Thank you

It is hard to thank you enough—

you who is up at 5 for work, every day. You who on your day off prunes the tomatoes, builds a compost bin, puts a door on the nursery. And then—when I think you must be tired, done—who mows the orchard, takes us for a swim. You who lets me do the napping while you make dinner—butter-poached lobster with pasta and sherry, roasted veggies—and washes the dishes. I don't have the words, not in this language.

But I do have this: whole wheat chocolate chip cookie dough in the fridge—made with flour from our CSA, pastured butter, Ghiradhelli's 60% Cacao big, dark chips. So let me pack them into a ramekin, fire on the oven, and give you thanks that are warm, oozy, and deep dish.

The Local Food Report: a local chocolatier

Chocolate is a pretty safe bet with me. Give me a chewy chocolate chip cookie with big, dark chunks, or a dense chocolate torte, and I will gladly hand over the keys to my car, or let you do your laundry in the basement. But handmade, local chocolates? Sixty-four percent single origin wrapped around a milk chocolate ganache infused with fresh local produce and herbs? You could probably empty our safe deposit box.

I'd never had a chocolate like that until the other day. A woman named Danielle Verizone makes those specimens up there. The one in the back is called Minty Fresh, and the one up front is a local strawberry ganache with a piece of dried strawberry on top. Danielle started her business back in 2009, after taking a class at L.A. Burdick Chocolate in New Hampshire. She calls herself the Sirenetta Seaside Chocolatier of Scituate, and she sells online and at the farmers' markets in Hingham, Falmouth, and Scituate.

The cool thing is that unlike most artisanal chocolatiers, she actually uses local produce and herbs in her chocolates. She was on her way to go strawberry picking in Bridgewater when I talked with her the other day, and for her other flavors, she uses things like basil from her garden and local mint and rosemary. Basically, they act as infusions—giving the dense milk chocolate ganache center its kick and flavor. She purees the berries or herbs, then heats them up with milk and honey, and finally purees the infused cream with milk chocolate. This makes a big slab of ganache, which she cuts into bite-sized pieces and dips in single origin sixty-four percent cacao dark chocolate. I tried four flavors—Rosemary with Olive Oil and Sea Salt, Spring Strawberry, Wild Minty Fresh, and Lavender Silk—and they were all delicious. Danielle puts out a new collection every season.

Right now, she's experimenting with raspberries and blueberries for summer—she's thinking raspberry-wasabi and blueberry lemon balm.

In the meantime, if you need a fix, there's a recipe to make your own chocolate sea salt caramels over here. Happy local chocolate, everyone.

A granola bar

We eat a lot of oats around here. In fact, I just searched through my email receipts so that I could give you some sort of number, and it turns out we eat about 60 pounds of oats, just the two of us, every year. Hoo-ey!

Mostly, we eat them for breakfast. I buy them from Maine, online from a farm called Wood Prairie Farm in Bridgewater, and they are organic and Maine-grown and make top-notch homemade granola. But thanks to my sister [hi Anna!], we have now found a new all-day snacking use for them, and between that and the baby, I predict our annual consumption will soon be in the high eighties. Please, no crop failures.

So, what is that beauty up there? That is one of the Granola Bars with Chocolate featured in the New York Times article that Anna sent me last week. It is also addictive, and not entirely healthy, but also not entirely unhealthy. The bars are made up mostly of oats, but also of butter and honey and dark chocolate. They hold up the way a granola bar should—they're chewy but not hard, they don't fall apart—and they have a hint of cinnamon and a dash of vanilla. In short, they are absolutely lovely.

I should have noticed them earlier, since the paper pulled the base recipe from a cookbook I have and love—Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain—but her version recommended dried fruit instead of chocolate. What can I say? Chocolate gets my attention.

GRANOLA BARS WITH CHOCOLATE

Alex says these are too chocolately. That phrase really isn't in my vocabulary, but if you're not a chocolate person, try making these with dried fruit instead. Oh! and a note about the wheat bran: the NYT recipe uses flaxseed meal, and the headnote in Kim Boyce's original says you can also use wheat germ. I just used coarsely ground wheat from our grain CSA.

3 tablespoons butter

2 cups rolled oats

1/2 cup wheat bran

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup honey

2 tablespoons brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 cup dark chocolate chips (I like Ghiradelli's 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chips)

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Grease an 8" by 8" glass or metal baking pan.

