Dog Poison Cookies #5 and Garlic Sourdough

Today has been the most uncomfortably warm day of the year for me. How did I embrace the situation? Why, I baked cookies and bread in a hot hot oven, of course.


With a family party fast approaching this weekend, I really need to make sure my Dog Poison Cookies are ready to go for a large audience. I'm not expecting to bring people to their knees with joy or anything, but I want them to at least be as good as the other cookies that'll be there. So I went back to my recipe for V2 and made some adjustments I had thought about in my last cookie post.

Basically, more sweetness was added in the form of light corn syrup, an idea taken from those chewy version three cookies. I secretly also hoped this would reduce the dryness encountered in both V2 and V4. I also lowered the amount of raisins and increased the amount of chocolate.


OK, so this recipe actually turned out so good that I kind of wonder if I should hesitate to post it online. I mean, what if I end up running a successful bakery operation and people are crazy for these cookies? Do I really want them to be so accessible, thus cheapening the value of my special product? The answer, of course, is yes. Sharing is the best thing we can do, whether it be in the arts, food, or just every day physical things. So please, feel free to pirate these cookies. But give me credit for inventing them; I don't want anyone taking credit for these and making millions.

Dry:

• 4 oz Whole Wheat Flour
• 1.5 oz Flax meal
• 4 oz. AP Flour
• 4 oz. oats
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda

Creamed:

• 6.75 oz. (1 cup-remeasured) brown sugar
• 2.5oz (around 3/8 cup) corn syrup
• 1 stick butter (room temperature would be best)
  
• 1/4 cup (1.6 oz.) canola oil
• 1 egg
• 2 teaspoons vanilla

Extras:

• 3.5 oz. raisins
• 3.5 oz. chocolate chips
• 3 oz. chopped macadamia nuts

1. Preheat to 375F.
2. Sift/mix together the dry ingredients in a bowl (not your mixer bowl).
3. Cream the butter, sugar, and corn syrup in mixer or by hand if you're superman.
4. Add egg, mix well.
5. Add vanilla, mix well.
6. Add dry, mix well.
7. Add extras, mix well (but not so long you smash the raisins or break up the nuts too much).
8. Drop and bake as desired. I did fairly large droppings, probably around 3-4 Tablespoons each, and bake time was around 15 minutes total. Rotate the pan(s) after about 7 minutes and check after another 5.

I think I'm done playing with the formula for these for a while. A little crispy/crunchy, a little chewy, a lot delicious. That sounded lame, but really, they're good.

I'm still baking lots of sourdough too, in case you haven't been religiously following The Windowpane Test, my other blog. Today, in addition to the really good cookies, I made what may have been my best bread EVER. Going on a memory of excellent roasted garlic boules at Beach Pea Baking Co. in Kittery, ME, I decided to have a go at it with a 20% whole wheat sourdough. Instead of roasting the garlic, I just smashed about 10 cloves and pan fried in a generous amount of good extra virgin olive oil. Other than a major deflation that shocked my core during the scoring just before baking, this bread came out freaking awesome.

I actually have another boule from the same dough in the fridge, retarding overnight. So tomorrow I'm going to bake another bread, hopefully this time without the deflation. I am pumped. This bread is lingering in my mouth with a sour garlicky goodness that is so nice it could be all I eat for the rest of my life. Humble, I know.

BRIAN OUT.

Dog Poison Cookies IV

Roman numerals look cool huh? Here's the latest revision on the recipe. They came out pretty good, but... well, actually, they were in my opinion the worst yet. They need more sweetness, which I think was a major thing missing from V2, and I realize now that at some point I reduced the amount of sugar in the chocolate chip cookie recipe I'd been working on this year, but did not account for effect the switch to whole wheat would have in doing so. I think I have figured out what I want in the next recipe: more oats, more chocolate, more sweet. Everything else should stay the same, I think. I'm planning on bringing these to a party this weekend, so I may have to do a few experimental batches this week to get the formula just right.


