Cookie Monster

Last night, I was in the mood for something sweet. What with not leaving work until 7:30 and not feeling like stopping off for some ice cream, I decided to make some cookies after eating leftover Shepherd’s Pie, courtesy of my loving husband. More on his delicious dish in another post. For now, back to me.

A former coworker of mine once made a batch of what I daresay might just be the best darned chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever had. When pressed (very softly), she said her secret was making them with Crisco.

So I went to their site a looking for a recipe. For some reason, all I could find was this Chocolate Chip Cookies version that was way out of the scope of what I was willing to put together. Coconut? Oats? Rice Krispies? Not what the doctor ordered.

Of course, today, when I go to find it again to link to it in this post, I find their recipe for the Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies, which is exactly what I was looking for last night. Figures.

Suffice it to say, I went looking elsewhere. My husband, Rick, suggested I use his tried-and-true recipe from Joy of Cooking for Chocolate Drop Cookies. A good back up plan, but I was bound and determined to find an easy recipe using the shortening.

Gave up on finding a usable recipe on FoodNetwork.com. Type in “chocolate chip cookies” and you get 300 and something results. Not my idea of quick, which is what I was looking for.

Allrecipes.com was no better. Butter, butter, butter. No Crisco. Then I sifted through a few pages of Google results before I landed on a fun site that just happened to link me through to an Alton Brown recipe I wound up using. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

The site was Cooking for Engineers, for those with an analytical mind who like to cook. Who knew such a niche was even out there? Thanks to one of their faithful readers, I learned of a Good Eats episode entitled Three Chips for Sister Martha.

There, I found three (surprise, surprise) recipes: one for thin, one for puffy and one for chewy chocolate chip cookies. I chose puffy because, well, it was the only recipe made with shortening.

They were pretty tasty. At first, I thought the 375˚ temperature was too hot – seemed like the bottoms were getting too brown – so I lowered it. Wound up raising it again because lower really cooked the bottoms while the tops were undone.

Some of them turned out better – puffier – than others. I think there might be something to chilling the dough before baking, which I only did for one or two batches. Never heard of this before, but I think I will employ the technique in the future. And I think I’ll add in some nuts to give them even more substance.

My little experiment also resulted in a new appreciation for parchment paper. Never really liked it before, but last night I had to question myself as to why not. Clean up is a snap. Plus, I finally used my Pampered Chef scooper I bought probably 10 years ago for just this purpose. My glass is half full – of milk, to go with my delicious chocolate chip cookies.