chez pim

Jazz Fest Love

Pebble Beach Food & Wine, see you this weekend?

  

I'm going to be here this weekend.  See you there?

The best chocolate chips cookies ever?

 

Once in a while, along comes a recipe that changes the name of the game.  Jim Lahey's no-knead bread recipe published by Mark Bittman in the NY Times two years ago was one.  It got so many cooks - who hitherto dared not touch yeast bread - to fashion themselves a veritable French boulanger, baking loafs after loafs of crackly, crusty bread, and even turning more than a few of them into petty thieves.  Then, a few months ago, the Times struck again, this time with a chocolate chips cookies recipe that purported to be no less than perfection itself.

The key to that recipe?  A little patience, said the indomitable David Leite who penned the piece.  Let me just tell you that it was quite an understatement.  Unlike the good Mr.Leite, I don't live in a world where restraining oneself from devouring, entirely raw, the whole batch of chocolate chips cookie dough during the 36 hours called for in the recipe constitutes a little patience.  And not just any chocolate chips cookie dough, mind you, but one so rich, so deliciously salty-sweet, and so -ever, ever so- tempting.  In my world, chocolate chips cookie dough can speak.  And it's calling my name - the whole, half a box of scrabble's worth of alphabets in my name.

So, did I give in, you asked?  Of course I did.  Although not entirely, I should give myself credit.  I waited 24 hours before I baked my first small batch, and the rest managed to last the 36 hours required.  And, no, no, that little elf that kept sneaking into the fridge to steal mini bites of the cookie dough was not me.  Not me at all.  It must have been my cat Ella, in her human/elven suit.  True story.