Monster Cookies and the Beast of Inspiration

For food writers, maintaining a balance can be difficult. Most of us would have the public to think we spend our days in a photogenic sequence of tasting, pondering, journaling, and then mess-free tinkering in the kitchen.

But if you’re doing it right, this is definitely not the way it goes for anyone. The ebb and flow of deadlines seems to collide with spells of failed recipes and technical issues: a leak under the sink, a downed internet connection, a flat tire when you need to drive to a special store to get a very specific ingredient.

This is why I don’t like to blog. Writing about the mundane inconveniences I face may be honest, but it’s not very engaging. And I don’t want to project an airbrushed (or filtered, as it were) image of what my daily life consists of. There’s a lot of typing and a lot of using the internet and a lot of cross-referencing different recipes. There’s a TON of grocery shopping and washing dishes and wiping down kitchen counters and sweeping flour and crumbs off the floor.  

And there’s cooking. I get antsy if I go a few days without cooking. I taught a pressure cooking class this weekend, and I’ve been developing recipes for a few different assignments the past few weeks, so I’ve been in the kitchen a lot, but yesterday I realized I needed to just get in the kitchen and cook for fun.

That’s where the balance comes in. If you don’t make space in your schedule to lavish in the sheer joy of making food with no agenda, then your writing and your recipes won’t be inspired at all. You have to put yourself in the place that made you want to get into food writing in the first place.

So a few days ago I blocked out several hours and made the food I wanted to make. I minced the cores and stems of some broccoli and cauliflower, and I cooked them in a skillet with some olive oil until they were browned in some parts and soft in others. I made a miso dressing and cooked some quinoa and made myself a big bowl of healthy stuff, because that’s what I like to eat.

And then I cleaned up and went to pick my daughter up from school. Out of the blue she asked me if we could make monster cookies, and I said yes, even though monster cookies had absolutely nothing to do with any of the assignments or independent projects I had going on.

We needed to get M&Ms to make monster cookies. Without M&Ms, they are a different cookie. We got the M&Ms. We made the cookies. I experienced the small triumph of my parenting identity and my writer-chef identity intersecting peacefully. Most of the time I feel them tugging at one another, keeping me from being fully present in any one role, but for about fifteen minutes I was right in the zone with Frances. It felt good.

I though the freestyle cooking and the cookie-making sessions would set me behind the following day, but I wound up tearing through my to-do list. I also decided I needed to type up the monster cookie recipe, because I tinkered with it a bit, and I was happy with how those came out, too. Frances was even happier, though.

Monster Cookies

Makes about 2-1/2 dozen medium cookies

I don’t know too much about the origin of these. Why are they called monster cookies? What region are they most identified with? I do know they are popular here in southeast Ohio, they don’t contain any wheat flour, and despite that they are probably not gluten-free, because I’m sure M&Ms contain gluten somehow, and monster cookies are not monster cookies without M&Ms. Packed with candy and sugar, they are not health food, but they are hearty and wholesome and rich and peanutty. This recipe is an adaptation of an adaptation, like a modern folk song. Like “Louie, Louie” or “Hey Joe.” I love songs like that, and I love these cookies.

·         4 cups rolled oats

·         1-3/4 teaspoon baking soda

·         ½ teaspoon table salt

·         1-1/2 cups peanut butter (chunky or smooth, processed or natural)

·         ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened

·         2 cups light brown sugar

·         2 large eggs

·         1 teaspoon vanilla extract

·         12 ounces (1-1/2 cups) semisweet chocolate chips or chunks

·         12 ounces (1-1/2 cups) milk chocolate M&Ms

1.       Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Arrange the racks in the upper and lower thirds of the oven. Line two baking sheets with parchment or silicon baking mats and set aside.

2.       If you’d like the oats to be a little more varied in texture, pulse them a few times in a food processor fitted with a metal blade, until some are powdery and others are still whole. Empty into a large bowl. Add the baking soda and salt and stir to combine. Set aside.

3.       In the bowl of an electric mixer, combine and peanut butter and butter. Beat on medium-high speed until smooth. Add the sugar and beat until lightened, about 2 minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the vanilla.

4.       Add the oat mixture, one half at a time, and beat at low speed. Beat in the chocolate chips and M&Ms (you may need to do this with a sturdy wooden spoon instead of the mixer). The dough will be greasy and a little soft, but not crumbly.

5.       Scoop out the dough in rounded tablespoons (about 1-1/2 inches in diameter) and place 12 to a sheet. Bake for about 10-12 minutes, rotating the pans from top to bottom and back to front halfway through baking. The cookies will be lightly browned when ready, but their centers will still feel a bit soft to the touch. Let the cookies rest on the baking sheets for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely. Cookies will keep, tightly covered, for up to 5 days.

Roasted Strawberries, circa 2012

(A transmission from a past life in Portland, Oregon)

The strawberries in our garden are in full swing now. We’re picking about a pint of ripe ones a day. All year long I wait for these little gems, the pleasure of plucking them right from our own backyard.

