Oatmeal CookieBlog

A Horse's Neck! A Horse's Neck! My Kingdom for a Horse's Neck!

I guess I owe Shakespeare an apology for the title of this post. Sorry, Will!

You're probably wondering what a horse's neck is, right? Well, to put it simply, it's an ice cream float made with ginger ale instead of root beer. (I love root beer, but I think it's best used for dunking pizza crusts in. Try it...trust me.)

My grandparents introduced me to horse's necks (or, as they would say with their wicked bad Massachusetts accent, "hah-siz necks") when I was a kid. I remember laying on my belly on their living room floor, stirring the ice cream and ginger ale together with a long spoon, and--not to date myself too much--watching Solid Gold.

1) Get a big glass or mug. For a classy presentation, you can pop the glass in the freezer for a bit to make it frosty. 2) Fill 2/3 to the top with ginger ale. Be sure to leave enough room for the ice cream and the subsequent foam. 3) Scoop in the ice cream.

I love how the ice cream develops a layer of icy crystals as it bobs in the ginger ale.

Grandma's Measuring Spoons

I started writing this post and got the song "Afternoons & Coffee Spoons" by the Crash Test Dummies stuck in my head. It's funny how that works...

These are my grandma's measuring spoons. They're old and a little bent, but It was nice putting them to use when I made my XXX Cherry + Chocolate Cookies.

Grandma used these to make all her baked stuff, but I particularly remember her using them to make pie crust. She'd use the tablespoon measure to add cold water to the flour/lard mixture. Mmmm. Grandma made the best pies.

Mumma's Old Cupboard

I'm visiting Mumma this weekend, and--of course--she wants to put the in-house baker to work. But you need ingredients to make cookies. We emptied her cabinets to see what she had on hand and what we needed to pick up at the grocery store. Top of the list: chocolate chips that aren't 26 months past the "best by" date. No...Mumma is not a baker.

Happy Anniversary, Oatmeal Cookie Guy & Oatmeal CookieBlog!

Rock & Ravioli Roller

Every family has its holiday food traditions. Some people have ham on Christmas. Some people have turkey. My family has...ravioli. (And a small turkey breast for post-holiday gobblers.)

My grandparents used to make our Christmas ravs by hand, and my grandmother would make her special loaded-with-meat sauce from scratch. No, this wasn't her everyday sauce. This was authentic grandma sauce made specifically for Christmas.

My dad used to cook the ravs in the "padella," a pot the size of a cauldron. The padella was so big that he had to take it outside, set it on a specially made steel stand, and then use a propane tank with a heater/torch attachment for the flame. "Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble," indeed.

This year, Mumma made some killer homemade meatballs, but we used store-bought frozen ravs and jarred sauce. Sure, the sauce was Rao's, but madone! Tony Soprano would call us something that started with Wonder Bread and ended with a word that rhymed with mops. Though grandma, grandpa, and dad aren't with us anymore, we kept up the family tradition, and we still have the heirloom ravioli roller. Maybe next year I'll put that old thing to use again.

Speaking of Chicken Soup...

My earlier post about chicken soup got me thinking about Maurice Sendak's Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months, which I think I checked out of my elementary school library dozens upon dozens of times.

Autumn Sunday: Turkey Day Dry Run

It was still a little too cold to go for a walk today, so we did the next best thing. We went all Martha Stewart and did a dry run of our Thanksgiving day table setting. Purrty, ain't it?

We bought a shelf for a modular shelving system and used it to improvise a leaf for the table. Perfect fit. It's family lore that my great grandfather sold the table's leaves and matching chairs to the "rag man" during the Depression. When my parents had the table, my dad made a set of replacement leaves, so I guess Jon and I are sticking to tradition, the addition of eggplant parmesan to the meal notwithstanding.

Jon's a sucker for a pretty placemat, and these square, leaf-patterned paper plates will make cleanup a snap. We also used the napkin rings that Karen sent me in her Blogging By Mail package. (Thanks, Karen!)

Summer Friday Star-Sighting Follow Up

Back on our first Summer Friday, Jon and I saw Kathryn Erbe filming an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent at 1 Centre Street. Last night, the episode in question aired! I grabbed my camera and took a shot of my TV. I wasn't quick enough, but a split second earlier you could see that she was wearing the same tailored white shirt she was wearing when we saw her. For a scene that barely lasted 45 seconds you wouldn't believe all the equipment and people involved...not to mention the catering!

Just Because...

C is for cookie. That's good enough for me. Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C.

Small Plates II

Here's my expanded collection of cookie plates. Let's hear it for cookie plates!

We picked up the little yellow dish at Fish's Eddy and the rest of the new ones at Crate and Barrel.

Small Plates

No, not tapas...baby dishes. (Sorry. I have that war kittens/baby cats commercial for Capital One on the brain.)

I'm a little tired of the two plates I have to set up my cookies' photo shoots, so Jon and I are going to stop by Fish's Eddy (which I always confuse with Vischer Ferry) this weekend to see if we can find some cheapo but neato props. Stay tuned!

When we first moved to New York, Jon and I went back and forth for a week (seriously!) trying to decide which silverware to get. I know...as if we were outfitting Martha Stewart's Bedford estate. We ended up getting the first and cheapest set we saw at Fish's Eddy but not before annoying the clerk...and following her from the Union Square store to the Upper West Side store and then finally buying them downtown at Union Square.

