Cultivating Patience Through Cookies

In a post or two over the course of this little blog, I've railed against "time-saving" ingredients or cooking steps that aim to take the place of culinary acts that aren't that time-consuming in the first place. (I'm looking at you, frozen prechopped onion.) At times I find these rants to be a bit hypocritical because I admit that I'm hardly the most patient person in the world. When I've decided on some course of action, I don't take kindly to anything or anyone who gets in the way of me achieving the end result as skillfully and swiftly as I can.

For this reason, I totally suck at baking cookies.

No, let me amend that. It's one of the two reasons I totally suck at baking cookies. The other reason is that my pathetic attempts to reduce the sugar and fat content yield dough that's just worthless. But I have to admit that I'm fine with that poor result, in a way, because it allows me to learn what ingredients I can futz with and what ingredients are unfutzable.

It's the patience required to bake cookies that deters me from baking them much. Once I've put the time and energy into creating the dough, I want to bake it once and be done with it. I don't want to spend an additional half-hour or more dolloping balls of goop onto baking sheets, juggling baking sheets that are ready for the oven, need to come out of the oven, need to be emptied of their cooled cookies or need to rest for a few minutes so their cookie payload can settle. I'm just...my multitasking skills don't work that way.

Furthermore, the active role needed in baking cookies--the actual baking of the cookies, not the making of the dough--is more of a...minder role: You're minding the cookies while they bake, rest and cool, doing what I see as drudge work. If I'm going to be in the kitchen while a food product is being subjected to some sort of heat source to achieve an end result, I like to have a more...influential role. Once I pop a sheet of cookie dough balls into the oven, there's nothing I can really do to affect their outcome except check on them to be sure they're not transforming into burnt sacrifices. Boring! However, if I have a soup or a curry or a chicken breast cooking on the burner and I sense that it's going to go horribly wrong if I don't do something to prevent that, then I feel like I'm really accomplishing something.

I guess baking cookies doesn't give me the rosy glow of maternal or just plain 'ol feminine satisfaction Nestle and Poppin' Fresh would have me believe it should.
And perhaps there's some emotional issues tied to baking cookies, which Mum did a lot and which my elder sister did a fair amount too--and which I never attempted because I didn't want to tempt fate. But, hey, I'm sure that emotional baggage has nothing to do with my displeasure with and angst over baking cookies.

So that's the long-ass backstory of me and cookies. Knowing that, Gentle Reader, would it surprise you much if I told you I'm forever bookmarking cookie recipes? Yeah, silly thing to do when I hate baking cookies! For a while when I first began my faudie ways, I aimed for recipes I could fairly painless convert into cookie bars: Filling a jelly roll pan with all the dough and baking it all at once was right up my alley. But I fell out of doing even that much, yet I continued to eyeball and save cookie recipes.

When the January 2010 issue of Cooking Light arrived in my mailbox some weeks back, I happened upon an oatmeal-chocolate-cherry "heart healthy" cookie recipe that had me salivating. Initially I thought, Ahh hell, here's another recipe that I bet tastes good that I'll never actually try out. But something moved me, Gentle Reader. One day, I checked my pantry to see if I had the necessary ingredients, planning already to substitute dried cranberries for the dried cherries and using whatever baking chocolate I had on hand for the bittersweet chocolate called for in the recipe.

Then I decided to make the cookies for my Saturday noon yoga class.

Yup, I'd decided on a course of action. Come hell or high water--or adenoidectomy--I was going to make those cookies.

Chocolate-Cherry Heart Smart Cookies1.5 oz. (about 1/3 C) all-purpose flour
1.5 oz. (about 1/3 C) whole-wheat flour
1 1/2 C old-fashioned rolled oats
1 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
6 T unsalted butter
3/4 C packed light brown sugar
1 C dried cherries
1 t vanilla extract
1 large egg, lightly beaten
3 oz. bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
   
2. Combine the flours, baking soda, oats and salt in a large bowl, and then stir them together with a whisk.
   Melt the butter in a small saucepan over low heat, then remove it from the heat and add the brown sugar, stirring until the mixture is smooth.
   
3. Add the sugar mixture to the flour mixture
   
4. Beat the contents of the large bowl with a mixer at medium speed until well-blended.
   
5. Add the cherries, vanilla and egg to the dough, and then beat them until combined.
   
6. Fold in the chocolate.
   
7. Drop the dough by tablespoonfuls 2" apart onto baking sheets coated with cooking spray.
   
8. Bake the cookies for 12 min., then let them cool on the pans 3 min. or until almost firm.
   
9. Remove the cooled cookies from the pans to finish cooling on wire racks.

Yield: 30 cookies (serving size: 1 cookie)

Nutritional Info
Calories: 94
Fat: 3.2 g
Sat fat: 1.6 g
Protein: 1.5 g
Carbs: 15.7 g
Fiber: 1.3 g
Cholesterol: 10 mg
Sodium: 88 mg

The Faudie's Futzings
Given that my past futzings with cookie recipes have usually resulted in disaster and that this recipe struck me as not needing much futzing, I restrained myself when making the dough. Aren't you proud of me, Gentle Reader?

