I’ll go ahead and warn you: This is one of those Let Me Tell You a Story posts where I type and type and type about something and then finally get to the recipe from the post title. So if you’re just here for the recipe? Click here.
It’s not a long story, though. I promise. Here goes.
The Great British Baking Show Bake-Along that I’ve been participating in on Facebook has started up again, and the first challenge is Regional Biscuits. The instructions are to make a dozen perfectly identical cookies that have a recognizably regional flavor and that have a personal meaning to the baker. I don’t know that there’s a regional cookie from my area, though, and I know I can’t get my Aunt Judy’s rugelach to look anything even close to identical (and possibly not even edible).
So I decided to go with the all-American chocolate chip cookie.
Fortunately for me, my friend April sent her chocolate chip cookie recipe out with her holiday cards this year. It was boldly titled “The World’s Best Chocolate Chip Cookies.” My first thought was “Oh, that’s a sweet idea,” and my second thought was, “Wow, April, that’s a pretty big flex. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
But it was Christmas and so I didn’t try it for a few weeks. I made my first batch last week, and I am happy to report that she was not overstating things. These are the best chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever made. They have a ridiculous chip-to-cookie ratio, and they’re somehow crisp and chewy all at the same time.
I’m not sure why I was surprised that they’re perfect, though. April is a scientist, and I’m positive this recipe went through lots of testing under rigorous conditions before she committed to it.
1 1/4 cups unsalted butter (10oz)
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar (8oz)
1 1/4 cup dark brown sugar (10oz)
2 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla
3 cups bread flour, approximately 20oz
1 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
10 ounces bittersweet chocolate chips
10 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chunks
Maldon sea salt
Cream together butter and sugars. Beat in eggs one at a time until mixture is homogenous. Add vanilla.
Mix together flour, baking powder, baking soda and kosher salt.
Add flour mixture to the prepared butter/sugar mixture. Beat together until homogenous. Stir in the chocolate chips. (This takes some effort. Twenty ounces is a LOT of chocolate chips.)
Cover and chill dough at least 4 hours and up to 4 days.
When you’re ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Scoop tablespoon-sized balls of dough onto cookie sheet lined with parchment paper approximately 2 inches apart. Sprinkle each dough ball with a few crystals of Maldon sea salt flakes.
Bake until edges are golden brown, approximately 10 to 12 minutes. Cool completely, if you can stand the wait.
Let’s talk for a bit about the eighth president of these United States of America.
I don’t recall learning much of anything about Van Buren in school. Other than a goofy turn on Seinfeld and an Ezra Pound canto, we don’t see a whole lot of him in pop culture, either. So I was surprised to read that he actually had a huge influence on our current political system. He basically pulled together a ragtag group of politicians who more or less believed the same thing and said “Hey guys, let’s form a nationwide system of connections and influence and call it the Democratic Party!” But here’s the funny thing: Nobody knows exactly how he did it. He was a very behind-the-scenes mover and shaker, and because he seemed to get things done through slight-of-hand (and he was short), people called him “The Little Magician.”
I had a hard time finding a biography of Van Buren, which seems to be the start of a trend from MVB through Buchanan. If anyone has a Franklin Pierce bio they’d like to part ways with, I will take it. Anyway, I ended up with “Martin Van Buren” by Ted Widmer. It’s part of the American Presidents series, and I enjoyed it well enough that I’m hoping to find the rest of the books in the series.
So here’s a bit of what I learned about Martin Van Buren.
You too can pledge your allegiance to MVB for the low, low price of $19.99. Click on the graphic to buy the T-shirt. This is not an advertisement, nor will I make any money off the sale.
Martin Van Buren was the first president to be born in the newly independent United States of America. He grew up poor in Kinderhook, New York, where his parents owned a tavern that just happened to be frequented by one Aaron Burr. Martin left school at age 13 and was sent to live and work in New York City with an influential rich guy from Kinderhook named William Van Ness, who was a pal of Burr’s. Burr took Martin under his wing, and a scurrilous rumor started going around that MVB was actually his son! Scandal!
Martin eventually became a lawyer — which was more of an apprentice situation than a law-and-lots-of-debt thing in those days — and in 1812 he won a seat in the state senate where, as Widmer puts it, “power began to flow to Van Buren.”
In 1821 he was elected to the U.S. Senate. John C. Calhoun was the first person to greet him in DC, and they were card-playing buddies before they became mortal enemies. Ain’t that always the way? Their falling out had more to do with Van Buren befriending and backing Andrew Jackson for the presidency than it did with whist or whatever they were playing, though. And listen to this dirty bit of business from Calhoun! So Jackson sent Van Buren to England to serve as minister to England. Van Buren gets there, drinks a lot of ale with Washington Irving and hangs out with the royals a bit, only to find out that the Senate voted against his appointment. And guess who cast the deciding vote? John Crabapple Calhoun.
But then later Jackson let everyone know he wanted Van Buren to be the next president, and even though:
a lot of political cartoonists made fun of his colorful, flamboyant fashion sense (I did not see that coming) and his stature;
some old-school power brokers hated the two-party system he’d helped foster;
some people thought he was too Northern;
but other people thought it was pro-slavery
he won the election. At the time, he was the youngest guy ever elected president.