Melt the butter in a wide saucepan over medium heat. Add the oats and cook, stirring frequently, until the grains are lightly toasted—about 8 minutes. Be careful not to let them burn—they should smell toasty and should be, in Kim's words, about two shades darker. Turn off the heat and spoon the oats into a mixing bowl.

Wipe the pan clean and add the honey, brown sugar, and vanilla. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium heat and keep it at a gentle bubble for 5 minutes. Pour this syrup over the oats and stir well. Let the mixture cool for 5 minutes, then stir in the chocolate chips.

Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and spread it evenly. Bake the bars for 20 minutes, taking care not to let them brown or they'll get hard instead of chewy. Let them cool completely; then cut them into squares and store in an airtight container.

Loud and clear

If today doesn't scream Kim Boyce's Chocolate Chip Cookies! to you, well, then, I don't know what to say. I heard it loud and clear when I woke up this morning, screeching in through the windows, up from my slippers, out from the pile of baking sheets and pattering in the rain.

Not that I believe anyone needs an excuse to bake chocolate chip cookies, mind you, but if we did, today would be the perfect day. I have about a million things on my to-do list—wash the whites, vacuum the car, weed the garden and plant the spinach for the winter and fall. But it's raining and whooshing and blowing outside; it's too wet for the laundry, for the vacuum cleaner to be hauled outside. It's too rainy for my seed packets, the weeds, too muddy and windy to bother mucking about in the yard.

And so instead, I am in Good to the Grain, spending the morning with Kim Boyce, page 41. I am reading about thick, chewy edges, nutty whole-wheat, high quality bittersweet chocolate and dough eaten straight from the bowl.

Soon it will be time to go to work—time for black pants and bobbypins and the rain jacket slung over the door—but for now it's just cold milk and cookie dough, and the oven to keep me warm.

WHOLE WHEAT CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

This recipe, from Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain, has become my go-to. It's about as healthy, straight-forward, and delicious as chocolate-chip cookies can get.

3 cups whole-wheat flour
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 and 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 pound cold butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 cup dark brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
12 ounces bittersweet chocolate chips, such as Ghiradelli's 60% Cacao

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease two baking sheets, or line them with parchment paper.

Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a mixing bowl and whisk well.

Combine the butter and sugars in another mixing bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer. Beat until they are just blended, about 2 minutes. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then mix in the vanilla. Add the dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Add the chocolate and stir until just incorporated.

Form the dough into balls—I make mine a little bit larger than golf balls. Arrange the balls evenly on the baking sheets, leaving about 2-3 inches between each one. Bake for 15-18 minutes, or until the cookies are evenly dark golden brown. Transfer the cookies to a rack to cool, and repeat the process with any remaining dough.

Note: These cookies are best eaten within a day or two of baking. I like to make a big batch of dough, bake off about a third, and keep the rest in the refrigerator to bake over the next week or two. Of course, some of it usually gets devoured as is—without any heat at all.

Pay dirt

Julie from Brunswick, are you out there?

I hope so, because this post is for you. A while ago, when I told you about the grain CSA we joined this year and the New York-grown spelt that came as part of our share, you wanted to hear more. I promised you that I would look into it, and I know it took a while, but this week, I did. I looked right into the face of a spelt flour, olive oil, homegrown rosemary, and dark chocolate cake, and Julie—we hit pay dirt.

This particular cake comes from a book I've mentioned a few times around here, Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain. It isn't a book that I fell instantly in love with, but the more I've used it, the more I've liked it. And after this cake, I like it even more.

The cake comes from a whole chapter dedicated to spelt flour, because according to Boyce, spelt can be substituted for plain-old whole-wheat flour in just about anything. It does especially well in cakes and muffins, she says, because it has a sort of inherent sweet, cinnamony-ness that bakes into a fine, sturdy crumb and is good at complimenting spice. The spice for this cake—rosemary—might seem odd, but somehow, with the chocolate and the olive oil, it's just right.

The key is to use fresh rosemary and top quality dark chocolate. The first time I made this I used Baker's chocolate, semi-sweet, because it was the only thing we had on hand, and I regretted it with every bite. Semi-sweet turned out to be too sweet—it was 54% cacao—and Baker's turned to out to taste, in big chunks, just the slightest bit like chalk. The second time around I went with two bars of dark chocolate chunks from the Chocolate Sparrow and was much, much happier with that choice. We also put down a dying rosemary plant with the first go-round, and the second time, with sprigs from a fresh pot I planted for the deck, that flavor was much better, too. Last but not least I'd say don't use too strong of an olive oil—something subtle and slightly fruity, maybe, but definitely not the fresh, green kind with bite.

