It's a free country - go nuts if you want to

The year: Summer of 1996
Location: Never Never Land (aka my aunt’s living room in Las Vegas, NV)
The players:    Me, as Wendy
                        Nate, as Captain Hook
                        Karlo (3 yr old cousin), as Peter Pan

Nate: Har har har I’m going to get you with my hook, Wendy! My big hook!
Me: Oh dear, not your big hook! (dude - that doesn’t even sound right). Save me Peter, save me!
Karlo: But I can’t! Wendy’s supposed to be skinny!

AND…CUT. End scene. Quickly, please.

He may have once deemed me an unfit Wendy due to our difference in size, he being about 3 feet tall at the time, me being 19 and outweighing him by a good 100 pounds (OR SO), but as I stood there looking down at this midget of a  Peter Pan with a habit of quoting from the movie Independence Day – “We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!” – I thought to myself, “This kid is going to be something special someday.” And he is. He is a remarkable young man who just started his first year at the United States Military Academy at West Point and the family couldn’t be more proud of him.

Friends who have requested my baked goods know my paranoia of mailing things across state lines...well, mailing things in general. I do not like broken cookies. I hate the idea of them not tasting fresh by the time they arrive at their destination. This makes me break into a cold sweat. It makes my stomach hurt just thinking about it. I have issues. But this weekend I put down the crazy juice for a minute and packaged 2 dozen oatmeal raisin chocolate chip pecan cookies for Karlo's parents to send in a care package this week. It’s the least I can do. I sealed the bags and tied them with the only ribbon I had. Pink (sorry, man). I’m praying that they end up intact and still taste good by the time they get there. Fingers crossed.

The rest of the cookies were taken out of my hands by a barrage of cousins before I even made it through the front door of my mom and dad's house. There were two different types: the first batch I made with raisins and no chocolate chips and the next batch was with chocolate chips and no raisins. You can interchange the two if you want. Hell - you don't even have to add nuts if you don't want to. Why? Because we live in a free country and every day is Independence Day. Thanks to all of those special individuals who make it so, especially to the grandpa I never met but love nonetheless, all my uncles, cousins, friends, in-laws, and Nate, who joined up as a reservist before he even started his senior year of high school. Freedom is so sweet.

Raisin Pecan Oatmeal Cookies (with or without Choco Chips)
Adapted from: 2008, Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics, All Rights Reserved

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups pecans
• 1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1 cup dark brown sugar, lightly packed
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2 extra-large eggs, at room temperature
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• ½ tsp of ground ginger (I added this just to see what would happen - I don't think I added enough to make much of a difference, really)
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt (I used regular salt)
• 3 cups old-fashioned oatmeal
• 1 ½ cups raisins
• 1 ½ cups chocolate chips (I like chocolate)

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Place the pecans on a sheet pan and bake for 5 minutes, until crisp. Set aside to cool. Chop very coarsely. (I didn’t do this since Trader Joe’s did all the work for me. Much easier to go this route.)

3. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter, brown sugar, and granulated sugar together on medium-high speed until light and fluffy. With the mixer on low, add the eggs, one at a time, and the vanilla.

4. Sift the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger, and salt together into a medium bowl. With the mixer on low, slowly add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture. Add the oats, raisins, and pecans and mix just until combined. (You can add the chips to this too...or not. Whatever you want, my friends!)

5. Using a small ice-cream scoop or a tablespoon, drop 2-inch mounds of dough onto sheet pans lined with parchment paper. Flatten slightly with a damp hand. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, until lightly browned (I usually like to stay on the low side, but these took 14 minutes. I kept opening the oven door every minute to check. This is not usually recommended, but I am a nervous baker). Transfer the cookies to a baking rack and cool completely.

Making it, not breaking it - oatmeal raisin chocolate chip success

I’m tired. In my advanced age, pulling an all-nighter is just not a good idea anymore. I couldn’t help it. I was too excited about having  a 4 day weekend  and didn’t want to waste any time in getting the party started. I had everything I needed to ensure a most excellent evening:  a Nate who wasn’t worried about work,  some cherries,  an orange soda, the last few remnants of the monster  granola bar,  and Netflix.