And then everything went sideways.
MVB became president in 1837, when the country was kind of entering its adolescence. The Panic of 1837 put a bit of a damper on Americans’ enthusiasm for all things America, and people were starting to get the sense that maybe America had some faults.
The Panic got its start because there was unregulated growth and loose credit and an unfavorable trade agreement with England, and when Ireland and England wanted their money and America couldn’t pay? The Panic of 1837 turned out to be the worst financial catastrophe in the United States until the crash of 1929! Bad news for pretty much everyone, but one Cornelius Roosevelt — aka Teddy’s Granddad — managed to scoop up lots of property on the cheap and get good and filthy rich in the process. So without The Panic, we might not have had the Presidents Roosevelt. We might have missed out on “Moby Dick,” too, since author Herman Melville took to the seas after his brother lost his business.
Another tidbit I found interesting was the way a wealthy guy in New York described groups of people protesting the high price of flour. He called them “a convention of loafers from all quarters of the world.” I’m hearing definite echoes of the “These punks wouldn’t have time to protest if they had jobs” sentiments that I see frequently on Facebook. The more things change, huh?
After the Panic of 1837, Americans started asking just what sort of place they wanted their country to be. The one big glaring issue was slavery, a topic on which Martin Van Buren had never been forthcoming. He seems to have tried to maintain a centrist position, which is gross in retrospect. It didn’t go over well then, either, because as he was trying to hold to the center, the country was pulling farther and farther apart and everyone found more and more reasons to be angry at Van Buren. And when the opposition’s new nationwide propaganda machine — modeled after Van Buren’s own Democratic Party network — put William Henry Harrison forth as their champion (complete with a totally fabricated poor-kid back story and a lot of catchy tunes!), Martin Van Buren lost in a big way.
(The folks campaigning for him called him “Ol’ Kinderhook,” and his supporters shortened that to “OK.” And that idiom has never left us.
Even if I forget everything else about Martin Van Buren, I hope I remember that he ushered “OK” into our vernacular.)
So former President Martin Van Buren went back home to Kinderhook. He did some traveling, he started writing his biography, he had a wildly unsuccessful run for the presidency with the Free Soil Party, and he had one of the first indoor, flush toilets in the area installed.
When Van Buren’s ancestor left the Netherlands for the new world, he didn’t even have a last name. And then his great-great-great-etc-grandson ended up becoming president and having a state-of-the-art toilet. A true Drake-ian tale.
Those who have wrought great changes in the world never succeeded by gaining over chiefs, but always by exciting the multitude. This first is the resource of intrigue and produces only secondary results; the second is the resort of geniuses and transforms the universe.
A few days before 2016 arrived, the venerable Angie posted a link to something called “Yoga Camp” on her Facebook page. She generally has good ideas, so I clicked to find out what it was all about. It was a 30-day at-home yogathon hosted by a cute Texan named Adriene, and it involved daily yoga and daily mantras, and the Yoga Camp page called it a “bootcamp for your mind, your body and your soul,” which sounded pretty woo-woo to me. But it was allegedly accessible to the out-of-shape and inflexible and most important of all it was free.
Hello Muddah. Hello Fadduh.
So I signed up.
I signed up under the assumption that I would ignore the mantras and that I wouldn’t be able to do the majority of the work and that I’d get discouraged and quit before Day 5. That’s a terrible way to start any project, isn’t it? Sometimes I have a very bad attitude. By the first day of Yoga Camp, though, I’d decided that not only was I going to do this project for my physical health, I was going to try to adjust my attitude as well. I was going to at least try to downward-dog and mantra my way through the entire 30 days.
And now here it is mid-January, and I’ve done yoga every day for the past 17 days. Even more surprising, I’m setting my alarm clock a little earlier and looking forward to getting up and greeting the day with a little yoga.
Every morning I go down to the basement, I clean up the Disney Infinity figures that Pete has inevitably left on the floor, and I move the coffee table. I crank up the TV and the Xbox and turn the dial to the Yoga with Adriene channel, and then — here’s the kicker — I do my best. I’ve fallen over a few times, and I’ve been unable to follow along once or twice. But I’m trying.
The multicolored Pottery Barn rug I picked up a few years ago for $20 at a yard sale does a serviceable job as a yoga mat, Marsha T. Cat likes to sit and groom herself in the most obtrusive place she can find, and I still can’t fold myself into a child’s pose. But every now and then I’m able to move in a way I was sure I wouldn’t be able to move, and every now and then that daily mantra business — I embrace, I create, I enjoy, I am bold, I am present, I am alive — actually clicks.
So here it is mid-January, and I’m more than half way through Yoga Camp. My body feels a little better, and my mind and my soul — woo-woo though it may be — are both feeling better as well. I don’t feel any more flexible, but I feel a lot more peaceful. I very much wish Yoga Camp could go on forever, and I’m really happy that I took a chance on it.
