Good, cozy plan

Fundamentally speaking, baking chocolate chip cookies shouldn't be complicated. But with the many ways to do such a thing: brown the butter, rest the dough 3 days, use part pastry flour and part bread flour, find chocolate feves/wafers, choose to use expensive chocolate, use only whole wheat flour (still a great choice) or simply decide which recipe to follow---and it can easily become a bother. Not so with these cookies. There's one caveat though, which is also why I chose to bake them: they use egg yolks, which I found, sitting in a lone cup in the fridge after making omelets with an extra white. The recipe, from The Violet Bakery Cookbook by Claire Ptak includes only yolks to add a delicate richness to the cookies, and manages to do so without getting too fussy. You can swap in a bit of whole grain flour, dial down the sugar a hair, add nuts, use whatever chocolate to your liking, and also eat them on the same day, while stocking the dough in the freezer for later which, to me, sounds like a good, cozy plan for fall. 

A push

And with a snap, all things summer get stored in the memory...
Increasingly beautiful sunsets.
Air, mountains, grass, oceans (for us urbanites)
Low-power A.C. : ( (good riddance)
As I write, a powerful breeze, slightly tropical, gusts through the living room window, announcing its entrance.

It will be four years in this space next month. In my kitchen, this summer, I got extra counter space--a seemingly simple thing that now seems inconceivable was never here. 

One night, early-June, a few days shy of turning 31, I was talking to Bryan Calvert, chef at James in Brooklyn. It was a celebration of his cookbook. It was a lively evening, with delicious appetizers and cocktails, and a cookbook so big and pretty it took me weeks to make anything from it (more below..)