Chocolate Chip Cookies 2.0

Inspired again by "America's Test Kitchen" I decided to try out their claim of a better chocolate bhip cookie. Better, you say? That's what I thought too. Their changes included, less butter, but you turn most of it into brown butter, using an egg plus a yolk instead of 2 eggs, using more brown than white sugar, and to NOT USE Tollhouse chips. Can you imagine? Their taste tests showed Ghiradelli 60% cocoa chips were the best. So I did just what they said. I think my butter was a little less brown than they were going for because I chickened out, but other than that, the same. The cookies were good, but in the taste department, they didn't have much on the regular old recipe. The way these cookies shined is in the texture. They were perfect! A tiny bit crunchy on the outside edges, but really soft and chewy on the inside. Oh and they are thick. Whenever I make the regular recipe, the cookies tend to melt out and be extremely thin and then crunchy. I don't mind this, but it was better for them to not be that way.

The Actual Recipe

For months now, K and I have been using this sauce recipe for salmon. It is actually just part of a larger recipe, and we pulled the bits out of it that interested us. Finally though, I made it the intended way, which is to put the salmon, veg and lemon sauce on egg noodles. It was good! To be honest, it isn't really any better than not having the noodles, but it is something different, I guess

Raw Cheese

Whenever we are at Vitamin Cottage, I look at the selection of raw cheeses. For some reason, I have decided that these cheeses are probably amazing. Alas, they are also expensive, so we have left them to our imagination. A couple of weeks ago, it was my birthday. My husband, correctly so, decided that a good present would be a fun kit of different teas, cookies, crackers, chocolates, and... the cheese! He got me two different kinds to try, one a hard cheddar, and the other a soft cheddar spread. Cheddar is totally my favorite. So I made each of us some samples and we had a taste test. Raw cheese, it turns out, tastes way better than pasteurized cheese. I don't know why exactly, maybe you can taste more of the subtle things that might be otherwise killed. All I know is this cheese has spoiled me into wishing it was the only cheese I ever got to eat. We will be sure to get it for special occasions here and there, but unfortunately, it can't be our go-to thing.

Muffins

I think I may have mentioned before that while I can cook like crazy, I never really baked until relatively recently. I think when I was pregnant is when it really started, because all I wanted to eat were baked goodies. Now I have added muffins to my repertoire. I was inspired by an episode of "America's Test Kitchen". They have yet to fail me on perfect recipes. These muffins were no exception. Perfect!
They have a few tricks. One is to use buttermilk. Another is to make a sugar and lemon zest topping to put on the muffin tops before baking, which gives them a super good, crystalline wonderfulness. The main trick though, is to make a condensed fruit jelly to mix in to the batter, besides just having the whole blueberries. You cook down some blueberries and a little sugar and then swirl it into the batter once you have that poured into the muffin pan. This makes for the best muffins we have ever tasted!
On my second go-around (we don't want to waste the excess buttermilk!) I found that I didn't have enough blueberries left to make both the jelly part, and have the whole ones in the batter. So I made the jelly out of raspberries instead, and still used blueberries for the whole fruit. This set was even better than the first!
We have enough buttermilk left for one more set of muffins, and I am definitely making the mixed berry version again. Good job Test Kitchen!