Saturday, February 28, 2009

hummus, baba ghanoush, and 96 cookies

The thing is, I'm not really a good cook. Aside from still not reliably being able to chop an onion, I can never do the thing where you take whatever's in the fridge and somehow magically turn it into delicious and interesting dinner. I look at what's in fridge and turn it into scrambled eggs on toast. I'm not good at improvising. What I do, though, is get an idea in my head for a cooking project that renders me unable to think about anything else. My thought process tends to go like this:
Me 1: What can I make for dinner?
Me 2: I dunno, but how about making lime curd instead?
Me 1: Sounds good. Hey...wait a minute! There is still no dinner!
Me 2: So? Lime curd!
Me 1: Fair enough.

The Food
Tonight's project was baba ghanoush, which I've wanted to make for a while, but hadn't connected the dots between the eggplant slowly going bad in our fridge and potential cooking experiments until this week. And since I had a can of chickpeas in the pantry, I extended the thought to hummus.



hummus + sriracha and cayenne pepper = spicy hummus

My dad sent me a bar of nice white chocolate with my last package, which was nice of him. Unfortunately, I'm not a huge white chocolate fan, so eating it straight wasn't really appealing. However, I am a fan of combinations invovling white chocolate and cranberries, so I decided to make white chocolate cranberry oatmeal cookies. This was a good plan until my dyslexic self swapped the measurements of sugar and flour in the batter. Basically, 1 1/2 and 1/2 look very similar when you aren't paying attention (and, in the interest of full disclosure, I may have been cooking a teensy bit under the influence). So, basically I accidentally tripled the amount of sugar in the batter. Oops. I didn't have enough butter to triple the batter (thank God for that), but I did have enough to double it. What I should have done is dump batch one (sugar is cheap) and start over, but instead I just decided to make two batches' worth so that they'd each have about 1.5 times the correct amount of sugar. This is how I spent my entire Friday night baking eight dozen cookies. I know baking is a science, and I was really worried about the structural stability of the cookies, but consistency-wise they came out fine. Definitely sweeter than I'd like, especially the batch with the white chocolate, but on the other hand, if I didn't know I'd added the extra sugar, I don't know that I would have noticed on my own.


The People Who Ate It

No pictures, sorry, but the diners included me and miscellaneous housemates and their friends, and maybe even...you. Seriously, I have hella leftovers (eight dozen cookies, people!). Please help me out here.

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