Best Cookies in the World, Scout's Honor

The Girl Scout cookie boxes arrived, I opened them, inhaled that sharp mint and chocolate aroma and dove right in. It’s the same story each year, but I’ve come to realize that nothing will ever taste as good as that first Thin Mint from 1970-something. I remember thinking it was the best cookie ever made - chocolatey, minty, crispy. I continue to buy the boxes each year, hoping that the cheap waxy chocolate against my teeth will take me back to those days of peasant tops, bell bottoms and tri-color Keds, but it hasn’t happened yet.

The cookie that does pull me back to my red clay childhood is the soft ginger cookie, a chewy disc, crackly with sugar, fragrant with cloves, cinnamon and the eponymous ginger, anointed with a puddle of raspberry jam in the epicenter. Is it overstating things too much if I say this is Proustian? Perhaps no literary reference is appropriated as much as Marcel Proust's contemplation of the madeleine in "Remembrance of Things Past." Considering that "Remembrance" is seven volumes long, I have doubts that so many cookbook writers have truly read the book. I won't pretend that I've read it, either (I keep a copy of the first volume, "Swann's Way," beside my bed, currently it’s underneath a John Dunning mystery.). If Girl Scouts sold these ginger cookies, not only could they send millions of girls to camp, they could build a retirement village on the proceeds from this cookie alone.


I first tasted ginger cookies at Becker's Bakery in Nashville, Tennessee, the Bakery of My Childhood. I still remember the wood floors, glass display cases and fake wedding cake. While my brothers and I plastered our sticky hands on the glass cases and shouted out the names of the treats, Mom would purchase pastel butter cookies, spritzes in green, yellow and pink. We could each pick out a waving gingerbread man, one arm up and one arm down, sprinkled with red sugar. And no fewer than two dozen ginger cookies would come home with us. Or at least make it to the car, because I doubt they lasted more than 15 minutes with my sugar-crazed brothers (and me).

Becker's is still in Nashville, although the store I remember near Brentwood is now closed. When I travel home, I stop by the store for a dozen or two. I've tried a few ginger cookie recipes searching for one to equal Becker's, and this is the closest. It’s based on a recipe in California Culinary Academy Cookies, copyright 1987. The recipe calls for ground pecans, which I don't think are in Becker's, but make for a tasty cookie. The texture is not quite as soft as the original, either, and I find that they are better after sitting for a day. These cookies are lovely on a winter day, when you can sit with a cup of chamomile tea and curl up with a book, Proust perhaps, in a chair by a roaring fire. Enjoy that moment until the Girl Scout knocks at your door.

Ginger Cookies with Raspberry Jam

2 1/4 cups flour

1/2 cup ground pecans

1 3/4 teaspoons baking soda

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

3/4 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 cup firmly packed brown sugar

1 egg

1/4 cup unsulphured molasses (like Grandma’s brand)

1/2 cup granulated sugar for coating the unbaked cookies

About 1/4 cup seedless raspberry jam (I use Polaner’s)

1. In a bowl, stir together flour, pecans, soda, salt, ginger, cinnamon and cloves; set aside. Preheat oven to 350.

2. In mixer bowl, combine butter and brown sugar; beat until well blended. Beat in egg, then molasses. Gradually add flour mixture, beating until blended.

3. Spread granulated sugar in a shallow pan. Drop cookie dough by heaping tablespoons into sugar. Roll cookies to coat well, shaping them into balls as you roll.

4. Place about two inches apart on parchment lined cookie sheets. With your thumb, make a small depression in the center of each cookie. Fill each thumbprint with about a 1/4 teaspoon jelly. I find that a baby feeding spoon, the narrow kind with the long handle, is just perfect for scooping the jelly and placing it on the cookie.

5. Bake the cookies until they are brown and feel firm when touched lightly, about 15 minutes. Remove to wire racks to cool. Yield: 30 cookies.

Poached Chicken a la Francis

My idea of the perfect chicken salad is firmly rooted in my Southern upbringing. It's the centerpiece at a bridal luncheon, plated on Lenox Eternal, eaten with Francis I sterling and wiped from delicate Southern Belle mouths with starched linens. A few weeks ago, Francis Lam posted on Salon.com about the proper method of poaching chicken in order to achieve the perfect chicken salad and 'fessed up that he thinks chicken salad is sexy.

I love chicken salad, but I can't say that it's particularly sexy food. For a Southern belle, there's a contextual burden: chicken salad is bound up in too many memories of lunches with Mom at Rich's Magnolia Room in downtown Atlanta. (Did I hear a sob out there? We'll talk later.). There are, of course, Great Chicken Salad moments in Literature. If you've ever read "A Southern Belle Primer: or Why Princess Margaret Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa Gamma" by Maryln Schwartz, then you know that you can never put dark meat in your chicken salad and still hold voting privileges with the Junior League. The perfect chicken salad is a plot point in chick-lit mystery author Mary Kay Andrews' rollicking novel "Little Bitty Lies." Beyond the Grave Chicken Salad is, pardon the pun, to die for.