Here's the recipe, anyway. I'm mostly posting so I can reference it in the future if I need to. Posting recipes on my blog has proven very helpful lately, by the way. Instead of constantly crossing out notes on my original recipe, I can just refer to the latest edition via laptop and adjust as I see fit. I type out the new recipe as I mix it, and it will be ready for next time. But this morning I had a major problem caused by a typo I made in my sourdough pancake recipe, in which I put a T instead of a t for the amount of salt (causing me to use 300% of the salt I'm supposed to!). I edited the post so it's correct though, so no more poisonous pancakes for me.

Dry:

• 4 oz Whole Wheat Flour
• 1.5 oz Flax meal
• 3 oz. AP Flour
• 2 oz. oats
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 t baking soda

Creamed:

• 6.5 oz. (1 cup) dark brown sugar
• 5.5 Tablespoons (2.7 oz.) butter
• 1/4 cup (2 oz.) canola oil
• 1 egg
• 1.5 teaspoons (0.3 oz.) vanilla

Extras:

• 3 oz. raisins
• 3 oz. chocolate chips
• 3 oz. chopped macadamia nuts

Mix and bake as in V2.

(EDIT 7/31/2009: See new and improved version of my Dog Poison Cookies here)


BRIAN OUT.

Our Lovely (wasteful jerk) Neighbors

Our next door neighbors are terrible. I mean, of course you're going to get annoyed when living right next to someone, especially when regular old neighbor things happen, such as screaming arguments about how the man drives drunk, or getting barked at by their untrained German Shepherd every time you leave the condo, only to hear the owners bark right back at the dog "NO!" in a lame attempt to cease the unsettling and always startling noise. Of course these things happen, and you get used to them and over time can effortlessly ignore them.

Their humongous pickup truck, fit to tow a humpback whale, starting up at 6am every morning blends in with the birds. And you know he needs that huge truck, by the way, so he can drive his their weekly 3 garbage bags the 20 yards to the edge of the curb (no need for a recycling bin, they don't bother sorting). Which is all you ever see them do with that truck, other than storm away with it in the middle of accusations of drunkenness. The SUV is much easier to get used to, it leaves at 8am, right after its driver scolds their dog for peeing in the backyard, even though she just stands on her back porch waiting, retractable leash allowing the pooch explore the vast universe it knows, a 5 by 10 foot patch of dirt and struggling seedlings of grass. It's kind of fun that they're my neighbors in this respect, because later in the afternoon when the man gets home, he tends to his shitty grass, wondering why it isn't coming in better.

The first really annoying thing we noticed about them was that they leave their outside light on at all times. The switch is right next to the front door; I know this because our condo is a mirror image of theirs. We keep ours off, it's pretty easy. For illustration purposes, I took these two pictures, one right after the other, to show just how ridiculous leaving the light on is.

"hmm can't find muh keys, muh keys, hmm, good ting da lights is on"

"oh wait i'm a moron, it's a beautifully sunny day, muh keys were in muh mouf da whole time"

Maybe their switch is broken... no wait, on Halloween they pretended they weren't home and put paper up in their windows so no light could come through. The outside light was amazingly off that night. Spooky!

With the recent heat and humidity, I can understand many people wanting to use air conditioners. I don't personally like them that much, for several reasons:

1. Huge waste of electricity
2. Air seems sort of stale, unpleasant
3. Heavy lifting
4. Locks you into the decision to use AC, even on nice days where not even a fan is necessary

But, of course, these light-leaver-oner neighbors of mine use an air conditioner, even though the windows in these condos are vertical and therefore you cannot easily get a good airtight seal as required for proper AC use. But, okay, whatever, a few other people in these buildings use AC, I've accepted it.

here is my neighbor's wonderful box of luxury

During the day, from 8am to 3 or 4pm, (7-8 hours), my neighbors are not home. I know they aren't home because they each have their own gas guzzling vehicles, and they each are gone. They park in the two spots right next to Amy's car, which are empty in this photo:

So, they're clearly off living their weekday lives. Wonderful for them. But as I sit in my office, every few minutes, my wall vibrates and I hear this horrible sound, a metallic whirring mixed with a high pitched whine. Can't imagine it from my description? Here you go:



It's like my neighbors are saying, "Just in case you weren't enjoying the humidity enough, listen to our cold, empty apartment. Isn't the sound excruciating? Too bad it's so darn hot and you can't close your window to quiet things down, huh? We'll be home in 6 more hours."

