August 2006 Archives

This How to Cook Everything is a damn good cookbook. This time Bittman's advice on cooking chicken breast cutlets produced juicy, flavorful meat. You just marinate the chicken in 1 tablespoon olive oil, 1/2 cup chopped basil, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, and salt and pepper to taste for at least an hour. Then just broil it for 3 or 4 minutes on each side.

The recipe says to boil the marinade for a minute, then brush the chicken with it while it's broiling, but I skipped those two steps and the chicken was still great, topped with chopped tomato and basil and drizzled with good olive oil.

My husband just bought me Baking Illustrated as a gift; I've always loved reading Cook's Illustrated but have been reluctant to actually make anything from the resulting recipes. You'd think having all that information would give you confidence; I find it daunting, knowing everything that could go wrong if I use the wrong ratio of butter to shortening or measure the flour by volume instead of weight. But my 2-year-old and I made the snickerdoodles last week and they were fantastic. The cookie didn't have a huge amount of flavor, but the spicy cinnamon-sugar on the outside compensated nicely. And the texture was perfect: slightly crunchy on the bottom and around the edges with a chewy center. I think it was the combination of shortening and butter.

August's job was to roll the cookies in the cinnamon sugar and put them on the cookie sheet. (But really the job he does best is to coat everything in the kitchen with flour.)

First you whisk 11.25 ounces unbleached, all-purpose flour with 2 teaspoons cream of tartar, 1 teaspoon baking soda and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Then you cream 12 tablespoons room-temperature butter, 1/4 cup vegetable shortening and 1 1/2 cups sugar. Add 2 eggs and mix to combine. Mix in the dry ingredients, then roll into balls using a heaping tablespoon of dough. Roll in a mixture of 1 tablespoon cinnamon and 3 tablespoons sugar. Bake in a 400 degree oven for about 10 minutes (9-11 minutes), until the edges are set and the centers are puffy.

We made sugar cookies from the same cookbook and they weren't nearly as good. But the snickerdoodles I'll make again.