For June 9

One new and one old recipe this week:

Peanut Butter (and Currant) Cookies, from Mary Bergin, Spago Desserts
Girl Scout Thin Mint Brownies, from The Food Librarian

I have previously made the peanut butter cookie recipe.  Mary Bergin was the pastry chef at the original Spago in Hollywood.  She then went to Las Vegas to oversee the Spago there, and I don't know where she has ended up since then.  This cookbook was originally published in 1994, and my copy is signed by her, as well as by the friends who gave it to me.  One of those people, Chris Kennedy, was an attorney at Irell & Manella who recruited me from the University of Virginia Law School.  Chris was completely responsible for us ending up in Los Angeles, since Irell was the only firm in LA that I talked to.  At the time, we were much more interested in living in San Francisco or Seattle, but when I visited Los Angeles to interview at Irell, I was taken by the firm and by the city - the smell of black sage along the PCH in the spring is a magical thing - and ended up coming here, instead.  Sadly, Chris died four years ago, when he was only 57 years old.  Chris was a large personality and I owe him much gratitude, even if I left Irell only a year after arriving and our ties loosened over the intervening years.  From even our short time spent together, many great stories remain, most of which involve him, restaurants, and wine, lots of wine, all brought by him in shopping bags.  I will never forget the time, in Ojai, when he was told that, while the restaurant was happy to open wines he brought, they could not do it for wines that they had on their wine list.  He looked at the waiter, coolly, and said that, while they probably had the wine (it was Opus One), they certainly did not have the year (1983).  When the waiter saw the year on the label (and at the time of the story, it must have been 1996), he hurriedly agreed that they did not have a 1983 and that they would be happy to open the wine.

Anyway, while I don't normally like peanut butter cookies, which I generally find too sandy and dry, I love this version, which is neither.  They are great - moist, a bit soft, interesting flavor, and currants!  The title of the recipe doesn't mention it, but the recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups of currants, and the cookies are liberally studded with them.  They give a nice flavor complement to the peanut butter and probably help keep them moist.

This has become one of Andrew Bodhi-Heart's signature recipes - he makes them much more often than I do.  And I am indebted to him this week because, although I made the dough, which requires overnight refrigeration, he actually formed the balls (the recipe calls for each to be 1 ounce, and he tells me he weighed each one - OCD, anyone?) and baked them.  That is a long and tedious process.  I was very fortunate that he had cleared his schedule for that day in order to study for his licensing exam, and that he was home to bake them in a time-out from studying.  Thanks!

I also promised I would thank him for his generous contribution to the second recipe.  Andrew is a Girl Scout Thin Mint fanatic - each year he orders not a box, but a case, from some lucky Girl Scout somewhere.  This recipe required that I triple it to make the volume necessary to feed the Zen Center and the many others for whom we are baking these days, and that meant using 3 sleeves - a box and a half - of Girl Scout cookies.  He tried to convince me that doubling the recipe would be sufficient, but in the end he acceded.  So three sleeves it is - indeed, not only did he agree, but he even chopped them up.  (Actually, I didn't weigh them to confirm that it was, in fact, three sleeves of cookies that ended up in the bowl and not two.  In light of my comments in the next paragraph, well, hmmm......)

As for the finished result - meh.  The idea sounds so great - I mean, thin mints and brownies, right?  What could possibly be better?  The recipe is apparently an adaptation of a Martha Stewart brownie recipe, which replaces chocolate chips with chopped Thin Mint cookies.  But I found the brownies a bit too dry, and the Thin Mint flavor a bit too diluted.  And given the amount of very good chocolate and cocoa powder that went into these, this was quite a surprise.  Now, others seemed to think they were good, and they seemed to notice the Thin Mint flavor OK, but my expectations were not met.  If I were to do this again - which, given the above, will not be until another case of cookies arrives next year - I think I may use a different brownie recipe for my base.  Then again, David Lebovitz has a brownie recipe that use peppermint creme candy, and Dorie Greenspan has one that includes a middle layer of mini-peppermint patties, so there are lots of other ways to get my chocolate-peppermint fix if I can't wait a year.

In any event, happy baking and eating!