“They taste kind of weird,” says Joe, and he’s right. They’re a tad too acidic, or a tad too ripe, or just wan and watery. I blame the late-season rain, because it’s handy to blame things on the rain here. They’re not terrible berries, just not as mind-blowing as I’d like. I can go to the farmer’s market and get a flat of Oregon-grown Hood strawberries that will blow some minds. Our backyard strawberries are convenient and passable.

But they’re ours, and we’re kind of a weird family, so it’s fitting they taste weird. I still think they are miraculous in their way. I planted them three years ago after my brother and I walked past a house in our neighborhood with a bunch of strawberry starts laid out in the front yard next to a FREE sign. I get to ignore them all year long, and then for about a month they give me fruit.

A friend growing strawberries in her Portland yard shared that she feels so blessed in numbers that she spits out any offending berries that aren’t up to flavor spec. A luxury, yes, and one we could adopt here as well, but I love our underwhelming strawberry children, and I can’t bring myself to write them off.

So I’ve been blasting them in the oven a bit to intensify their flavors. Roasting fruit is de rigueur, so I’m not blazing any culinary trails here. I think some people roast strawberres on a parchment-lined sheet pan, but I want some syrup to go with it, so I put them in a small gratin dish that collects their gooey liquid. It’s almost like making jam in the oven, and it’s a jillion times easier, and I don’t have enough ripe backyard strawberries at a time to make jam, anyway. The vanilla bean is really what makes this amazing. It fills in that gap of exquisiteness my berries suffer from.

Roasted Strawberries, a.k.a. Oven-Baked Strawberry Compote

Makes about one cup

• One pound (about a pint) strawberries, washed and hulled
  
• 2-3 tablespoons turbinado sugar (though you could use any kind of sugar you had on hand; I like the fruitiness of turbinado)
  
• ¼ vanilla bean

1. Position a rack in the center of the oven. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
2. If the strawberries are those big honking ones, you may want to cut them in half, but you don’t have to. Put them in a medium-sized shallow baking dish, preferably non-reactive (ceramic, enameled, or Pyrex vessels are good choices). Add the sugar. Split the vanilla bean vertically and scrape out the seeds; add the seeds and the scraped-out vanilla bean hull to the berries. Toss it all together a bit, but don’t worry about it too much. It’ll all even out in the oven.
3. Place the dish, uncovered, in the oven and bake for 30 to 45 minutes, stirring a little bit midway though if you remember. You want to see the berries collapse and lots of juice rapidly bubbling all around them. The whole mess will thicken and become jammy as it cools. 
4. Store, covered, in the refrigerator for up to five days. Leave the vanilla bean hull in there so that the flavors both deepen and mellow as it all sits.

Here’s what you should do with this stuff:

• Spoon it over nice, thick plain Greek yogurt (full fat!) 
• After scraping the warm mixture into a container, there will be a bunch of syrup clinging to the spoon. Lick this off because you don’t want to waste it. It’s so sweet and a little wine-y and it might make you feel a bit sick, but it’s worth it. Wipe off your face when you are done; you will have ruby streaks all around your mouth. You can also share this spoon-licking part with your kid.

Totally Grown-Up Halloween Candy Brownies

We don’t mess around here when it comes to over-the-top desserts. When faced with the curious problem of too much leftover trick-or-treat candy, I don’t just rip open a brownie mix and throw in handfuls of Twizzlers and Smarties. There has to be a method to the madness.

My method came about after our town’s untimely October 25 trick-or-treat night. We’d purchased an extra-large bag of candy, because we now live in a neighborhood that’s quite popular for commuting trick-or-treaters. Come the big night, though, we were all having so much fun meandering around from house to house with our friends and their kids that, by the time we got back home, the streets were empty; we didn’t hand out one piece of our trick-or-treat candy. “Give it to people who don’t have enough food!” Frances suggested. The concept of donating candy to a food pantry makes sense to a 4-year-old, but to me there’s something amiss with it to me, like dropping off moldy Reader's Digest Condensed Classics at a charity booksale.

So much effing candy.

For a few nights I nibbled an assortment after Frances went to bed: a Snickers bar, then a Twix, then a little pack of M & M’s. I should have been satisfied, but my hands kept creeping back to the candy bowl.  

As an adult, I find most candy too sweet and one-dimensional. Halloween candy does not hit the spot like it used to. Really, why do I bother eating it at all?

My husband started nibbling at the corner before these got a chance to cool. I like them better the next day, after they've set.

There’s another reason I should keep my distance from those little sugar-bombs in their shiny wrappers. I wrestled with an eating disorder for many years, and junk-food sweets were always my undoing. That’s why I never have that kind of stuff around the house. Just seeing a bowl of candy makes me feel compromised, distracted, and weak. It’s difficult to write about not because I’m ashamed, but because it’s challenging to articulate to anyone who hasn’t gone through something similar. People wouldn’t leave festive crack pipes and dime bags out in front of recovering drug addicts, but those of us who came out of disordered eating to have healthy, balanced relationships with food have to deal with this bullshit every year. It begins with Halloween and tapers off after New Year’s, when everyone freaks out about their holiday indulgences.