I rarely attempt it at home, especially since my family is happy with the Almond Tarragon Chicken Salad from Publix, one of the few packaged foods I will purchase, although I personally find the salad to be overwhelmingly salty. On a recent supermarket trip, with the thought of chicken salad in the back of my mind, I purchased a pair of three-pound birds for about $3 apiece. The first became the centerpiece of my standard roasted chicken dinner: a brined, butter-basted, heat-blasted bird; accompanied by homemade mashed potatoes with individual lakes of from-scratch gravy. Although the remaining bird was due for poaching, I decided to brine it just the same as my roasted bird.

I picked this technique up from Cook's Illustrated, which seems to brine everything that clucks. (The test cooks are also obsessed with thyme, but that's another matter). I take a large plastic container, put 1/4 cup Kosher salt and 1/4 cup brown sugar in the bottom and pour in about three or four cups of water, being careful that the chicken will not displace liquid clear out of the container. I remove the giblets and clean up the fat around the cavity a bit, then submerge the bird. If more water is needed to cover the bird, pour it in now. This goes in the fridge for at least two hours and no more than 10. (I recall a saline-intense experience with a bird that was left in brine for 24 hours. I won't make that mistake again.)

I then followed Francis' technique for the perfect poach and the resulting chicken was the most succulent, tender bird, ever. I'm not saying the brine made a difference, but I will definitely do the brine and poach together again.



I pulled the meat from the chicken, using the white meat in my chicken salad - enough mayonnaise to bind, the juice of half a lemon, and for crunch, thinly sliced celery and sliced almonds, finishing with a pinch of salt and a few cranks of the pepper mill. The chicken salad was, as my grandmother, Kitty Warren, a Birmingham society lady whose sterling pattern was Calvert by Kirk, would say "out of this world." Hear "world" as "wuld" drawn out into at least four syllables.


I saved the dark meat for soup - just adding chopped celery and onions, along with the chicken, seasoned with salt and pepper. For an investment of three dollars, along with a handful of vegetables and pantry ingredients, I had tasty lunches for a week. Looking at this delicious food on my everyday Fiestaware kind of makes me want to iron the linen napkins and pull out Kitty's silver and my Lenox china...

Brownies or Fudge? You Decide

These fudgy brownies are favorites because they use cocoa instead of chocolate. Cocoa is always in my pantry, but chocolate is one of those ingredients that I forget to pick up at the store. Just mix a few ingredients together while you're putting supper together and dessert will be ready right after the dishes are cleaned.

Brownies

2 sticks unsalted butter, melted

2/3 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

2 cups granulated sugar

4 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

3/4 cup natural cocoa powder (Dutch is ok, in a pinch)

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter a 9-inch-square metal baking pan.

2. Melt the butter in a saucepan. Off the heat, stir in sugar, followed by the eggs and vanilla. Slowly stir in the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and salt, until the batter is smooth and free of lumps.

3. Spread the batter into the prepared pan. Bake until a toothpick or a skewer inserted 3/4 inch into the center of the brownies comes out with just a few moist clumps clinging to it, about 40 minutes. Let the brownies cool completely in the pan on a rack.

4. Cut into squares. Keep the brownies at room temperature, place in a covered container.

Easy, Peasy Side Dish

There are a few dishes that I make, usually pastas, that require a bit of green on the side, not because my family begs me, mind you, but because I'm the mommy and I believe that most dinner plates require a triangle-shaped serving of green vegetable. One of the easiest is frozen green peas, this dish requires all of five minutes to pull together, and it has a better than average chance of your young child eating it. I make no promises, I just put it out there.

Here's the idea: skillet, stovetop medium heat, tablespoon or two butter melting, half a small onion finely chopped, sautee, frozen green peas in whatever quantity you feel your family will eat poured out and stirred into the butter and onions, salt and pepper seasoning, and optional, zest of lemon just before serving.

It's taken me longer to type this recipe than it will for you to make it.

Kiss My Cheek and Call Me Betty Crocker!

When I forget to defrost the chicken in the freezer, I go to the pantry for a can of salmon and make salmon patties. With a side of baked macaroni and cheese, this is an inexpensive, filling meal that my family loves. Here's the salmon patty recipe. Keep in mind that the patties are very loose because you don't drain the salmon. Handle gently as you bread them and place them in the pan, they will be fine and won't break, and even if they do, it's not a big deal. The pictured patties are ginormous; if you're serving lots of kids, make smaller patties.

Now for the mac and cheese, a subject that I've written about many times. It seems to be the universal kid-pleaser. Creamy mac and cheese has been my standard for years, but to be honest, my kids seem to like the stuff in the box better. My friend Julie makes a baked macaroni and cheese with eggs that my kids love, so I tried yet another mac variation. You can be honest about the picture: the dish didn't look great to begin with, and my photography skills didn't enhance it much. But, you know, like with some kids and old men, this dish is so ugly it's cute. And it was delicious.


