Back to Basics

Shhhhh....be vewy vewy quiet, I am being sneaky in the kitchen.  So I know I promised you something fun and exciting and sweet.  But, boyfriend, ever the traditionalist decided he had a cookie craving that only I could satisfy.  (That is probably not true, but we were out of E.L Fudge cookies and Oreos, so what could I do?)
So no cookie pie, no apple crisp (at least for the time being) because I can only deal with dirtying and then washing so many dishes per day.  The downside of not owning a dishwasher.  So I contended with good old-fashioned chocolate chip cookies.  I, like most experienced home cooks, have a go to recipe for chocolate chip cookies.  In fact, it's my go to cookie base in general.  I have tried others every so often, but I ALWAYS go back to the one I'm going to give you.  Now, when baking I don't normally mess around with the recipe because baking is like science you have to have things in the correct ratios otherwise things don't turn out; savory recipes I can't leave alone, but to me, they're like art - I always have to put my own touches on things and ultimately I can usually correct something like too much acid or salt, etc.  But I messed around with my go to cookie recipe today because it seems like boyfriend is having some inner turmoil.  Eating healthy vs. eating tasty.  So I wanted to help that out a little bit.  And I did that by subbing in whole wheat flour for half the flour - next time I'm betting I can get away with all whole wheat.

Basic Cookie Recipe
3 Cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
2 sticks butter melted and cooled
1 cup white sugar
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
3 large eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 cups chocolate chips

Pre-heat oven to 375.  Sift (I know, I know, honestly I pretty much NEVER do this) flour, baking soda and set aside.  Beat together both sugars and butter until smooth.  Add in eggs and vanilla.  Beat.  Beat in flour mixture.  Stir in chips.  I don't measure my chips - I use a bag and a half.  This time it was 1 bag of semi-sweet and half a bag of white chocolate chips.  Also, I didn't have large eggs; I had teeny little medium eggs, so I used four of them instead of three.  I won't say it was a mistake, everything turned out ok in the end, but I ended up adding a little extra flour and setting the dough in the fridge for 20 minutes because it was looser and stickier than I usually work with.  This particular recipe makes ALOT of cookies.  Here is my downfall, I get tired of putting out sheet after sheet of cookies so the cookies gradually get larger so I have to make fewer of them.  Ultimately I ended up with roughly 40 large-ish cookies.  Had I made them "normal" size I would probably have around 60.  That rarely happens.  I know boyfriend likes it better because he has "lots" of cookies, but in my opinion, 40 is still lots of cookies, they're just freakishly huge now.

I promise.  To both you and myself that there will be something more exciting happening tomorrow.
Oh, and the steak - it was totally bad assly awesome.