No, I’m not kidding. But you’re not, like standing over them the entire thirty-six hours – in fact, nearly all of that time is spent in the fridge – it’s more that it’s just really frustrating to wait that long. I don’t know about you, but when I’m all, “OH. YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD BE GOOD. COOKIES,” I kind of want them five minutes ago, not tomorrow afternoon.

But if you can somewhere find a store of the-patience-of-a-saint, here’s how to make the best chocolate chip cookies in the world. This recipe was originally devised by David Leite for the New York Times (who says it was inspired by Jacques Torres, but if you read the article, a few more people are indicated, too), and I found the recipe via Smitten Kitchen (of course)… but I’ve made a few adaptations that should make your life marginally less stressful while making these cookies.

(That said, if you think something still looks complicated, it’s best to do it anyway. Trust me, I’ve tried every shortcut possible with these cookies, and if I didn’t include it in this adaptation, it’s because it made the cookies suck.)

Ingredients.
- 2 cups minus 2 tbsp cake flour (NON-SELF-RISING CAKE FLOUR. Check the box. Or just use Swan’s Down brand.)
- 1 2/3 cup bread flour
- 1 1/4 tsp baking soda
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1 1/2 tsp coarse salt (like, kosher salt)
- 2 1/2 sticks butter, softened
- 1 1/4 cup light brown sugar
- 1 cup plus 2 tbsp granulated (regular) sugar
- 2 eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla
- 1 pound bittersweet chocolate chips (NYT and Smitten Kitchen advocate the fancier stuff – which I’m sure tastes better – but being poor, I myself have only ever used Ghiradelli’s 60% cacao chips [which are still spendy], and they’re awesome. But DO use bittersweet, and not semisweet – it will make a difference.)

DAY ONE
1. Sift (whisk) the flours, the salt, baking powder and baking soda in a bowl. Set aside.

2. Using a mixer (you can get away with a hand mixer if you don’t have a stand mixer), cream the sugars and butter together. Cream them till they’re fluffy – about five minutes – which is long past the point where it’s a homogeneous mixture. Longer than you think. Trust me, this makes a difference.

3. Add eggs, one at a time. Make sure the first egg is thoroughly incorporated before adding the next egg.

4. Add the vanilla and mix.

5. Add dry ingredients and mix on low until the mixture is fully, uh, mixed, but no longer.

6. Add chocolate pieces. Gently mix in with a spoon, not the mixer, or you’ll break all your chocolate and end up with not-pretty chocolate shards.

7. Put dough in a fresh bowl. Cover with plastic wrap (press the plastic wrap up against the dough) and refrigerate for 24-36 hours. I promise you, this makes a difference.

DAY 2
8. Spoon golf-ball-sized lumps (YES) onto a baking sheet and sprinkle with sea salt if you want to get fancy. Bake at 350F. While SK and the NYT both say 18-20 minutes, I find when I check them at 15 minutes, they’re just starting to turn brown on the edges. They won’t look done, but this is the PERFECT time to take them out of the oven – they’ll cook just a bit more on the baking sheet. They’ll have a soft center and chewy-crispy edges.

9. Taste cookie 20 seconds after removing it from the oven because you’re really curious if they’re the best cookie ever, for real.

10. Burn mouth severely.

11. Hope anyway that you didn’t tell anyone about making these cookies, because you’re totally going to want to hoard them now and not share them.

Fast forward to Saturday, when I realized I had never practiced, and the party is this upcoming Saturday. So I checked the number of eggs in the fridge, walked to the grocery store to buy some heavy cream, and I was in business.

Here’s the thing I learned about cream puffs: I’ve always heard that making the puff part, the hollow pastry part, was the hard part. Not true! Have no idea where that came from! Because that was the super, could-not-have-been-more-easy part.

The filling – the pudding, the custard, the cream, technically known as creme anglaise or creme patissiere – that is always the hard part. I knew this going in, based on tear-inducing experiments with Boston cream pie and banana cream pie, etc., and almost copped out and just filled them with sweetened whipped cream.

But that kind of defeats the point of cream puffs, right? So I manned up and made the creme anglaise. It was so much better this time! So don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t work out for you the first time, either, and pay attention to the details of the instructions below, because they will make or break your creme anglaise.