And don't get me started on our first set of plates. All I'll say is that I was too cheap to pay for a cab (or the subway) home from the Pottery Barn in Lincoln Center. But that's another story...

Blast from the Past

Jon and I spent the weekend with my family in Massachusetts. When we got back tonight, I was too tired to make cookies. Sorry folks! So I figured that I would instead post about the start of our cookie baking…and cookie dough eating.

We took this pic our senior year of college. (I’m on the left, Jon’s on the right.) While our classmates were out squeezing as much last hurrah as they could into their final semester, Jon and I were at home squeezing as much Body Shop Warming Mineral Mask onto our faces and pizza from Pope’s (which has since been turned into a Borders bookstore) into our faces as we could, along with eating raw cookie dough from the tube (and sometimes baking a few cookies) and watching HGTV. This was our typical Friday (and Saturday and Sunday) night. We were homebodies even back then.

All these years later, we still do the occasional face mask but have Rosa Mexicano instead of Pope’s Pizza, watch Britcoms instead of HGTV, and make our own cookie dough instead of buying that stuff from Price Chopper.

What Cookbooks Mean to Me

This is a picture of a cookbook called Home and Away from Home that belonged to my grandmother. The book dates to 1970 and was a self-published fundraising item for a ladies’ group from Marshfield, Massachusetts.

As I page through, I get a kick from the old ads for long-gone businesses and the off-the-wall recipes for things like “Seven-Can Casserole.” But I also see handwritten flags to mark things that caught my grandmother’s eye--like this recipe for blueberry cobber that Mrs. Charles Broadbent submitted to the cookbook--and the words my grandmother underlined--like Thanksgiving in a recipe for cranberry-cornbread stuffing. (Just had a flash of that scene in Heathers when Christian Slater underlines the word Eskimo in Moby Dick.)

And those flags with the scripty old-lady handwriting in pencil! (Nobody writes that way anymore.) She certainly predated Post-Its, but I doubt she’d ever use them even if they were available to her. These flags are cut-up pieces of old grocery lists. She used to wash, air-dry, and reuse aluminum foil and Ziploc bags--why not reuse paper?

You see, she had what others called a “Depression-era mentality.” To which she would say, “You kids wouldn’t be able to live through the Depression. You wouldn’t know what to do with a goat!” Yes…a goat, whose milk my grandmother administered to her children as a cure-all for every possible ailment. This, I’ve been told, was the advice she got from a “doctor.”

To this day my mother scrunches up her face and shudders as if she just downed a shot of the nastiest, booziest booze in the world at the mention of—shock, horror—goat cheese. The memory of having cow’s milk swapped with goat’s milk is still too close to the surface, I guess. (Funnily enough, my mother tried the same stunt when my brother and I were kids by replacing chicken cutlets with pork cutlets. Yeah…like we couldn’t figure that one out.)

Oatmeal CookieBook

This is the recipe notebook...the one that Jon says he'd rescue if our building ever goes up in flames.

Scrawled across the egg-and-vanilla stained and chocolate-splattered pages are the recipes you read here. I don't really have a set process for developing recipes: some spring from the items on a shopping list, and some come out fully formed.

I take cookie inspiration from everything--TV shows, favorite non-cookie flavors, interesting ingredients--and try to put together a plan for what I hope is a really tasty, really unique cookie.

Apple Pie

Here's a picture of one of my famous 6-hour apple pies we used to bake from scratch in our old apartment...in the background you may notice the signature 1930s white enamel stove top and crusty, rusty old burner.

Everything in our old apartment was "pre war" (as realtors in New York City like to say) in every way, including the kitchen. The cabinets, sink, stove, oven, and floors were original--no remodels for more than 40 years. Don't be fooled: The picture is black and white, but the pie is circa 2000.

Before I started baking oatmeal cookies, apple pies were a big hobby of mine—especially in the fall when Jon and I would go apple picking (we like Cortlandt apples best). I'll post our pie recipe here one day, but you can enjoy this old pic for now. We still make a great apple pie once in a while, but we upgraded our oven when we moved.

A Bowl for the Milk 'N Cookies Crowd

This is the bowl I use to combine my dry ingredients.  I've had it since college, when Jon and I used to fill it with Doritos and play Scrabble all night. 

Yes...our senior year looked like this.

Crazy for Cookies

Yeah...I really look like I need a cookie. And what's up with that coat.

This pic was taken during a break from Model UN in Boston in 1993. Representing the desert nation of Chad had lost its luster at that point. And I'd heard the words dilatory and caucus enough times to last a lifetime.

Why I struck this pose, I'm not entirely sure, but it does capture my true feelings about cookies.  In short, I love them.  Cookies in the morning, cookies in the evening, cookies at suppertime: What could be better?

Well, in my case, baking them. I’ve always loved to bake, something I inherited from my father and my grandmother (sorry mom), but a new apartment with a new-ish oven has really inspired me. It would take six hours—yes, SIX hours—to bake an apple pie at my old apartment. This past year I’ve been developing oatmeal cookies with the goal of creating one unique recipe for every day of the year. That’s right—365 oatmeal cookie recipes. Or 52. Guess which one will come first.