To conclude, I'll share a piece of conversation I once overheard. The guy had pulled out his cell phone to call a friend.

"Dude, turn on Fox News. They're talking about some great stuff. Fox News... Fox News, I don't know what channel."

Vote democrat.

BRIAN OUT.

Bugs

My camera (Samsung S85 snagged for very cheap off of a Woot) may not look like much, but I've been able to do some pretty cool stuff with it over the past... 11 months? Has it been less than a year?

With the thriving vegetation all around, I've been able to find some pretty cool creepy crawlies lately and thanks to the super macro feature on my camera, I've been able to get very close and get clear shots. Well, sometimes they're clear, at least. Here are a few, as well as some other recent pictures:

stupid fast bees

this was like an evil inch worm or something

niiice and slow

slimy

moth outside of my apartment. it had a 3-4 inch wing span. i thought it was a bird at first

lamb chops amy grilled. delicious

quinoa salad amy threw together. also delicious.

camo grasshopper in the wrong environment

some flowers on the side of amy's mom's house

BRIAN OUT.

I saw a flock of moosen!

In case you're wondering how my morning went (sorry about the bad images, didn't have a tripod):

Buck. It was territorial. See video below.

This buck was mad at me. If you listen closely you can hear him kind of huff at 0:28 and 0:34, right around the same time he's flitting his tail angrily. I retreated, but then just before exiting the clearing checked over my shoulder and saw two moose, so I stayed.

Saw this just after the buck scared me away.

Two Moosies in the Moose Spot off the Kancamagus Highway

Not worth looking at unless you zoom in. This is the same moose spot as always. There's a moose in the opening just to the right of that dead tree on the left. It's that thing that looks like a blackish blob.

Frog at Amy's Mom's house.

Potential campsite off Kanc?

BRIAN OUT.

A List

It started with Into The Wild (the movie with Emile Hirsch) and my brother Tim. The urge to be in nature. To find wild animals that we've never seen before but have lived so close by. The movie was great, but I think Eddie Vedder's excellent soundtrack is really what got me to hold onto the idea. Tim puts it on as we approach the White Mountain National Forest, and it has been a prominent soundtrack for my activities for the past year. There is really no better music for driving, or, I imagine, for hiking, biking, or sitting still. The air should be moving, or you within it, though.

The Friday before last I went home and Tim and I watched a movie about Dick Proenneke (watch some of it here), a man who left civilization for the wilderness of Alaska, where he built a cabin by hand and lived in it for over thirty years. By no coincidence, I have also been listening to a free audiobook version of Walden by Henry David Thoreau (get it through the awesome Librivox project). Living off of your own efforts, directly. It has been a long time since I have found an idea that speaks to me so loudly. Perhaps not since I was courting Amy (if "courting" is even the right word), a time when I knew I had found something new and full of potential.

Just after Christmas, Amy and I stayed in a Yurt at Frost Mountain Yurts, and other than firewood and propane, we were left to our own devices for fueling our activities. I brought my guitar. Amy brought some knitting. Leela ran in the woods. Reading, knitting, hiking, singing. Even though it was just two nights, it was by far one of the best vacations of my life.

All of these things have been collecting and swelling in my mind, and they lead to important questions. What good is a subscription to cable TV? Why are there five guitars in the room with me? Why do we enter into legal borrowing situations like student loans and renting an apartment? I feel as though I am going to undergo some changes soon, and today I want to put together a list of luxuries I would like to take with me through it all. My hope is that within a year or so, I own very little more than what is on this list.

• a guitar
• good books that I feel a need to own (Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut, etc)
  
• adequate TV, with DVD player
• notebooks or other paper to write and draw on
• a good chair
• a good table
  
• mp3 player
  
• sturdy laptop computer
  
• bed
  
• kitchen supplies (this is a list unto itself, and I will pare it down another time)
• digital camera
• digital media that is organized and compact (ie, DVDs stored in large wallets and not displayed in the commercial cases)
  

I am not done. But I want to spend some of my work day at the library, so I will work more on this list later. Sorry.

