Hungry Hippo

At times, anal retentive/OCD behaviour can be rather useful. It was the day I made these cookies, because they turned out well, and now I can attempt to recreate their lemon-chocolateyness another day. As well, others can too. I got the original cookie recipe from Baking Sheet, an excellent blog about, well, you guessed it, baking (and cooking too). I started changing some of the proportions of the ingredients; for example, being the slave to chocolate and fat that I am, I increased the amount of chocolate chips, and went for full size chips instead of the mini variety, and started skimming the top off of unhomogenized whole milk yoghurt. But this recipe has quickly become one of my favourites, because the light citrusey tang of Meyer lemons nicely off-sets the chocolate chip overload, which occurs with a slip of the wrist while measuring out that last step over the bowl of cookie dough (this is precisely why home-ec classes across the globe give the age old advice of measuring ingredients anywhere but over the bowl/pot/skillet in which you are preparing the food). I really do think that the brand of some of the ingredients have made a difference in the cookies, so the nit-picky specifics of the recipe are as follows:

Cocoa Fudge Chocolate Chip Meyer Lemon Cookies (whew, that's a mouthful)

1 C all purpose flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/4 C butter, room temp. (Organic Valley)
7 tbsp cocoa powder (Green and Black’s Organic/Fair Trade cocoa powder)
1 C evaporated cane juice sugar
1/3 C plain yoghurt (skimmed off the top of Hawthorne Valley’s unhomogenized whole milk yoghurt for some cream action)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 C (heaping) Ghiradelli semi-sweet chocolate chips (plus a handful more, if you are so inclined)

For optional lemon flavour:
grated zest from 2 Meyer lemons (approx. 2 tbsp)
4 tbsp freshly squeezed Meyer lemon juice
1/2 tbsp grated zest from a regular lemon

Preheat oven to 350F.
Mix together flour, baking soda and salt in a small bowl.
In a larger, microwave-safe bowl, melt butter in the microwave. Sift in cocoa powder. Mix in sugar. Stir in yoghurt and vanilla extract. Stir in lemon juice and zest. Add flour mixture and mix until just combined. Stir in chocolate chips. Drop tablespoonfuls of the cookie dough onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet.
Bake at 350F for 10-13 minutes and/or until slightly firm at edges. Allow to cool on pan for 3 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to completely cool. Cookies should be crisp around the edges, but otherwise chewy throughout.
Makes ~2 dozen.

A couple weeks ago, three people I know sent me this article about Korean fried chicken (which, unfortunately, is no longer available for free). Carolyn was hell bent on figuring out what all the fuss was about. She called a teatime meeting for the ladies last Sunday. But we drank beer, not tea, and instead of dining on cucumber sandwiches, we chowed down on some fried chicken at Bon Chon. These are my kind of ladies.

Korean fried chicken means business. The skin is beyond crunchy—you cannot converse and chew this chicken at the same time because you won’t be able to hear anything except for the fried chicken skin shattering between your teeth. Under the golden skin, you find juicy, tender chicken—texture-wise, this fried meat is truly a winner. Both the spicy and sweet varieties were ridiculously tasty. And, it’s all relatively light for fried chicken, as I had more than four pieces of chicken with no ill effects (although others in the party may have suffered from oil overdose). You can go here for unflattering photos of chicken consumption.

Apparently, there are multiple Korean fried chicken restaurants around the city. Perhaps it’s time to organize a monthly brunch meeting to discuss women’s issues at these various venues? I suggest clothing as the topic of the next meeting. To start, pedal pushers are neither pedals nor pushers. Discuss.

Yet another wacky egg related occurrence. I must be in the twilight zone. And, note another wonderful use for kitty litter: egg clean up. Again, via Poe News.

Those who have dined with me know that I have a proclivity for egg-containing dishes. In this department, I’m all equal opportunist; chicken eggs, duck eggs, quail eggs, fish eggs, shrimp and lobster roe—the list could go on and on. Fried, boiled, baked, savory or sweet. If it has a yolk, I’m not picky about preparation.
Recently, however, an ungodly clash of my two worlds has occurred. My lab life has encroached upon my egg haven, and I’ve been purifying antibodies from chicken egg yolks, one of the more horrifying things I’ve had to do in the name of science (there are a few other things I’ve done that make this list, but they’re not appropriate to discuss now, trust me). I’ve been dwelling in self-pity for the last few yolk-filled weeks. On one hand, I have harmless egg yolks, the epitome of creamy comfort food. On the other hand, in stark contrast, is lab life. Nothing that resides in the lab has ever passed my lips. Now I’m centrifuging yolk solutions like there’s no tomorrow, and washing the chunky remnants of stale egg yolks down the industrial sized lab sink. I have moments in which I think I should be eating these eggs, but at the same time, I’m wholly repulsed by the fact that the yolks are sitting in a beaker. I wish I could say that this purification process produces lovely custardy smells in the lab, but really I have only been able to catch the fishy notes of the eggs—blech. Perhaps it’s not wise, but I’ve been forcing myself to eat eggs on a regular basis through all this. The idea being that I’ll be able to keep reminding myself of my love of eggs, and, therefore, I’ll never shy away from them after this purification is done. So far, this tactic seems to have worked and I only have four more weeks of this to go. FOUR MORE WEEKS. No, I wasn’t yelling. Maybe just screaming. After all this settles down, maybe I’ll get a chance to try this out.

Since I'm up late and trying to align DNA sequences from fruit flies to those in the honeybee genome, I found this heartbreaking news story about bee diseases sweeping the honey industry.

Then, I found this story, and though it's food-related, it is incredibly freaky and makes me feel queasy and wrong all over. I always thought that being a parent was all about keeping the food in the kids. Obviously, that doesn't work for everyone.

(Both links via Poe News.)

January and February are the darkest, dreariest months of the year. It’s when time tends to distort such that hours and days seem drag out until forever. Yet on a seemingly random morning, one wakes to the sinking realization that January has become February without any warning. For me, these last couple of months have been quite eventful, for many reasons; some good and some more difficult. What it has done, however, is brought me back to this blog, which I’ve abandoned for a good many months. Perhaps I’m in a reflective mood, and this is simply a product of that, but hopefully it’s the beginning of more regular posts.