For November 19

OK, a lot going on. Andrew received jukai last Saturday, and now has the name Bodhi-Heart. Very beautiful ceremony, and a gorgeous rakusu! As for me, Roshi gave me the OK this week to go ahead and begin gathering fabric for my okesa (priest robe), which means that I am going to be ordained as a Zen priest sometime in 2010. Wow. Overwhelming. More on that later.

This weekend is also the Zen Center's annual Day of Dana, as part of which the Zen Center buys and assembles baskets of food for needy local families. As part of that process, Bob Fisher, another Zen Center member who is also a professional pastry chef, and I are making homemade cookies to add to the baskets. We are each making 15 dozen cookies of two different varieties, so we will end up with around 60 dozen cookies. Since we are making 29 baskets, each family will receive 2 dozen cookies. I am glad it is Thanksgiving, so people at the supermarket don't look quite so askance when I buy 4 pounds of butter, 4 bags of chocolate chips, etc. etc. LA is so full of thin people, and they all seem to surround me in the checkout line on the days I am buying large quantities of butter and eggs. Sigh....

But I digress. In the midst of this, we still have a Thursday night talk, and Thursday night tea and cookies afterwards. For the cookies, there is nothing new, holiday-ish or particularly difficult this week, given the time I am devoting to other matters, but it is not to say that these are not worth, uh, sampling... And so:

Chocolate Chip Cookies, from Sherry Yard, The Secrets of Baking
Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti, from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

These are both repeats, and I realized a bit into the whole thing that this is really just two different versions of ch0colate chip cookies. Well, who doesn't love chocolate chips? Sherry Yard is the pastry chef at Spago, and this is the chocolate chip cookie recipe they serve there. (Although as someone recently pointed out to me, there they are warm from the oven and soft. If you pay me $150 for dinner, I will give you warm and soft, too.) These are a very thin, crisp cookie. Using a variation in the recipe, I added an extra egg to try to make them a bit cakier, but the dough seems to have just sneered at the extra egg. So thin and crisp it is.

The biscotti are one of my favorites. These involve lots of roasted, chopped hazelnuts and also chocolate. (For both the biscotti and chocolate chip cookies, I ended up hand cutting some Ghirardelli Semisweet Chocolate Bars. Hand cut chocolate is usually much better quality and more interesting than using store bought chips, which are usually made using a lower quality chocolate.) While, as with all biscotti, these would do better dipped in milk, hot cocoa or even (gasp) coffee than in the tea we serve at the Center, the chocolate and hazelnut combination is a very nice flavor. That is why the Italians came up with a special name for it: Gianduja.

Oh, and tomorrow I will be doing my baking for the Dana baskets. I am making this same chocolate chip cookie recipe from Sherry Yard (although I am using Ghirardelli 60% Bittersweet Chocolate Chips - which received the highest rating from Cook's Illustrated for chocolate chips - instead of hand cutting 42 oz. of chocolate, oof), and then the Nibby Pecan Butter Cookies, which have pecans and cacao nibs, from Alice Medrich, Bittersweet.

Take care,
D-J