I cobbled together this recipe from a recipe (for both) from Bakewise, by Shirley Corriher, who is a genius, and a recipe from Joyofbaking.com.

Ingredients for puffs.
- 1/2 cup all-purpose flour (DON’T use pastry flour; also, some recipes suggest bread flour to make the puff more stable, but that will toughen it, too.)
- 1/2 tsp sugar
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
- 1/2 cup water
- 2 eggs, lightly beaten

1. Preheat oven to 400F. (Temperature is really important here, so make sure your oven is calibrated, or double-check with an oven thermometer.)

2. Whisk together in a bowl the sugar, salt and flour. (This is an easy way to sift – you could also use a sifter, obviously.)

3. Place butter and water in a saucepan. Heat to boiling over medium heat. Immediately pour this into your bowl of dry stuff. Mix thoroughly – this will make a yellow paste that should pull away from the sides of the bowl. Keep mixing for a few extra seconds to get rid of some of the steam in the dough.

4. Mix in the eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly until you have a smooth, bright yellow paste.

5. Take a greased cookie sheet. Use two teaspoons to make little mounds of paste, a couple inches apart, on the cookie sheet.

6. Put the cookie sheet in your preheated oven, on the middle rack, and bake for fifteen minutes. Then turn the heat down to 350F, and bake for another twenty-five minutes or so – peek in every once in a while and make sure they’re not getting too brown.

7. Turn off heat and let the puffs sit in the (slightly open) oven for about twenty minutes. Finish cooling on cooling racks.

Ingredients for filling.
- 1 1/4 cups heavy cream
- 2 tsp vanilla
- 3 large egg yolks
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1/8 cup all-purpose flour
- scant 3 tbsp cornstarch

1. Whisk cornstarch and flour together. Set aside.

2. Mix sugar and egg yolks together until you get a bright yellow, smooth paste. Add to this the cornstarch/flour mixture and mix until smooth.

3. At the same time, heat gently the heavy cream and vanilla until boiling. Don’t let it boil past a second – don’t scald it!

4. Remove cream from heat and add to eggs in a thin steady stream, whisking constantly. This is super important, because if you don’t whisk fast or steadily enough, your egg mixture will scramble.

5. Put this mixture back over medium heat. Whisk constantly until it gets thick and hard to stir – keep whisking for about thirty seconds after that, then take it off the heat. Most recipes tell you the thickening will happen when it boils, but I find it usually gets thick before boiling (and waiting till it boils causes it to overcook, and ruins it).

6. Hurrah! You made creme anglaise. Pour into a bowl, let cool to room temperature, then refrigerate.

Putting them together.

1. Wait until both components are totally, 100% cool. Slice off the top of a puff with a bread knife. You’ll see some “webbing” through the mostly hollow interior – pull it out with your fingers. Fill with creme and replace puff top. Sprinkle with powdered sugar or drizzle with chocolate!

2. Eat with several margaritas, like we did.

This is what you make for your crush on your third date (you know, the date where they come over to your place for the first time, and you’re totally trying to give the impression that you’re such a great cook that it really isn’t even a big deal that you’re cooking dinner for them); it’s really easy, but it looks (even to the untrained eye witnessing the entire process, you know, when your date’s hanging out with you in the kitchen) super fancy and accomplished.

I think this recipe originally has its roots with Nigella Lawson, but when I went and searched for her recipe just now, to link to, it doesn’t seem to exist. Shrug.

Ingredients.
- 4 cups veggie or chicken broth (chicken will taste way better, but makes the dish off-limits for vegetarians)
- 1 cup white wine
- 1.5 cups Arborio rice
- 3 tbsp butter
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1 onion, chopped into small pieces
- 1 cup frozen peas
- 1 cup grated Parmesan or Asiago cheese
- minced garlic

1. Bring broth to a boil in saucepan; turn down heat very low and keep warm on a back burner.

2. In a small pan, heat about a tablespoon of butter and cook your frozen peas in it for about two minutes. Remove half the peas and set aside. Add a ladleful of your warm broth to the rest of the peas and cook for another five minute. Pour the whole peas-broth shebang into a food processor with about a tablespoon of cheese and another tablespoon of butter. Puree until smooth. Set aside.