So this year, I decided to be the candy’s boss and make it into something worth eating—something so worth eating one or two amazing bites would do it. Taking a cue from Maida Heatter’s brownies layered with baked-in peppermint patties, I dug out my favorite brownie recipe, some fantastic raw ingredients, and a sharp and pointy knife. I unwrapped twenty Fun Size candy bars and chopped those fuckers up. I dropped them onto the brownie batter, shoved them into a hot oven, and told them to go to hell. Once they cooled, I cut them into tiny squares and ate one. A few hours later, I ate a second one. And then I was done, because I’d taken something shitty and made it into something awesome.

These witch and pumpkin picks are so cool. My mom saved them from the 1970s.

Totally Grown-Up Halloween Candy Brownies

Makes 36 small brownies

This is essentially candy bars bound with brownie batter, a baked confection. The batter itself is intense and bittersweet, something to offset the cloying candy. Cut them into tiny squares, like truffles.  

• 3 ounces unsweetened chocolate, finely chopped
• ½ cup unsalted butter
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 2 large eggs, straight from the refrigerator
• ½ teaspoon vanilla extract, optional
• ½ cup unbleached all-purpose flour
• 12 ounces Snickers and Milky Way bars, sliced crosswise into sections about ½-inch thick (this is 20 Fun Size bars)
• ½ cup chopped roasted peanuts (salted ones are nice, but unsalted will work, too)

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. 

Melt the butter in a medium high-sided skillet over medium heat, keeping an eye on the pan so the butter does not burn. When the butter is quite hot (you may hear it sizzling or popping a bit), remove the pan from the heat and add the chopped chocolate. Stir once with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula and set aside to finish melting while you prepare the pan.

Line an 8 x 8-inch pan with foil or parchment paper, letting several inches hang over two opposite sides to create handles. Grease the pan and foil and set aside.

Now stir the chocolate and butter mixture until is smooth and the chocolate is completely melted. Beat in the sugar and salt, then beat in the eggs, one at a time. Add the vanilla, if using. Beat in the flour until the batter is smooth and shiny and a little tacky.

Spread half of the batter in the prepared pan. Lay the ¾ of the candy bar pieces on top of the batter in a mosaic fashion. Drop the remaining batter on top and smooth as best you can (it does not have to look perfect). Lay the remaining candy bars pieces on top, and then scatter the chopped peanuts over them.

Bake until a toothpick inserted in the middle of the pan comes out with moist crumbs, not raw batter (about 30 minutes, but this can be hard to gauge, since the caramel and melted chocolate will be gooey). Cool on a rack or place in the freezer until the brownies are cool and set. Using the parchment or foil handles, life the brownies out of the pan. Invert on a cutting board and peel off the foil or parchment. Place another cutting board on top and invert again, so that the brownies are nutty-side-up. Cut into squares (I prefer smaller ones, a little over an inch across) and serve. To me, these taste best the day after they were baked; when still hot from the oven, they’re impossible to cut nicely, and they’re so gooey all of the flavors run together.

Pawpaw Pudding

First, get some pawpaws. Hurry, you only have a few weeks left. This article I wrote for Serious Eats explains how to do that. It's awesome and you should read it right now.

Next, make this pudding. It’s homey and custardy, with intriguing caramel notes and an undeniable pawpaw kick. Using a food processor, it takes only minutes to blitz that batter together. (Note: estimated minutes blitzing batter excludes gathering of pawpaws. It took me about 40 minutes to haul home ten pounds. Call it your exercise for the day.)

Pawpaw Pudding

Serves 6 to 12

• nonstick cooking spray, to grease the dish
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
• 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 2/3 to ¾ cup sugar (I prefer a less-sweet pudding)
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• 1 large egg
• 1 large egg yolk
• 1 cup pawpaw pulp
• ½ cup buttermilk, preferably not low-fat
• ¼ cup half-and-half
• 2 teaspoons vanilla bean paste OR vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and position a rack in the middle. Grease a 9-by-9 inch baking dish, preferably glass or ceramic, with nonstick cooking spray.

In the bowl of a food processor, pulse the flour, sugar, salt, and baking soda to combine.

In a large glass measuring cup or medium bowl, combine the pawpaw, buttermilk, half-and-half, and vanilla bean paste. With the machine running, add the pawpaw-buttermilk  mixture through the feed tube. Turn off the machine, scrape down the sides, and add the butter with the machine running. Your batter should have the consistency of pancake batter.

Pour the batter into the greased dish. Bake until the center is set but still jiggly (like a pumpkin pie), about 30 to 45 minutes. The sides of the pudding will rise up and brown, while the interior will be flat, shiny, and amber-colored. Let cool to room temperature and serve with crème fraiche or whipped cream (I like this for breakfast with a big dollop of Greek yogurt, but I could say that about most any dessert.)

The pudding will keep 2-3 days at room temperature. I suppose you could refrigerate it, but I like it better when it’s not cold.