ad hoc at home #6: shortbread cookies

Pure joy can be created from 4 simple ingredients: butter, sugar, vanilla and flour.

Who knew?

If you've ever eaten at French Laundry, you've walked away with some of those light golden buttery crumbly cookies cut into perfect little rectangles. Well, with a stand mixer and some parchment paper, it's easier than pie to make (I know the saying is easy as pie, but pie is not this easy to make).

The ingredients: 1.75 sticks (or 14 tbs) unsalted butter; 0.5 cup granulated sugar + extra to sprinkle over cookies; 1 tsp vanilla paste or extract; 2 cups AP flour.

The dough: Using the paddle mixer, mix butter and sugar on low to combine, and then beat at medium speed for ~3 minutes until creamy. Add vanilla, and then on add flour on lowest speed. Once all the flour is in, beat on medium until dough begins to cling to the paddle and no longer looks dry, but before it forms a solid mass. Transfer dough to a board and bring it together with your hands. Form the dough into a roughly rectangle shape, wrap it in plastic and refrigerate it for at least 30 minutes, and up to several days.

Forming the cookie: Roll the refrigerated dough between two pieces of parchment paper until it's 0.25-inches thin. Set aside the top parchment, and cut the dough into 2-inch squares. Cover again with the top parchment and refrigerate again for ~15 minutes until cookies are firm enough to remove from the parchment.

Baking: Position oven racks in lower and upper thirds of the oven, and preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remove top sheet of parchment, and arrange cookies 1-inch apart on two cookie sheets lined with parchment paper or Silpats. Sprinkle cookies with sugar, and bake for 11-12 minutes, until their edges are just starting to turn golden brown. Allow cookies to cool a few minutes on the baking sheet before transferring onto a rack to cool completely.
After making the cookies a few times, I decided to take the cookie one step farther: dipped in chocolate.

Technically, to create a shiny, hard chocolate coating for the cookies, you have to "temper" it. Well, tempering technically requires bringing chocolate to a certain temperature, then cooling to a certain temperature, etc., and I don't cook with thermometers, not yet anyway. So I looked for shortcuts, and this is what I came up with:

For a single batch of cookies, you just need 5-6 ounces of good quality semisweet chocolate (you can use bittersweet chocolate, too, but for me, it wasn't sweet enough to stand up to the cookie's flavor). I chopped the chocolate into large pieces, and transferred approximately 2/3 of it to a medium-sized glass bowl. The glass bowl went over a small pot of simmering water. I added a teaspoon of shortening (I read somewhere that shortening added to melting chocolate stabilizes the end product and lends a sheen, although I haven't yet tested what happens if you don't add it), and stirred the chocolate around slowly until melted. I then added the rest of the chocolate, which I think achieves the cooling part of the tempering process, and continued stirring until it was all melted.

Then I removed the bowl of chocolate, and started dipping. I placed the dipped cookies on parchment paper to cool.

This yields enough melted chocolate to allow easy dipping in a bowl, but this means you have plenty to spare. You could theoretically use even less chocolate, but then the chocolate coats the bowl and will be quite shallow making it difficult to dip the cookie.

Allow the chocolate dipped cookies to cool in the refrigerator until the chocolate hardens, which I found takes at least 45 minutes.

Needless to say, these chocolate-dipped versions were very well received.

ad hoc at home #2 and #3: crispy braised chicken thighs and creamed baby spinach

What better day to put in some effort in the kitchen than Valentine's Day. On the other hand, you want to enjoy the day with your special someone, preferably with a delicious dinner to share. Mark and I have long since stopped going to restaurants on this day for overpriced, mass produced food. Usually one or the other of us cooks, and then is too exhausted to do much apart from watching TV as the other one cleans. As a testament to the evolution of our relationship to the point where we can share the kitchen (which was not always the case), we decided to cook together. It was brilliant, and I wish we could have come up with the idea years ago.

Mark and I decided to each tackle a single recipe from ad hoc at home. I chose a relatively uncomplicated main course, and he chose an uncharacteristically complicated side dish ... so we were even.

I made crispy braised chicken thighs with lemon and fennel. It was supposed to include olives, but I don't like how olives overpower other flavors I love, so I left them out. You'll find me taking just such artistic license with recipes often because if there's something Mark and I know well, it is what we like to eat.

For this recipe, I learned how to cut fennel into "batons" (I normally slice the bulb into uneven, unmanageable open rings). I also learned that by browning the chicken skin side down to a crisp, and then braising it skin side up, you can achieve braised chicken with a crispy skin.

Like I said, it was a pretty straightforward recipe considering its source.

Mark took on the creamed baby spinach, which seems like it should be simple enough ... not. Like many of his recipes, it was two recipes in one. He had to first learn to make a Mornay Sauce, one of Keller's "basic" sauces involving five herbs and spices, diced onions, butter, flour, milk and heavy cream, some cheese we don't normally keep in the house (Comte or Emmentaler), and 35-40 minutes of stirring. This is all before you cook and strain the spinach, mix it in with the Mornay Sauce, bake it, and then broil it.

To be fair, we left out the cheese because we didn't feel like combing the extensive cheese counter for these specific cheeses. Still it took Mark about the same amount of time to make the spinach as I did to make the braised chicken, so at least the timing turned out nicely. It really was the best creamed spinach we've ever had, but I'm not sure I could get Mark to make it again.

We washed it all down with one of our favorite Rieslings.

And finished the dinner with my first ever chocolate souffles, from a recipe I saw on Gordon Ramsay's The f Word (the "f" stands for food). For this triumph, I had to do a lot of metric to U.S. customary conversions, and learn to make corn flour from corn starch and flour. The corn flour thickens the milk to a "yogurty" texture, the result being a "creme patissiere" (yes, lots of learning happened that day). After 3-4 minutes of stirring, I wasn't sure "yogurty" was an accurate description, and just when I was about ready to give up on achieving the desired texture, it happened. It really took on the texture of yogurt.

Then came the chopped chocolate, egg yolks, whip the egg whites with the superfine (=caster) sugar, load the batter into buttered ramekins pre-sprinkled with grated chocolate, and tada!

Okay, after the prescribed 6-8 minutes, it wasn't quite ready. But given 5 more minutes, tada!

There may have been a more impressive rise had I not disturbed them when they were not ready, but they were deliciously decadent with a very gooey center, and Mark said this was how he wished all restaurants served their chocolate souffles, so I declare victory.