although I think his opinion is a little more vehement, that we've lost sight of our original intentions by focussing on the salty chocolate oat cookies. Stewart disagrees, he is doing soul-searching by continuing to experiment, he said, melting dark chocolate instead of using cocoa powder and substituting cocoa nibs for chips -- by a cosmic coincidence the nibs, given to him by his aunt, come from Theo Chocolate in Seattle, which I visited during my stay in the rainy city, before which I had never heard of nibs. He says, we are spreading the gospel on the two coasts, the finer points of which we will have to continue to debate over the Christmas holiday when the three of us will be in Boston. Stewart will be working at Clear Flour Bakery in Brookline and I hope we will be able to steal some time on the equipment to search our souls on a grander scale.

Last night I made a good old-fashioned half batch (with just white flour and minus white sugar), dee-licious! I had lost track of my values, trying to make those darned chocolate cookies -- I made them again the other night, this time with melted Callebaut chocolate (1/2 pound), and again they were crumbly and too salty (1 tablespoon of Baliene course). I'm putting the recipe aside for a little while to do some soul-searching.

Stewart called from the road in Maine (he couldn't remember the exits), he and David are at the house now, moving the deck furniture out of the elements.  They've started a band, figured out how to use the heat (two months too late), and I assume are enjoying an half batch themselves.

I have a cold and so tonight I made apple sauce (from a few different apples and a pear).  I discovered Aurora's mother's copy of the The Tassajara Bread Book, relevant to all cooking and baking endeavors, in it there is a poem that begins like this:

A COMPOSITE OF KITCHEN NECESSITIES

Bring food alive with your

loving presence.

To have compassion, to have respect

for fresh foods, for broken bowls,

for dirty napkins, and little bugs.

To take care of leftovers,

not saying, oh that's all right, we have plenty

we can throw that away.

Because everything is saying love me, 

have compassion, hold me gently.

Please hug me now and then

(we're really one, not two),

but don't get attached

(we're really two, not one).

The bowls and knives, the table, the teapot,

the leftovers, the molding vegetables,

the juicy fruit,

everything is asking this of you:

make full use,

take loving care

of me.

The cups, the glasses, the sponges,

the sticky honey jar,

all asking to fulfill.

Just to make deepest love all the time,

concentrating not on the food, but on yourself:

making your best effort to allow things

to fulfill their functions.  In this way

everything is deliciously full

of warmth and kindness.

I've been on the road for two weeks...

My first night in Seattle, I was going to make cookies but a friend of the friend I was staying with is allergic to gluten (flour, oats), dairy (semisweet chips), soy (Earth Balance), peanuts, corn, practically everything.  After consulting with Aurora, I made her mother's chocolate cake:

3 eggs

1 cup coconut milk (instead of buttermilk)

long squirt of honey

1-3/4 cup (gluten-free) flour

1-1/2 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup cocoa

2 tsp baking soda

dash of salt

The recipe calls for a cup of coffee, which provides most of the cake's flavor, but I didn't have time for it, and the end result was bland but happily devoured with a Dagoba Lavender bar. Despite my precautions, the allergic friend had migraines for the rest of my stay in Seattle and is maybe still having them.

My only other (not quite) cookie experience before leaving the rainy city was a delicious cone of bourgeois cookies and cream ice cream from Molly Moon's -- peppermint ice cream with Girl Scout thin mint cookies -- mmm!

 

Then I headed south to San Francisco, where I set up a mobile cookie unit, carrying all the ingredients for the Chocolate Salty Oat knock-offs around with me in my backpack (except the eggs and butter which I left in the knowing hands of Providence to make available to me).  I made them three times, first for friends at UCSF, then for a dinner party in Berkeley and last for my family in Sonoma on the night before Thanksgiving, when we celebrate Hanukkah (we also got a mint chocolate chip and oreo cookie ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins decorated with a menorah).  The only change worth noting was in the batch for my family, I used a Trader Joe's Pound Plus dark chocolate bar chopped into chunks instead of chips.  The next day, my cousins chatted me up about the idea to start a cookie business, maybe out of a truck in New York -- I tried to explain to them that the secret ingredient to any successful cookie venture is Stewart's charm and good looks.

I brought the mobile cookie unit with me on the plane to Arizona, smuggling the 4 oz. bottle of vanilla in my back pocket through the security check.  They searched my backpack, feeling my flour for anything I might have hidden in there but without opening my Quaker Oats tube, where I hid my chips and baking powder.  I was nervous and talked a mile a minute about how a friend and I are looking for a space to open a bakery in New York.  Nothing was confiscated.

My family had many opinions on how to improve the recipe, some methodological, others about ingredients and proportions.  On Sunday in Flagstaff, where I am now, I made the recipe again with an extra 1/4 cup of butter.  They came out better but still too crumbly.  Next, I'm going to try replacing coconut flakes with coconut milk and/or try using melted chocolate instead of cocoa powder.