We started off with the heavy,  Academy Award  quality film "The Reef", starring 4 people and a shark.  If you are not afraid of sharks, watch this movie.  You will be afraid of this one. He is the ultimate hater shark, the shark that will not give up. He hates people - these 4 in particular  - why? I don’t know. Maybe it was their accent.

I’m not one for sharks, by the way. When I was a kid, I wanted to pet one. This is not my dream anymore. You cannot engage in dialogue or playful splendor with a shark. And I don’t believe that sharks do not like human flesh, that they take one bite out of you and decide that you don’t taste good enough to finish. Who made that up?  Who knows with 100% certainty what a shark's gastronomical preferences are?  This is baloney to me.

Nate left halfway through the next BAFTA caliber film, “The Resident”, starring Hilary Swank and Denny from “Grey’s Anatomy”.  Two words: nail gun. This is a weapon of mass destruction,  but only when aimed at someone’s head.

At the conclusion of this work of art,  I settled in for something a little less brainy, something I could just lose myself in. Ah yes, the world of competitive gymnastics – “Make It Or Break It”, which is ridiculous.  Ridiculously good, that is. The intrigue, the drama, the mean girls, the abstinence theme DJ Tanner keeps ramming down our throats (Candace Cameron will always be DJ Tanner to me)…entertainment at its finest. Who needed sleep when I was only 10 episodes away from finishing season 2?

Alas, sleep came. 

Interestingly enough,  this brain fog did not affect my baking this morning. What I turned out look like actual cookies – oatmeal raisin chocolate chip cookies.  I have no idea what I did, but I’m totally ok with these. And now...back to "Make It Or Break It"!

The oatmeal raisin chocolate chip cookie that never was...or, the monster granola bar that could feed a very small village

This is what happens when one erroneously considers themselves to be a baking savant, a sort of cookie Rainman, if you will. Spitting in the face of early onset Alzheimer’s (see previous post), I set out to make oatmeal raisin chocolate chip cookies without a recipe.

People – baking is a science. There’s not a lot of room for mistakes in terms of how many cups of flour and eggs a recipe calls for, or a teaspoon versus a tablespoon of baking soda or baking powder. That kind of stuff matters. A lot. In all honesty, they're not too bad. They’re just a little flat and stuck together. So let’s just say these aren’t cookies. Let’s call it a big oatmeal raisin chocolate chip granola bar! A monster granola bar that can feed approximately 15 people.

This crazy exercise reminded me of the time I developed an unhealthy obsession with baking cheesecake. The summer before my grandma had her stroke - I think I was about 8 at the time – she became my partner in cheesecake crime. And man, did we commit a lot of crimes against the baking world. We didn’t have a cookbook – geez, we didn’t even have the right tools like a mixer or measuring spoons. What we did have was the recipe off the back of a cream cheese package and some blind ass faith. To be fair, desserts weren’t a common thing in my Asian household. Fruits were/are our dessert, because nothing motivates one more to finish their food than a nice big banana and some orange slices.

But this was America and I wanted cheesecake. Grandma and I turned out disaster after disaster. Graham cracker crumbs as a crust? Never grounded fine enough. Cream cheese? Never beaten until smooth. I don’t know how exactly, but one version came out gelatinous. And what the hell was a springform pan? I didn’t even know what that was until college. These things did not jive with my 8-year old brain and my grandma’s old world cooking sense.

One weekend we got it right. It was a little thin (we used a 9x13 pan) and tinted a strange violet color (canned blueberries), but it was the right consistency and tasted like real cheesecake! Victory was ours. It's one of my most favorite memories ever. We didn’t have another baking summer like that again after she got sick.

As an adult in today's modern society that includes such things as the Internet and an iPad to take into the kitchen with me - and as someone in possession of the right baking equipment, I realize I don’t have to subject myself to this kind of experimentation anymore. I can do other things to keep my brain healthy and active…like play more chess or learn to read and write Chinese. But this was fun, and it reminded me not only of grandma, but of a time in my life when I didn’t give up until I got the results I wanted. Where did that me go? Time to find her.

So let’s see where this takes me…more blind ass faith baking to come!