Beyond that, it's fairly hard to go wrong. Boyce said to bake the cake in a tart pan, but since I like nice, moist centers, I made it into a Bundt round instead. I also added a bit more milk than the recipe calls for—spelt cakes tend to be dry, and again, I like mine moist—and I was happy with that tweak, too.

So Julie, here you are: a whole-grain spelt cake and—maybe if we all cross our fingers at once—an afternoon to cozy up with a slice of it in the sun.

ROSEMARY, DARK CHOCOLATE, & SPELT CAKE

The thing that I love about this recipe—which, as explained in the post above, is adapted from Kim Boyce's Olive Oil Cake in Good to the Grain—is how easy it is. It's the type of thing you can whip up in minutes, without any beating or special steps or fuss. I made it the other night in the midst of dinner preparations, and it took only 10 minutes, from thought to oven.

3/4 cup spelt flour
1 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
1 cup olive oil*
1 scant cup whole milk
1 and 1/2 tablespoons fresh rosemary, finely chopped
10 ounces bittersweet chocolate (about 70% cacao), cut into irregular but roughly 1/2-inch pieces

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and grease a Bundt cake pan. In a large bowl, whisk together the flours, sugar, baking powder, and salt. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs to break them up, then stir in the oil, milk, and rosemary, and mix well. Mix these wet ingredients gently into the flour mixture, stirring until just incorporated. Fold in the chocolate pieces, and pour the batter into the prepared Bundt cake pan. Bake for 35-40 minutes, or until the top turns golden brown and begins to crack and the center is still moist but cooked through.

*Note: To make this cake even more local, I thought about using butter instead of olive oil, but decided against it in the end. Substituting butter in recipes that call for oil tends to make things a bit drier—some people say this is because the butter solidifies at room temperature, whereas the oil remains liquid—and since spelt already has a tendency to dry things out, this didn't seem like a good idea. That said, however, I think it might be a risk worth taking. If you decide to experiment, just be sure to melt the butter so that you can mix it in rather than cream it.

The Local Food Report: a personal preference

Before we get into things today, there's something you need to know: I am not, by any respectable caffeine junkie's standard, a coffee drinker. I like coffee, to be sure, but I don't need it in the way that reputable addicts like my father and mother and sister do. I drink coffee for fun; they need it in order to brush their teeth.

Luckily for all of us, my friend John Simonian is incredibly serious about coffee. He is one of the guys behind Beanstock Coffee, a small, local roasting operation in Eastham. Alex buys his coffee for his restaurants, we serve it at Blackfish, and we always try to have a bag it in the house when my family comes to visit. The other day, I asked John to tell me everything he knew about selecting a great coffee. Here goes—my words, his notes:

1. Find out how the beans are picked: Good coffee is hand harvested. This is not because something happens flavor-wise to the beans when they are machine picked; it's because machines can't tell the difference between ripe and green beans. Ripe beans have a much better flavor, thus, hand harvesting to avoid picking green beans pays off.

2. Find out where the beans are from: Things like elevation and soil richness, John says, are preferences. He likes beans that grow at high altitudes or in rich soils—places like Ethiopia and Kenya and in parts of Indonesia and Hawaii—because they tend to have big, rich, earthy flavors. This might not be your thing, but if you pay attention to where coffees you like are from, you can figure out what sort of geographic profiles you're likely to enjoy.

3. Pay attention to how long the beans are roasted: There are two "cracks" in the coffee roasting business: the first crack, which happens when the coffee beans suddenly expand around 400 degrees F, and the second crack, a series of more intense crackling noises that take place around 440. Some people roast only through the first crack, which makes for lighter beans; others go into the second, producing dark beans with more intense flavors. How dark you go is really a personal preference.

4. Drink your coffee fresh: This means buying your coffee beans freshly roasted, in small enough batches that you can grind and brew them all within eleven days. After this time frame, John thinks the flavor starts to go downhill; after three months, he thinks you might as well throw the beans out. Fresh also means buying your coffee whole, as beans, and grinding it just before you're going to brew it at home. And finally, fresh means storing the beans in an airtight container, away from sunlight and extreme temperatures, which are, as he very dramatically puts it, Coffee Enemies.