3. In another small pan, heat your olive oil and saute about a tablespoon of minced garlic, and your onion. Add rice and stir until the rice gets all shiny and coated with oil and a little toasted. Add the wine and stir until absorbed.

4. When the wine is absorbed, add a ladleful of broth to the rice and stir until absorbed. Add the reserved peas now. Then add another ladleful of broth, and like before, stir until absorbed. Keep doing this until the broth is gone and the rice has magically turned into creamy risotto. This requires zero effort on your part except for stirring! But you have to be patient, and never stop stirring. This is really, really important.

5. When the broth is gone (or you’ve decided the rice is fine how it is and you’re really sick of stirring), add the pureed peas. Stir until mixed in thoroughly. Add the rest of the cheese (if you’re a little tipsy and drop the entire plastic container of cheese in the pot, no one will notice! it doesn’t have to be precise) and beat in well.

Congratulations! You made risotto. Serve with a bottle of wine, some salad and some crusty bread (or as a side dish to a steak or something). She’ll totally make out with you now.

Lessons learned: 1) cutting up a fresh pineapple is not as daunting as I thought, and 2) neither is making a brown sugar caramel sauce!

This recipe was slightly adapted from Smitten Kitchen‘s recipe, which was apparently slightly adapted from a Gourmet magazine recipe.

Ingredients.
Topping:
- 1/2 fresh pineapple, peeled, cored and cut into rings
- 3/4 stick unsalted butter
- 3/4 cup packed brown sugar (I think the original recipe called for light brown sugar, but I used dark brown, and it worked fine.)
Cake:
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 3/4 stick unsalted butter, room temperature
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 tbsp dark rum
- 1/2 cup unsweetened pineapple juice (you’ll have to buy this separately since you’re using fresh pineapple, but it’s okay, because you’ll have pineapple juice to mix with the rest of the bottle of rum!)

1. Melt butter in cast iron skillet.

2. Add brown sugar and simmer over medium heat for about five minutes. Stir the whole time.

3. Remove from heat. Arrange the fresh pineapple pieces (throw some fresh cherry pieces in there too, if you’re fancy!) on the bottom of the pan, on top of the sugar muck. Overlap the pieces and put more than you think you need – they’ll shrink in the oven.

4. Sift together flour, salt and baking powder in a large bowl. (Helpful hint: if you’re not your grandmother and don’t have a sifter, you can use a whisk — this will aerate the powders and thoroughly mix them, which is the point of sifting, anyway.)

5. Beat butter with a hand mixer in another large bowl. Beat for about three minutes, or until the butter is fluffy. Cream in the sugar, a little at a time. Add the eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly after each egg. Beat in vanilla and rum.

6. Add half of the flour mixture (give one last quick whisk first) to the butter mixture. Mix in thoroughly. Add pineapple juice, and mix thoroughly. Add the rest of the flour mixture. Beat in thoroughly. It will look curdled. Ignore this entirely.

7. Pour the whole mess over your pineapple pieces, still nicely arranged in your cast iron skillet.

8. Throw the whole skillet into your preheated 350F oven, for about 40 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cake sit in skillet for five minutes. (No longer!) Invert over plate and let cool.

Serving suggestion: Make some lightly whipped cream from scratch and spoon on top.

This cake ruled. The end.

They’re really easy and don’t take all that long to make, although you can pre-make the meat filling the night before, if you want, for an even speedier dinner.

I thought about rewriting this recipe, but then remembered how much it made me laugh the first time I read it, so I present to you the recipe for Jeff’s friggin’ sweet enchiladas, only slightly edited to get rid of some of the more offensive swear words.

Ingredients.
- 1.8ish pounds ground beef (you can substitute ground turkey if you’re totally lame) (Ed.’s note: don’t do this, it’s pretty awful, suck it up and realize that if you’re going to eat enchiladas, you’re probably going over your points for the day. The sun will still rise tomorrow.) (I feel strongly about this.)
- 1 onion, chopped up ninja-style
- 8 large flour tortillas (I bet you could use corn, but they wouldn’t be as Tex-mex.)
- Lots of shredded cheddar or monterey jack (About two bags, if you get preshredded cheese.)
- 8 ounces sour cream
- 3 jars of your favorite kind of salsa
- Cumin powder
- Minced garlic
- Chili powder
- 2 tbsp. butter
- Six-pack of your favorite choice beer
- Optional: Your favorite hot sauce (Jeff says he likes Crystal because it’s sexy.)
- Optional: Sliced jalepenos