Panoramic Photos

Autostitch is effing great. Here is a collection of panoramic images it allowed me to create. Click to view full size.

Wagon Hill (Durham, NH)

Wagon Hill (Durham, NH)

Kancamagus Highway (facing southwest)

Moosing Spot (off Kancamagus Highway in Livermore, NH)

Scenic Overlook at sunrise (off Kancamagus Highway in Livermore, NH)

Frankenstein Cliff (off 302 in Bartlett, NH--I think?)

Near Sabadday Falls (off Kancamagus Highway in Waterville Valley, NH)

Bear Notch Road Scenic Overlook (Passaconaway--or maybe Bartlett, NH)

BRIAN OUT.

Dog Poison Cookies Versions 2 & 3

The best thing about experimental baking is that even if the results aren't what you had in mind, or if they just plain don't come out right, as long as everything is thoroughly cooked and not burned, it'll usually taste good. Unless you're going to get really experimental, that is...

Since I really want to perfect these Dog Poison Cookies of mine, I have been trying out a few different things.

Version 2: Oats

I felt like they were pretty great on the first try, but I wanted to make it a bit heavier and healthier, so I added some oats and made other small adjustments to the first recipe.

Dry:

• 4 oz Whole Wheat Flour
• 1.5 oz Flax meal
• 4 oz. AP Flour
• 4 oz. oats
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 t baking soda (probably should have kept at 1)

Creamed:

• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 stick butter
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 1 egg
• 1.5 teaspoons vanilla

Extras:

• 4 oz. raisins
• 3 oz. chocolate chips
• 3 oz. chopped macadamia nuts

Instructions:

1. Preheat to 375 degrees F.
2. Mix/sift the dry stuff in regular old bowl.
3. Cream the butter and sugar in large/mixer bowl. Add egg and vanilla and mix well.
4. Add dry, mix well.
5. Add extras, mix briefly.
6. Bake 10-15 minutes, checking and rotating after about 7 min. Mine took about 15 minutes with two sheet pans in the oven at once.

These came out really great. Almost exactly what I wanted. I'm worried that the extra baking soda caused a strange sharp taste, but otherwise these had nice full mouth flavor. I'll admit that they were a little dry, no doubt due to the vast increase in dry ingredients, but that should be easy enough to remedy. Also, the chocolate was a little lost in these I think, and perhaps they could have been a touch sweeter.

(EDIT 7/31/2009: See new and improved version of my Dog Poison Cookies here)

Version 3: 100% Whole Wheat
(modification to chewy chocolate chip recipe in King Arthur Flour's Whole Grain Baking)

This recipe is a complete tangent from my evolving recipe above. I wanted to follow specific instructions for using all whole wheat flour, which increases my chances of getting things healthier, so I went with this recipe. Note: It requires overnight refrigeration of the dough.

Ingredients:

Creamed:

• 1.5 sticks butter
• 7.5 oz. brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt (1/2 teaspoon table salt, probably)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 3.6 oz. corn syrup
• 1 Tablespoon apple cider vinegar
• 2 eggs

Dry:

• 9 oz. whole wheat flour

Extras:

• 5 oz. chopped macadamia nuts
• 6 oz. chocolate chips
• 7 oz. raisins

Instructions:

1. Melt butter.
2. Mix butter with sugar, heat a little to dissolve sugar well, let cool.
3. Add everything but eggs, flour, and extras.
4. Add eggs, mix well.
   
5. Add flour, mix well.
   
6. Add extras, mix until evenly distributed.
7. Put in fridge OVERNIGHT.
8. Preheat to 375 degrees F.
9. Drop dough onto cookie sheets in desired size.
10. Bake smaller cookies (about 1 Tablespoon each) for 12-13 minutes, checking and rotating halfway. For larger cookies (about 3 Tablespoons each), bake time was about 16 minutes in my oven.

