boston cream puff

he goddam mad dog, eh?

This is a first in recent days; I'm posting without procrastinating. I just tried to make oatmeal cookies, and it seemed like I should record it as a followup to the rice pudding entry. I actually finished the article about Meiji nuns (for the moment). I sent it off to the editor of the journal, whom I love. She's so cheerful and sweet and effusive and sharp as a tack and doing cool feminist research. And I'm not just saying that because she's agreed to publish my work. Or because she told me to write this and gave me an actual deadline for it. She very cheerily and effusively suggested that I rework the whole article since it was too technical (read: dry and entirely lacking in context) for the readership of the journal. So I've been rewriting up a storm and it's not the same article as before, but I am terrified that it now sucks in an entirely different way. Well, if it does, she'll tell me in the nicest possible way.

So, the cookies. I've been having a craving for oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips in them and for some reason I decided to make them myself. You can see pictures of my pocket sized kitchen in earlier posts (if there are pocket gays, can I have a pocket kitchen?) and imagine what it's like to assemble a big bunch of ingredients in it -- not enough space for two bowls, (one for the dry ingredients, one for the butter and sugar), let alone an array of boxes and jars -- so why I didn't get some at the supermarket, I don't know. I'm also a little surprised at myself since until today I had a. no cookie sheets, b. no cooling racks, and c. no electric mixer. I stopped at Bed Bath and Beyooond, picked all those things up, proceeded, clanking, to Trader Joe's (source of all good things not provided by Old Navy), and thence to home.

Assembling the dry ingredients -- flour, cocoa, baking soda -- proceeded uneventfully, barring some cocoa powderage of the floor. Creaming the butter and sugar was also uneventful, once I derockified the brown sugar. The usual way to do this is to put it in a bowl with some wet paper towels, cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and nuke it for three minutes. All very simple, but what they don't tell you is that you end up with a drippy sugar coated paper towel and a range of brown sugar in different states from still-rock-hard to molten.

I haven't been to the gym lately, so holduing the electric mixer and beating the ingredients together, and then stirring in the walnuts, chocolate chips and oatmeal was a real workout, especially in my very hot kitchen. I do have to say that my oven heats up just like it's supposed to. Nine months or so here, and I just find this out. And the batter kachunks onto the cookie sheet just like it's supposed to, and the oven door opens in a perfectly ordinary way.

So why am I not eating chocolate oatmeal cookies right this minute? I'd like to formulate this next sentence that it becomes a bit of homespun wisdom blog-readers will tell their childrens for years to come, but I don't know if I can: Measure your oven before buying a cookie sheet? Don't buy your cookie sheets before you measure your oven? A foolishly unmeasured oven is the hobgoblin of non-little cookie sheets? An oven-measuring in time saves nine cookie sheets? You've just got to let cookie sheets be cookie sheets?

The upshot of all of this is that after all the hard, hard work I put into making the batter, the goddamn cookie sheet tray wouldn't fit in my goddamn oven, not lengthwise not crosswise. Stupid pocket oven.

I scraped the cookies manque back into the dough, put the dough in the fridge and licked the beaters on the electric mixer...

posted by Gina @ 10:46 PM