5. Pay attention to processing if you drink decaf: Not all decafs are created equal. Some decafs are water processed, some are processed using CO2, and the majority are processed using chemicals. These chemicals have names like methylene chloride (carcinogenic when inhaled) and ethyl acetate (naturally found in fruits; synthetically produced to decaffeinate coffee). Water processed decaf is the safest from a health standpoint, and also tends to be the tastiest (more on that here). You might also want to pay attention to where the beans were decaffeinated: oftentimes, decaf coffee has a much larger carbon footprint than regular does, as the beans have to be shipped not just from the farm to your roaster, but also to a middleman for processing.

6. Make coffee infused brownies: Ok, John didn't say that, but I will. Seriously, this is his recipe, and they're good. And given the weather recently, I'd say you should probably make an iced coffee swirled up with cream, too.


BEANSTOCK BROWNIES

Every year, John gives some of these out to the restaurants and markets Beanstock works with as a sort of customer appreciation thing. I can't speak for any of his other customers, but I can speak for the one I'm married to, and these brownies made us both feel very appreciated indeed. I was even happier the next day, when I called him to up ask for the recipe and he sent it my way. Here it is, with a few tweaks, and one note: do not worry when the brownies don't look like they're cooking. They might not appear to be, but they are. Err on the side of underdone, don't panic about the not-quite-firm top, and you'll be okay. A-okay.

6 ounces baker's chocolate (unsweetened)
1 stick butter
2 large eggs
1 and 3/4 cups granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons brewed coffee, strong
1 cup minus 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
a generous pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter and flour an 8" by 8" baking pan. Melt the chocolate and butter together in the top of a small double boiler. Set aside to cool.

In a large bowl whisk together the eggs and then mix in the sugar, vanilla, and brewed coffee.

In a smaller bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, and salt, and then stir these dry ingredients into the egg mixture. Pour in the melted chocolate and butter and mix gently until everything is combined. Spoon the batter into the prepared baking pan and bake for about 25 minutes, or until the top starts to look a bit brittle around the edges and the middle no longer jiggles. Enjoy warm or cold, with a glass of iced coffee.

P.S. I promised a list of local roasters to those of you who listened to this morning's show. Here it is—a work in progress, I have a feeling, as some coffee shops roast their own but aren't too vocal about it—so if you have any to add, let me know:

The Art of Roasting, Chatham
Beanstock Coffee, Eastham
Cape Cod Coffee Roasters, Mashpee
Nantucket Coffee Roasters, Nantucket
Pie in the Sky, Woods Hole

Fully on board

You know what? It is a good feeling when you have been looking for a wedding caterer for a long, long time, to find one that you like.

It is a good feeling to find a caterer who doesn't flinch when you tell her you might not be able to finalize the menu until a few weeks before the event, as there's a farmer to work with and a potato blight in Maine in full swing. It is an even better feeling when not only does she not flinch, but she gets fully on board.

It will make you nearly ecstatic when she tells you that it's fine to put beets in every course because they are In Season and of course she'd like to peel nine dozen tiny local eggs because actually they give a better mouth feel and wouldn't your family like to help her pull the mozzarella one day?

Finding a caterer like this is a feeling very similar, come to think of it, as the one you get when you meet the man you want to spend the rest of your life with. Between Alex and Katy, I'm not sure things could get much better around here. Or at least, I didn't think so until Katy introduced The Cupcakes. Here, would you like to meet them too?

They are the product of a Ms. Alexandra Mudry, a student at the Culinary Institute of America. (Katy went there too, but I like to say she's from the CIA. It makes her seem a lot less Betty Crocker and a lot more James Bond, don't you think?) Anways, Alexandra came up with the cupcakes when the American Cancer Society decided to host a contest to remake the birthday cake. They were looking for a healthier, more old-fashioned version—one with real ingredients and no preservations and maybe a few less sprinkles and definitely no box mix. (Or maybe they were just looking for something to back up their newly assumed position as the Official Sponsor of Birthdays, but we'll pretend not to notice that.) Because really, I could overlook just about anything for The Cupcakes.

The Cupcakes are red velvet cupcakes, the old fashioned kind dyed with beets. They have half whole wheat flour and dark chocolate and even applesauce in the mix, and they are an absolutely stunning color. Sort of like mahogany, only with a bit more red. I've made them with cream cheese frosting, but they're also good with French icing or even a good vanilla buttercream.