1. Open beer number one.

2. Melt butter in large skillet with garlic and onions, until onions are tender.

3. Add beef and brown. You should be opening your second beer about three-quarters of the way through this.

4. Splash just a sip of beer into the beef just to see what it does. A real man does this with everything he cooks.

5. Reduce heat and add enough cheese to ensure cardiac arrest. (The equivalent of one of the preshredded bags.)

6. Throw in the sour cream and stir.

7. Beer number three is looking mighty fine. Mighty fine.

8. Add dry ingredients to taste. If you’re a real man, this is where you add your hot sauce.

9. Pour salsa into the bottom of the baking dish so that the bottom is covered, but save some, because you’ll need it later.

10. Take a spoon and put the gluey meat mixture into the tortillas. Roll them up and put them seam-down into the pan. Repeat until the meat mixture is all used up.

11. Take some more salsa and and cover the tops of your dude-guys. Then, cover the top with cheese until it’s tough to see the salsa. Finally, add a little more cheese because that’s how we roll.

12. You can throw some of those jalepeno wheels on top if you think the bitches will appreciate that colorful stuff. Also, I’m hoping by this point you’ve taken the initiative and continued along with your beers.

13. Place into the oven at like 350 degrees or something, because this baking sheet is probably too big for your microwave. It should take about 20-30 minutes for everything to get all bubbly and hot.

14. Remove from the oven.

15. Consume with the rest of the 30-pack that I KNOW you bought instead of the sixer I said to get. Good man.

Anyway, my point is that sometimes, here, it’s much easier to eat out. I do most of my cooking at Jeff’s apartment, but nearly every time he comes to the city we eat out. Sometimes it’s just a salad from the Italian market across the street, or a burrito from the Chipotle a couple blocks away, but occasionally we go to an actual restaurant. One of our favorites – actually, one of my favorites since the first autumn I lived here – is Veselka.

Located on the Lower East Side (i.e. forty-five minutes from my apartment, but worth the trip) at 2nd Avenue and E. 9th St., Veselka is in the middle of a little cluster of Eastern European eateries and stores. I think it’s made itself the most accessible and mainstream of these, but it still has the best (if not always the most authentic) food of the bunch. It bills itself as Ukrainian, but it’s really more an amalgamation of Eastern European food in general.

The portions are huge and the food is incredible, as long as you like food like stroganoff or goulash, borscht (I don’t care if you don’t like beets, you should try it anyway, and vegetarians don’t get off the hook because they make a meatless version), and pierogi.

Order pierogi as your appetizer (fried, not boiled; with both applesauce and sour cream), borscht as one of your sides (trust me on this), and don’t bother with the desserts (they’re terrible), and it’ll be one of your favorite restaurants, too.

My “recipe” is an amalgamation of techniques from Nik, chicken-roaster extraordinaire; Alice Waters (from her book The Art of Simple Cooking); and the most recent issue of Fine Cooking.

Here it goes:

- Buy a chicken. Make sure it’s organic, and really organic, not a Tyson chicken in a different wrapper that costs three bucks more.

- Unwrap said chicken the night before you actually want to eat it. Take out the sweetbreads or innards or whatever the hell they are from the inside. Rinse the chicken under cold water.

(Tip: when emptying the chicken, don’t look inside the chicken neck to see if you got it all, or a crucial part of the chicken’s internal anatomy [like, I don't know, THE HEART] may fall out and merrily bounce across the kitchen floor, not that that happened to me once, and not that it caused me to hand that chore over to Jeff for, um, forever.)

- Liberally salt and pepper the chicken on the inside and the outside; if you have some dried rosemary and thyme, pat that on there too. Slit the chicken skin and put slices of garlic inside there. Cut a few lemons in half, squeeze into the chicken, and then put the spent lemon halves inside the chicken. Refrigerate (covered, obvs) overnight.

- Preheat your oven to 450. Throw the chicken onto the rack in your roasting pan and – this part is crucial, guys – make sure it’s breast-side-down. Put it into your preheated oven. Roast for 35 minutes. Stand by your smoke detector and fan frantically because yes, the chicken will sound like it’s exploding as the grease sizzles, and it will get kinda smoky in your kitchen.

