Baked, a Saturday Edition

I’ll admit that when it comes to baking, I always go to the things I love most, pies and cookies, especially chocolate chip. I’ve posted about this before, how I rarely repeat a recipe, which isn’t hard to do considering all of the different versions there are out there on the web alone.

Over the summer I was curious about the New York Times recipe but being a little short on outrageously expensive chocolate discs and seeing that I had to let the dough rest for hours and hours, I decided to put it off for another day.

Today, Scott baked ten loaves of zucchini bread from the remainder of a mutant zucchini we picked last week. Five loaves were made from the first piece we hacked off.

And from the rest, he baked these. They’ll go in the freezer, by the way.

Since we were already messing up the kitchen I figured I’d try the cookie recipe, throw the dough in the fridge and bake as necessary. I probably let the dough chill a few hours before I baked the first batch. I’m not convinced another 24 hours of chilling is going to make any difference, but we’ll see.

A few modifications:

• I added a cup of toasted chopped walnuts, because Scott loves walnuts.
• I didn’t have unsalted butter so used salted and omitted some of the salt from the recipe.
• I forgot to put in the vanilla so I added it after the dry ingredients. Oops.
• I used semi-sweet chocolate chunks/morsels from various bags left over, not the fancy schmancy chocolate bittersweet discs. Sue me.
• After putting the dough in the fridge to chill, I realized I forgot to add the brown sugar. So I put the dough BACK into the mixer bowl, added the brown sugar, and beat the crap out of the dough for a few seconds with the paddle attachment. I’m sure it wasn’t all incorporated evenly and maybe even affected the outcome of the cookies, but let me just say that I sampled one a few hours ago and the hell if I can tell the difference.
• I also forgot to sprinkle the first batch with sea salt, but did for the second. I could take or leave that part of the recipe.

Because we hadn’t spent enough time in the kitchen, we decided to bake lasagna for dinner, as it’s one of the few things that The Kid will eat, or I should say, it’s one of the things that we can make him eat. While I pride myself as a very good crafter of lasagna, I have learned there are some things you just need to let your boyfriend make, because it seems no version you concoct will measure up to the one recipe he loves — his go-to lasagna recipe, if you will — which I am sure is just off the back of a box of Barilla pasta.

So I made my small contribution of dinner rolls.

So your first weekend after going back to work and you spend it IN THE KITCHEN? ARE YOU CRAZY? I guess that’s where the two of us are a little odd. We love to cook/bake and consider going to the grocery store therapeutic. There were no pressing obligations for either of us, so we put the Big Ten Network on TV, watched college football and baked.

Right now, I can’t think of a better way to spend a Saturday.