Friday is National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day. I just love significant food holidays. National Pizza Day is one I hold near and dear. I can’t muster much enthusiasm for National Zucchini Day, though. Unless a new zucchini sport (á la the caber toss) has been devised in recent years. National Zucchini Day is August 8, so mark your calendars accordingly. It might be wise to be away on vacation.
May is also National Strawberry Month, National Asparagus Month, National Barbecue Month, and, of course, the perennial favorite: National Mediterranean Diet Month. I am holding out for the highly anticipated National Beer Week – which is the fourth week of May. All of these days lead into the big Memorial Day Weekend, which is always cause for considerable celebration, enthusiastic shows of parading patriotism, and fine grilling. Thanks to the brilliant bakery innovation of the legendary Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, you can bring a platter of homemade chocolate chip cookies for the event. Everyone will be happy you did. Cookies are so much more enjoyable than a Jell-O salad.
National Chocolate Chip Day might well mean you spend weeks practicing and fine-tuning your secret family recipe. (Which is probably like everyone else’s and it comes from the back of the package of Nestlé’s chocolate baking chips.) Or I suppose you can be cheeky and mark the occasion with store-bought cookies. But there are so many reasons right now for indulging everyone’s inner child. The school year is winding down. Colleges are disgorging legions of hungry youth. Folks are having graduation parties. What can you bring to the best second grade teacher ever? The answer to all these social predicaments is to provide a warm and sweet plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies.
Personally, we draw the line at slice and bake grocery refrigerator dough, but we can cut you a little slack if you buy a box of Ghiradelli chocolate chip cookie mix because we love it, too. But I cannot remember a single instance of resisting cookies because we knew they weren’t homemade, can you? Think of Famous Amos and Mrs. Fields’s cookies. Have you ever refused? What about Entenmmann’s? Or Keebler elfish cookies? Pepperidge Farm? Trader Joe’s? It is doubtful. We are forever youthful when it comes to chocolate chip cookies. It would be rude to be judgmental, or to refuse.
And while we never question the provenance of cookies, perhaps in our own smug way we should strive produce the best and the brightest cookies for our own satisfaction. We need to employ the scientific method and some insightful thinking. How else can we decide which is better: thick and chewy, or crisp with lacey edges? Kingdoms have been lost for more prosaic reasons.
Good Old Reliable Workhorse Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients
1⁄2 cup shortening
3⁄4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup flour
1⁄2 teaspoon baking soda
1⁄2 teaspoon salt
1 cup chocolate chips (spring for Ghiradelli chocolate chips!)
DIRECTIONS
Cream first four ingredients
Combine dry ingredients
Add to wet ingredients
Add chocolate chips.
Bake @ 350°F, 10-12 minutes.
This is the recipe that Nestlé has on its website for the Original Toll House Cookies: https://www.verybestbaking.com/recipes/18476/original-nestle-toll-house-chocolate-chip-cookies/
Here is a recipe for gooey, chewy chocolate chip cookies. https://hostthetoast.com/best-chewy-cafe-style-chocolate-chip-cookies/
Of course Martha has the answer to the crispy cookie conundrum. My crispy cookies are burnt ones, retrieved from the oven at just this side of incineration: https://www.marthastewart.com/343950/thin-and-crisp-chocolate-chip-cookies
“The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.”
― Neil Gaiman
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