Dear world: something amazing happened this week.

It is not something that I had planned on, or ever expected to happen to little old me.

I made perfect chocolate chip cookies.

Like really, really awesome.  Now, I have spent twenty-two years perfecting the art of botching chocolate chip cookies, so this was a bit of a departure from the usual for me.

Baking cookies was one of my favorite things to do growing up – I even had the classic Tollhouse recipe memorized.  The cookies always tasted good, of course, but they never had that ideal crunchy-to-chewy ratio going on that I was looking for.

Sarah and I were grilling out one night this week, so I thought a batch of good old-fashioned chocolate chip cookies would fit the casual theme for dessert.  Unfortunately the back-of-the-chocolate-chip-bag recipe had failed me one too many times, so I figured I’d branch out.

I Googled around and found this recipe, complete with very enticing pictures.  But let’s be real, my hopes were not that high and I suspected that the internet might be messing with me and the pictures were fake.  Oh well, I went for it anyway.

When I finished making the dough, it seemed too wet… or so I thought.  The motto of the day was “oh well.”

The blog I found the recipe on seemed pretty intense about cookie-makin’, so I left out some of the more “gourmet” steps like flash-freezing the dough before baking or sifting the teaspoons of salt and baking soda in with all the flour (I never do that.  It just seems like a ridiculous step to me.  My time is precious, yo!)

Once the cookies started baking, they looked pretty cakey:

By the time they came out, they would’ve had Alton Brown drooling:

I haven’t the faintest idea what made these cookies so awesome.  Perhaps I mixed up my flour with fairy dust, or (SPOILER ALERT!) Albus Dumbledore came back from the dead and waved the Elder Wand over my cookies while my back was turned.  In actuality, I think it might’ve been the whole “one egg and one egg yolk” instead of two whole eggs deal… but let’s go with Dumbledore, eh?

So without further ado, here are the goods, straight from the recipe box of heaven.  This is my slightly-varied version of the original I found, exactly as I made my cookies – I left out the extra steps and random stuff I didn’t do, because clearly they were not necessary for awesomeness.

The Ultimate Awesome Chocolate Chip Cookies

(adapted from smittenkitchen.com)

Ingredients:

• 2 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup butter, melted
• 1 cup brown sugar, packed
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 tablespoon vanilla
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 2 cups chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 325F.  Grease cookie sheets.
2. Cream together the melted butter, brown sugar, and white sugar until blended.
3. Beat in the vanilla, egg, and egg yolk until creamy.
4. Mix in the baking soda, salt, and flour until just blended.
5. Stir in the chocolate chips.  Place cookie dough in rounded balls a few inches apart on cookie sheets.
6. Bake for 12-15 minutes or until edges are lightly toasted.  Cool on baking sheets for a few minutes before transferring to wire racks.

Most important thing: do not overbake them!!  I took them out of the oven when the edges were just barely starting to get golden brown.  They almost looked underdone when I took them out, but after cooling for a few minutes they were – you guessed it – awesome.

SOURCE

It is a small sort of accomplishment, making perfect chocolate chip cookies… but I think it’s a good life skill to have.

Try ‘em?  Tell me!  Happy cookie baking, friends.

Well, my second guest in a week has come and gone.  My roommate also left to spend a couple days in Richmond this afternoon and took the pup with her, so I’m currently experiencing some very rare and slightly unsettling silence here in the Palmetto Palace.  Even when Sarah travels for work, Irie usually stays with me, so at the very least I’m used to having his constantly wagging tail and puppy kisses to keep me company!  Ah well, I suppose I should try to appreciate the solitude.

My friend Meghan arrived the night before Mikaela left, which was another example of magical worlds colliding.  Two of my closest pals, one from college life in Geneseo and one from study abroad in New Zealand, sitting together in my living room on the Outer Banks?  Nutso ridiculous.

In the same way that my conversations with Mikaela frequently stray back to the afternoons spent exploring in Hagley Park or hanging out in our flat in Christchurch, my week with Meg was heavily peppered with reminiscences about our Geneseo days.  I met Meg the day I moved in to my freshman dorm, so we have a full four years of college experiences to talk about.

(Foam party on the first weekend of freshman year to the Ke$ha concert during our senior spring semester… we’ve come a long way, baby!)

But something else we talked about, actually in relation to blogging, was that a single anecdote, fleshed out with details and dialogue, can sometimes be better than a general retelling of a long span of time and activity.  We have four years of Geneseo memories to talk about, but often found ourselves rehashing specific nights with our Steuben neighbors when we were sophomores, or the Easter “friend holiday” in Meg’s apartment last spring.  Similarly, though we had almost a week-long visit here, there was one instance in particular where we really brought Geneseo to life here on the beach.

The Anatomy of a Garbage Plate

For those of you unfamiliar with the region of western New York (I repeat: western.  Not upstate.), let me give you a taste of college life in Geneseo.  In every college town, there’s one grungy food joint that’s known for having the two main qualities that university students look for: it’s super cheap and open late.

Ours was called UHots.  It’s right on Main Street and open until 3 o’clock in the morning.  Its specialty?  Garbage plates.  Not Mama Kwan’s weird version made of lettuce and cabbage and an unholy amount of other vegetables, but the classic regional dish from Rochester: a bunch of mayo-based side dishes, topped with meat in any form, mixed together and covered in an obscene amount of ketchup.  Disgusting, right?  I know.  They’re amazing.

That was my first garbage plate ever, on the way back from the Rochester Lilac Festival in 2008.  I’m trying to decide which song I should’ve been singing to the plate in that picture: I’m torn between this, this, and this.  Okay, I wouldn’t sing that last one, but I would quote it dramatically as my garbage plate and I walk off into the mist.

ANYWAY.  Although we are now nearly nine months, hundreds of miles, and countless experiences removed from the last time we had a garbage plate in Geneseo together, Meg and I set out to recreate one of our favorite college dishes.  I thought I’d share the recipe:

1) Start with an evening of red wine and reminiscing.

2) Follow with a trip to the nearest 24-hour grocery store to stock up on the essential ingredients: mac salad, potato salad, hashbrowns, and some sort of meat.

3) Get that grub cookin’!

Helpful Hint: Recruiting a super cute chef will greatly enhance the final result.

4) Add spices, cheese, and onions to taste; mix it all together (Styrofoam containers are the most authentic, but actual bowls will do in a pinch).

5) Garnish with half a bottle of ketchup.  Serve hot and enjoy promptly!

And there you have it!  A real western New York garbage plate.  Are you incredibly grossed-out by me right now, or ready to go give it a go yourself?  Either would be reasonable, really.