These "chewy" cookies were indeed chewy, and had a new tang that I wasn't sure was great or just good. May have been caused by increase in raisin ratio, but more likely it was the vinegar. They were also fairly sticky, a big turnoff to the fingers. I love their taste, with such great dynamics between the chocolate, nuts, and raisins, but they aren't really what I want in these cookies. The texture just isn't right. I think the next version will be a convergence of versions 2 and 3 in this post.

(EDIT 7/31/2009: See new and improved version of my Dog Poison Cookies here)

BRIAN OUT.

I am ALF

Gordon Shumway in "We're So Sorry, Uncle Albert"

Thanks to Hulu, I've been watching lots of ALF lately. Remember ALF? He's back. In streaming video form.

In case you don't get my reference above:
"It's ALF. He's back. In pog form." - Milhouse

ALF was on when I was between the ages of 3 and 7 (1986-1990). This was that weird period in life where I have no real reference points to recall concrete memories. As the series was ending, I was just starting school, and with specific grades and different classmates and teachers, it is easier to remember certain things. I remember playing with blocks and kissing a girl named Jessica in kindergarten, I remember bringing 100 grapes to show and tell in 1st grade, and I have plenty of other memories that I can recall easily from every year of my early schooling if I just think about where I was and who I was with. But before kindergarten (which was the school year beginning in 1989) I was just hanging around at home with my family, and I have trouble remembering any specifics without looking at pictures or finding old toys. In watching ALF, I'm finding that there is another reference point from my past.

Because Hulu goes to commercial right after this, it was hard to get a good screenshot, sorry

I'm not going to exaggerate and suggest that I actually remember any of the episodes specifically, but I do remember all of the characters quite well, how the house was laid out, and most of ALF's characteristics (the "HA!" with the hand slapping the table especially). I remembered before watching any of it that Mrs. Ochmonek was played by the woman who later played Jerry's mom on Seinfeld. I remember loving the show, however, and I think my older brother Joe had a sweet ALF lunch box.

He thinks he killed Uncle Albert

For so long I was always annoyed when people got nostalgic about being an 80's child, because most of the stuff they talked about were shows I didn't watch and music I didn't listen to. Up until I found ALF on Hulu (actually, my younger brother, Tim, who was only 2 years old when the show went off the air, told me about Hulu hosting it), I just kind of felt like I had no recollection of the eighties, and everyone else just had a better memory than I do. But now I feel like I've unlocked another huge chunk of my life, just as I did when I found that Tidy Cat.

You can't see all of them, but he's watching 3 TVs at once. And wearing a shirt.

Since Amy has been working at a yoga studio 3 nights a week, I find myself needing to kill time while alone and not working. Typically, I fill this time with cooking/baking, watching DVRed TV, and random time sucks on the Internet. Now I've found ALF, and it is really, REALLY difficult to stop watching. Once an episode ends, I just click right on to the next one. And after watching a lot of episodes, I realized that since I don't really have any reason or means to leave the apartment very often, I'm not much different than a hairy comedy monster hiding out from the Alien Task Force.

Sentenced to 30 days without TV, ALF puts on his own Dance Fever in "Can I Get A Witness?"

Aside from walking Leela around the neighborhood, I really am here all day, every day, just like ALF is in the Tanner house all the time. I just mill around this apartment, fighting off temptations to eat the neighbor's cats and trying to entertain myself with various media. It is therefore at least a little bit ironic that I've been filling so much time watching a show about someone else who is trapped in a house and constantly succumbing to the pressures of boredom.

"HA!"

I have absolutely no shame about watching so much of this somewhat short-lived show. It's so funny and nostalgic, and I couldn't ask for much more from twenty minutes of television. So, if you watched ALF as a kid, or even if you were older, I really recommend this opportunity to relive some quality situational comedy. It's really a great show, which some truly excellent puppetry by the voice of ALF and one of the show's creators Paul Fusco. And Max Wright, the guy playing the patriarch, Willy Tanner, is hilarious. He elevates the conflicts between human and alien to a perfect level of humor.

Willy and ALF arguing over who should run the neighborhood watch in "Someone To Watch Over Me Pt. 1"

Watch ALF on Hulu, NOW.

BRIAN OUT.