That said, I did change up a thing here and there:

• Even though I doubled the recipe to make sure I had enough for my yoga class, I didn't double the amount of dried fruit. A cup of dried cherries really isn't much, but a cup of dried cranberries is. Two cups of dried cranberries would have been overkill, so I used just a cup and a quarter.
  
• I used Splenda brown sugar blend, not just because I wanted to but also because it's the only brown sugar I have. I thought I had some regular stuff, but if I do, it's buried much deeper in the pantry than I looked.
  
• The chocolate I used was a combination of various melting chocolates I'd melted together and had leftover when the boys made their mice back in September. Some of it was El Cheapo CandiQuik, I think, and I seem to recall tossing in the last of the Baker's dark chocolate I had, which is just a step up from El Cheapo CandiQuik, if you're to believe a number of experienced bakers out there. That probably wasn't the brightest move on my part, using cheap chocolate that had already been put through its paces, melting, cooling, melting, cooling and then being refrigerated for several months. But, hey, it got that little container of chocolate out of my baking goodies draw in the 'fridge!

I prepared the dough on Wednesday as a means of helping me burn off some nervous energy about the boy's surgery the following day. I also chose to make the dough in advance and let it rest on the advice of David Leite, author of "Perfection? Hint: It's Warm and Has a Secret," which appeared in The New York Times way back on July 9, 2008, but who talked about his research and findings on an episode of The Splendid Table, which I've subscribed to in iTunes to listen to when I'm driving up and down Mopac on Tuesdays and Saturdays. (Must have been a rebroadcast show I was listening to, but I can't seem to find it in the iTunes library. Oh well.) Anywho, Mr. Leite discovered through cookie maker Maury Rubin and confirmed with CookWise author (and frequent Splendid Table guest) Shirley Corriher that letting the dough (in this case, chocolate chip cookie dough) rest 36 hours, thereby "'...allowing the dough and other ingredients to fully soak up the liquid--in this case, the eggs--in order to get a drier and firmer dough, which bakes to a better consistency.'"

Long story short, not long after I got home from my post-op visit to the gym on Thursday, I baked some cookies.

You'd suspect, Gentle Reader, that my patience would be slim to none by that point, having been up since 3:45 a.m. that morning, having been through a crazy four-hour experience for getting the boy's adenoids removed and then having run (albeit painfully slowly, for the pain in my right leg has not abated) for 90 minutes while watching the awful The Family Stone (mein gott, Sarah Jessica Parker is an bad actress--and I couldn't even hear the dialog). Oddly enough, I found it all quite soothing: scooping out the dough, tablespoon by tablespoon, onto two baking pans that I alternated baking; waiting through the 12-minute cooking time (well, 11 minute for the heavier, darker pan but 12 minutes for the cheap-ass pan I bought when I was a freshman in college but manages to bake the best cookies); juggling the postbaking resting time; preparing the emptied pan for the next baking go-round until all the dough was gone.

I was dead on my feet when I got around to washing dishes later that evening--after I'd prepared the delicious roast chicken with balsamic bell peppers for the husband and me, which came after the cookies were baked. In for a penny, in for a pound, I suppose.

Best of all, the entire batch had only a few crispy critters, and they were from the first pan baked on the heavier, darker pan, which helped me determine that particular pan only needed 11 minutes for its subsequent bakings. Knowing that I'd have more than enough for my class, I sampled a few of what I'd made: It's always good to do that so you're relatively sure you're not going to poison any students. The cookies were a little what I was expecting--something along the lines of an oatmeal-raisin-chocolate chip cookie--yet they also had an unexpected flavor. It took me a few bites to identify it, for it was one I knew I'd tasted before, but eventually the memory came to me: ranger cookies!

If you're not familiar with ranger cookies, Gentle Reader, I wouldn't be surprised. I have to admit that I'm not at all familiar with their history. They might be a regional peculiarity, or maybe the iteration of ranger cookies I grew up with varies greatly from the iteration you grew up with, for I see from my Google search that the ingredients aren't always the same. The ones I grew up with, I seem to recall, had corn flakes and oats, maybe even some peanut butter, but I could be mistaken.

What I'm not mistaken about is that the unexpected flavor I encountered with the cranberry-oatmeal-chocolate chunk cookies is that of ranger cookies. "How can you be so sure?" you ask, Gentle Reader? Because when I shouted out "Ranger cookies!" upon recovering the memory, the husband, who was busy munching on his sampling, readily agreed with me. And considering the husband might have only become acquainted with these odd things called ranger cookies through my mother, I'd say it's a pretty safe bet that my taste memory is accurate.

If you decide to make these cookies yourself one day, Gentle Reader, take a bit of advice from me: Be patient when it comes to stirring in the brown sugar into the melted butter. Perhaps it was due to the peculiar nature of Splenda brown sugar blend, but getting that stuff to blend into the butter and yield a smooth consistency took frickin' forever. Countless times I was on the verge of declaring the consistency good enough when the liquid's constituents were still not fully blended, figuring that the peculiar nature of Splenda brown sugar blend would not yield a smooth consistency. But I kept stirring.

That one of my proudest moments of recent memory came from the successful blending-until-smooth of melted butter and brown sugar is a sad, sad statement.