As for how they are to make, there's a bit of cooking time involved in roasting the beets and a few odd ingredients to track down, but otherwise, they're a sinch. Plus, once you buy that tiny jar of instant coffee it will last you many, many birthdays. You only have to do the tough shopping once.

And on the presentation side of things, for the wedding we're planning to go to the flea market and stock up on all sizes of cakes stands so that we can stack the cupcakes in small, double-decker circles the way they are below. Not only will it be pretty, but pulling out a piping bag and making a few nice, billowy swirls of frosting on each cupcake will be a whole lot easier than spreading frosting on a crumbling, towering cake.


In fact these cupcakes are so good, so easy, and so pretty, I think they might just be the ones for the big day. What do you say?

RED VELVET CUPCAKES

adapted from the American Cancer Society's recipe by Ms. Alexandra Mudry

This recipe makes 24 cupcakes. For the wedding, of course, we'll be making a lot more, but for your next birthday party, this size batch should be just right. Also, you might notice that this recipe uses a lot more ingredients than I usually go for, but I think you'll find, as I did, that cupcakes this good are well worth a trip to the store.

8 medium-sized beets
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup canola oil
2 large eggs
2 large egg whites
3 ounces unsweetened chocolate, melted
1 teaspoon instant coffee
1/2 cup unsweetend cocoa powder
1/2 cup applesauce
1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Peel the beets and trim off their tops and tails. Line a cookie sheet with tinfoil and place the beets on top. Drizzle them with olive oil and bake for about two hours, or until a fork goes into them easily. If you're going to make the cake batter immediately, you can go ahead and leave the oven on as the cake bakes at 375, too.

Puree the beets in a food processor with several tablespoons of water. (One or two should do the trick). Once they're smooth, they're done.

Line two 12-cup muffin tins with cupcake wrappers. In a small, heavy-bottomed pot, melt the chocolate. While it heats up, combine the oil, eggs, egg whites, and sugar in a mixing bowl and beat together until they turn smooth and lighten in color. Add the instant coffee to the melted chocolate and stir until the two are well-mixed. Slowly, beat the chocolate mixture into the eggs, oil, and sugar.

In another mixing bowl, combine the cocoa powder, applesauce, and beet puree. Stir well, and beat this mixture into the egg and chocolate mixture. In yet another bowl (I know, not only are there a lot of ingredients but there will also be a lot of dishes but I swear it will be worth it people, so soldier on!) whisk together the remaining dry ingredients. Fold these gently into the wet ingredients until just combined. (Be careful not to overmix or the cupcakes will get tough and dense.) Pour the batter into the cupcake liners and bake for twenty to twenty-five minutes, or until a piece of straw (my mother used to take hers from a new broom) comes out clean.

Let the cupcakes cool for a few minutes, and then take them out from the pan to cool on a rack. Ice with cream cheese frosting, below.

CREAM CHEESE FROSTING

24 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 and 1/4 cups confectioners' sugar

Beat the cream cheese with the vanilla extract until they are light and smooth. Add the confectioners' sugar, bit by bit, until the whole mixture is creamy and smooth. Be careful not to overmix, or the frosting will be hard to spread. Spoon into a piping bag and ice the cupcakes in whatever decorative, lovely way you see fit.

P.S. If you're wondering why there's no Local Food Report today, it's because the station is doing a pledge drive this week. I went up to Woods Hole to help out yesterday, but they could use yours, too. You can head on over here if you're up for becoming a Cape & Islands NPR member.

Treat you well

I think I'm ready. Though for some people an overdose like last Sunday's might take weeks to recover from, well what can I say? It only took me eight days. Turn on your ovens, people. Here comes heirloom chocolate cake.

This cake is one of the richest, fudgiest things I have ever tasted. I never turn down chocolate, not even when it would be a very good idea if I did. In fact, as I type, I'm sitting at my desk drinking hot chocolate milk. I am a devout chocolate sampler, and right now, this cake is at the top of my list.

The secret to its success is so simple I'm not entirely sure I should even tell you, because it will make the cake seem much, much less magical, but here it is: It has 2 sticks of butter, a half a pound of dark chocolate, 5 eggs, and a cup of sugar in it. It would be extremely difficult not to be fudgy with a cast of characters like that. In fact, if anyone manages to make this cake dry, they deserve some sort of Kitchen Disastress medal. I really don't think it's possible.