- After 35 minutes, flip the chicken over and place it back on the roasting rack breast-side-up. Use a big pair of tongs. It is not as scary as it might seem. Continue roasting until the internal temperature (stick the meat thermometer in the thickest part of the chicken for this) registers between 165 and 170F.

- Place on a carving board (or a cutting board with one of those little moats on it) and tent it with foil. Let it sit for about fifteen minutes before you cut into it.

THE END. You have yourself a fancy roast chicken. Consider your friends and family officially impressed.

(The header picture for this website is actually a photo of my inaugural roast chicken, made almost exactly like this.)

1. I am awesome at making desserts, and I like to talk about it a lot.
2. I am not so great at making things without a lot of brown sugar and chocolate in them, but I’m getting better at it. My boyfriend, on the other hand, is a great cook. I also like to talk about these things a lot. (He doesn’t, because he’s too busy working on his website, which has nothing to do with cookies or fried chicken [unfortunately], but you should check it out anyway.)
3. I read a lot of food blogs, and actually plain old cookbooks, too, for fun, and get curious enough to try to make a lot of the things I read about, even if I’m not entirely sure what half of the ingredients are before I start.

So! Between the above reasons and my desire to create yet another form of procrastination for myself, I rigged up this blog to tell you all about the pratfalls and missteps in my journey to become to next Nigella Lawson / Martha Stewart hybrid.

For this inaugural post, I wanted to tell you about a totally awesome and deceptively easy recipe I came across on The Wednesday Chef, who credits it to Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez of Lassi, an Indian restaurant in the West Village that, as of yet, I have been too poor to go to. Chana punjabi: I think “chana” translates to “chickpea”, but I’m not sure what “punjabi” translates to. My guess would be “effing good”, based on this recipe. It’s similar to a dish I’ve had before called chana masala, but I’m not sure if it’s exactly the same. Anyway, it’s (very) spicy, tomato-ey, vegan, and will impress the ladies. (Jeff was impressed.)

Notes: Though the recipe serves two, we doubled this recipe to serve the same, on recommendation from the original posting on The Wednesday Chef. However, we ended up having food for multiple meals over three days. (We did not mind.) Double at your own discretion.

Also, if you’re confused by “garam masala” and are perhaps not sure if it is a spice or a flour or a vegetable or, if you’re asking a Shop-Rite employee, possibly made-up (not that this happened to me): it is a spice. You’re welcome.

Chana Punjabi.
Courtesy of The Wednesday Chef

Ingredients:
- 1 tablespoon canola oil (I used olive oil, and it worked just fine.)
- 1 onion, chopped
- 2 teaspoons minced garlic
- 2 teaspoons minced ginger
- 1 small Thai bird chili or jalapeno, chopped (We used some random pepper we found in the produce section; once again, could have been spicier, but it worked just fine.)
- 2 large tomatoes, chopped OR 14-ounce can of chopped (diced, puree, whatever; doesn’t matter) tomatoes
- 1.5 teaspoons paprika (the spicy kind, not the sweet Hungarian kind)
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoons coriander
- 0.5 teaspoon garam masala
- 0.25 teaspoon tumeric
- 1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
- 2 15-ounce cans of chickpeas, drained
- 2 tablespoons minced cilantro

1. Put the oil in a saucepan (skillet, whatever), and saute the chopped onion until it’s nice and… sauteed. You know. Clear-ish and soft. Add the pepper, the garlic and the ginger; saute for a few more minutes, until the pepper softens a little. Add the tomatoes and 0.25 cup of water. Cook the whole mess for about three or four more minutes. Turn off the heat.

2. Put the whole shebang through your food processor until it’s all pureed. (If you have a small food processor, you may have to do this in two batches.)

3. Put the tomato mixture back on the stove; add the rest of the ingredients except for the cilantro. Bring to a boil, and then immediately turn the heat to low.

4. Simmer on low until the sauce thickens a little, and the chickpeas soften through. This should take about 45 minutes to an hour. Spoon over rice (basmati if you’re fancy like us), top with cilantro, and make sure you have a cold beer to cut the spice.

Seriously, guys, the best Indian food I’ve ever had, and I made it myself.