Yet Another Macaroni and Cheese... Buy the "mouse cheese" block at the supermarket and shred it yourself, with a food processor or box grater. My girls, ages 11 and 4, can each use a box grater. They watch their fingers, and no tragedies have been recorded to date. By the way, don't use pre-shredded cheese for this; it contains a non-caking agent to keep it from clumping and it will affect the taste and outcome of this dish.

Baked Macaroni and Cheese

1 small box elbow macaroni, cooked according to package directions

8 ounces medium Cheddar cheese, shredded

2 cups whole milk

2 eggs

Butter for the casserole

salt and pepper to taste

1. Preheat oven to 350. Butter a casserole dish. (It's always best to overestimate the size you'll need for a casserole. And buy some insurance by placing the oven-ready dish on a foil-covered sheet pan, just in case. )Pour in cooked and drained macaroni.

2. In a bowl, stir together milk, shredded cheese, eggs, salt and pepper. Pour over macaroni in casserole.

3. Place in oven and bake until golden and cheesy, about 30 minutes. You can cover it with foil if it needs to stay in the oven longer (while you fry the salmon patties, for instance.)

Salon Kitchen Challenge Winner

A little piece I wrote about my newspaper days is this week's winner of the Salon Kitchen Challenge! The story appears below. The tuna dip is wonderful - my kids loved it.

My Brilliant, Brief Career as a Sports Savant

Here we are staring down the barrel of another Super Bowl Sunday, and I couldn’t tell you who’s playing or where. I lead a blissfully sports-free life, relying on my husband to keep up with who’s winning, who’s losing; who’s abusing dogs and who’s bringing weapons into locker rooms; in other words, the flotsam and jetsam of the briny sea of sports. I could say that sports savvy is not in my DNA, but that wouldn’t explain my mom and two of my brothers who eat, breathe and live sports, although the remaining brother, Tom, couldn't care less. Among my sibs, we find the most to talk about.

Imagine the irony that my first job after graduation was reporting for my hometown daily newspaper. Just like county rec departments are populated with college baseball players with bum knees, newsrooms are filled with sports geeks who desire steady access to players and statistics and sports talk. The dinky newsroom was a huddle of desks, all sections from news to features and sports chock-a-block. Gregg, an Alabama grad who covered local government, sat opposite me, reading the AP wire sports stories while swinging his fist, roll tide fashion. Bill, the sports editor, sat next to him, rolling tide in syncopation. While writing the daily crime round-up, I tried to keep up with the sports talk. About the best I could do was sports trivia; I developed a sub-category where I will someday shine in some demented version of Trivial Pursuit: team names. UGA and Mississippi State are Bulldogs, Stanford is the Cardinal, and the Green Wave is from Tulane, easy-peasy. But what about the Hustlin’ Quakers of Earlham College, hmmm?

I had another gift, picking games. All these years later, it's time to come clean. In truth, I had a boyfriend who had the gift of picking games. It was acceptable at the time to gamble in the newsroom, hence the football season’s weekly pick of 20 games. With a salary only slightly more than minimum wage, winning $20 was significant - it meant lunches for a week or a tank of gas for my Ford Escort. My boyfriend, who had his own office pool, helped me with the ballot, and we won two weeks in a row. I'm not sure who was more stunned -- Bill and Gregg, or me. Not long after, I took another job, government flunky, twice the money, with a desk in an office with a door that I could close. It was always too quiet at that job. No guys to talk with, and definitely no gambling on state time.

This is all my way of explaining that when the Super Bowl comes, I’ll probably be working or cooking, maybe writing or cleaning, filling my time with something other than the national obsession. But that’s not to say that I can’t come up with a recipe for the Super Bowl party that I won’t give. When I’m choosing snacks, I go for the crunchy, cheesy and salty. This is my offering, a creamy tuna spread with smoked paprika and lemon. Salty and smoky, creamy and peppery, it’s a substantial snack or appetizer.

Tuna Spread with Smoked Paprika & Lemon

1 shallot, peeled and rough chopped into 4 chunks

1 (6.4 oz.) foil pouch albacore tuna packed in water

1/3 cup mayonnaise (full fat or go home)

4 ounces cream cheese (Neufchatel, ok)

Juice of ½ fresh lemon

½ teaspoon smoked paprika (for a mild version, more for adult tastes)

Pinch of salt

Black pepper

With the blade of the food processor running, drop in the shallot. Add remaining ingredients and buzz until incorporated. Taste for seasoning. (I quoted a kid-friendly amount of smoked paprika; grown-ups may want significantly larger quantities.) Serve with crackers or tortilla chips. Store in fridge for up to three days. Leftovers are brilliant spread on whole wheat bagels for breakfast.

Productive Day

I cleaned out the freezer today and made chicken broth, cornbread dressing and banana bread with the odd bits that were stored there. I also baked a loaf of no-knead bread and turned out a yummy tuna dip that I'll share in a few days. Here's my cornbread dressing recipe, and here's the banana bread recipe. What do you make when you clean out your freezer?