That said, there is something I should warn you about. This cake does NOT need frosting. I generally don't believe in un-frosted cakes, but please, take my word on this. The first time I made it, a friend and I slathered buttercream on top and were forced to drink an entire bottle of rioja and watch the Twilight DVD as a recovery operation. It wasn't pretty, not then, or the next morning. For the record, rioja headaches and sugar headaches do not cancel each other out. Don't say I didn't tell you so.

But if you don't abuse it, this cake will treat you well. It will treat you especially well after a dinner of fresh spring greens with balsamic dressing and goat cheese and pickles and smoked salmon paté on brittle, homemade crackers, with your friends sitting all around. And then, the next day, it will treat you even better as a snack. It will even treat you well as a birthday present, as my friend Chelsea can attest.

HEIRLOOM CHOCOLATE CAKE

adapted from the Modern Baker by Nick Malgieri

2 sticks butter
8 ounces dark chocolate, cut into small pieces (I used Ghiradelli's 60% cacao chips)
1 cup sugar
5 eggs
1/2 cup flour
pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a small, heavy-bottomed saucepan, melt the butter and the chocolate together. Once they're smooth, whisk in the sugar, and then the eggs, one by one. Sift in the dry ingredients, mix until just combined, and pour the batter into a prepared 9-inch cake pan. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until the edges begin to pull away from the pan. The center should remain fudgy.

Chocolat chaud

There's no use crying over spilt milk.

Isn't that what they say?

But what if it's steaming hot with chocolate and
your breakfast for a day of
writing
and radio
and taxes
and teetering heaps
of paperwork.

Can you cry then over
chocolat chaud
swimming down the drain?

The good with the bad

I have very, very good news to report. Not only did I recently come into a large inheritance of chocolate chip cookie dough, but even better, I learned to make ice cream with it. There. Now you have it, the news of the day.

In case you can't tell from the picture, the cookie dough I've inherited came in industrial tubs, rescued from a dumpster behind an upscale grocery store in Truro. If that sounds kind of gross, well, it is and it isn't.

They do this every year—chuck out whatever's left in the store come Labor Day—and the fishmonger has learned to dumpster dive before anything starts to melt or de-refrigerate in an unsanitary way. This year, he saved an unopened box of Dove bars, not to mention the cookie dough: a whole case. Until just recently, however, they were safely tucked away in the freezer of his store. Then came cleaning day, and he willed it all to me.

Unfortunately, it seems the good always comes with the bad, and in this case it was accompanied by a trip to the dentist. I have a cavity. This really shouldn't come as a surprise, given the way I feel about sweets, but I'd never had one before. I feel sort of like I did after I got my first speeding ticket, like I wish I could just rewind a few minutes, and wipe the record clean. Not to mention avoid the trip back, for the terrific filling event. Mouths and drills should not go together in my opinion.

As I wallow in this discovery, I have decided it is best to comfort myself in the way I am familiar with. Namely, by eating chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and drinking a cup of black coffee. Surely (?), this will bring back the glory days for my teeth.

The ice cream, I should say, didn't come without a bit of trial and error. The first recipe I tried was from Ben & Jerry's, and the base had far too much heavy cream in my opinion, and not nearly enough egg, and simply refused to freeze. It was very stubborn, that recipe. But it didn't matter too much, as all I really needed once I had the instructions for adding the cookie dough (you have to freeze it in chunks first, and then throw it in at the very last minute, according to the ice cream gurus) was a good recipe for vanilla. I learned that from Alice Waters ages ago.

Basically, you just make a nice, thick, eggy custard, let it cool down in the fridge for a bit, and then whip it into a creamy, delightful freeze. It's actually a lot like making the pastry cream for the apple tart I showed you the other day, only you go on to put the whole mess in an ice cream machine. Provided you have that, it's really no fuss at all.

So here's the recipe. I have to go upstairs and brush my teeth.

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE DOUGH ICE CREAM

adapted from Alice Waters, the Art of Simple Food

This recipe uses a lot of eggs, but I have found that for truly excellent ice cream that is the key. Don't worry about wasting the whites: simply save them for a fritatta the next morning. If you whisk one whole egg into 6 egg whites and bake it with some veggies and cheese, no one will know the difference.

If you have unhomogenized milk, use it instead of half and half. Don't shake it up: just pour the creamy part off the top. This will result in a fat content that is almost the same as the half and half you'll find in the store.

Also, Waters calls for a vanilla bean, but I just stir in extract at the end. You can tweak this recipe to make anything—mint, etc.—that's the beauty of it. And the best part is, if you're making homemade cookie dough, you will likely have enough to make a batch of cookies, too. Which means ice cream sandwiches, in my book.

ingredients:

1 and 1/2 cups cookie dough
6 eggs
1 and 1/2 cups half and half or unhomogenized whole milk
2/3 cup sugar
a pinch of salt
vanilla extract
1 and 1/2 cups heavy cream

Cut cookie dough into chunks, pile into a bowl, cover, and put it in the the freezer to harden up.

Separate eggs, saving whites for another project. Whisk yolks just enough to break them up, and set aside. Pour half and half or milk into a heavy bottomed pot along with sugar and salt. Warm over medium heat until steaming and very close to boiling, but don't let it actually begin to roll. Whisk a little of the hot milk into the egg yolks to temper them (in order to warm them up, so they won't cook immediately when they hit the pot and get chunky and not thicken properly), then whisk the egg mixture back into the milk in the pot.

Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens. This can take anywhere from 2 minutes to maybe 10, depending on how hot you let the milk get initially. Just be patient, and if it seems like nothing is happening, gently turn up the heat. When it coats the back of a spoon and has the consistency of custard, remove from heat, stir in heavy cream and a bit of vanilla to taste (maybe a teaspoon or two) and pour into a metal bowl. Chill thoroughly.

Pour the custard into an ice cream maker, leaving room for the cookie dough. (Depending on how much your machine holds, you may want to adjust the ratios of custard to dough.) When the cream is thick and stiff, add the frozen cookie dough chunks. Allow the machine to churn for just a minute or two longer, then transfer the ice cream to the freezer and let it harden a bit more before serving.

Oatmeal chocolate chip catastrophe

Having already confessed my love for chocolate chip cookies, there is little left to admit but that I've made them, again. This time the sin was with oatmeal: thick, chewy rolled oats from up towards northern Maine, coupled with a good bit of butter, sugar, and plenty of chocolate.

I was inspired by an interview with Teri Horn, founder of Hyannis-based Kayak Cookies and creator of the Chocolate Salty Oat. We'd talked about the cookies for nearly an hour; she'd run through the oats she used and her butter tips, and we'd laughed through a few stories of disaster.

By the time I reached home, I was in a virtual cookie frenzy.

I pulled out my mother's oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe, warmed the oven, and mixed up a bowl of dry ingredients. Next, it was on to the wet: sugar and butter and eggs and milk, and finally I put the two together. The oven steamed hot, and in they went: 24 perfect drops of gold.

But when the sheet emerged, minutes later, my creations brought to mind one of Teri's calamitous stories. They had spread, thin as a sheet, individual oats stuck to the pan with huge craters of chocolate rising up. They were tasty, to be sure, and at the least not burnt, but they hardly compared to the bag of Salty Oats teasing me from the kitchen counter.

I turned to the Hershey's website to trouble shoot the disaster. "If homemade cookies spread too much during baking, the following problems may have occurred," it instructed with a militant groan. The oven could have been too cold, the baking sheets greased too heavily, oil substituted for butter. The cookie sheet could have been hot when I'd dropped the cookies, or perhaps fructose sugar was substituted for cane? No, at none of these had I failed.

But when I came to the section on brown sugar, I knew what I'd done to deserve disaster. "Dark brown sugar was used instead of light brown sugar," the accusation read, and I blushed at the strength of its truth. Yes, certainly that had been it. Despite the Maine organic flour and thick rolled oats, the stick and a half of Kate's Homemade Butter, and the hand-cut chunks of Baker's Chocolate Semi-Sweet (in varying sizes as Teri recommended, no less!) my cookies had spread. All on account of a sugar substitution I'd never even thought to suspect.

OATMEAL CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

(substitioners beware!)

Makes 24 small cookies

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Beat 1 cup light brown sugar, 1/2 cup granulated sugar, 3/4 cup butter, 1 egg, and 1/4 cup water in a large mixing bowl. Mix in 1/2 cup white flour, 1/2 cup whole wheat flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 3 cups raw rolled oats, and 1 package chocolate chips. When well mixed, form into small balls and drop onto well-greased cookie sheet; bake 10 minutes or until golden.