TWD: Midnight Crackles

The crackles, I made them. Luckily, I had some tips from Tracey and Mike, so was able to make one very major adjustment to the recipe - Dorie suggests chilling the dough for 3 hours, but evidently that makes it hard as a rock. So the solution for me was to chill it for an hour, then let it sit on the counter and warm up while the oven preheated. It was still a pretty funky feeling dough - it reminded me of chocolate play-do. Thank goodness this is a kind of play-do that would actually taste good! (don't lie - I know you tried to eat play-do as a kid too. everybody does. These are wonderfully chocolatey cookies, especially since I left out the spices and added a teaspoon of instant coffee powder. Chewy, chocolatey, and out of the apartment - they're destined to be a post-Christmas gift to the in-laws. I hope they approve!

In entirely unrelated news, I have been in the kitchen non-stop for two days. You see, J wanted a new video game, and we generally trade - he can buy a video game if I can buy a cookbook. So last Friday, he got Epic Mickey and I got Momofuku. I promptly flipped through the entire book a couple times on Friday afternoon, giddily marking recipes that I wanted to make - spicy sausage and rice cakes, kimchi stew, english muffins... And on Saturday, I decided that sometime this week I should make the ramen. And if you've flipped through Momofuku, you know - when you decide to make ramen, it turns out that first you have to make ramen broth, tare, pork belly, pork shoulder, and slow cooked eggs. Then you can make ramen. Given this sort of time commitment, it just makes sense to get people over to enjoy the fruits of your rather excessive labor. So by mid-afternoon on Saturday, plans had been made to have people over on Monday. In two days. Have I mentioned that I also decided to make this an all-Momofuku dinner? As in ramen, roasted rice cakes, and blueberries & cream cookies. And that the ramen broth takes all day? As does the pork shoulder? And the cookies have to chill for at least 24 hours?

Yeah. After managing to source nearly everything (had to swap in beef marrow bones for meaty pork bones), I roasted and simmered and boiled and sauteed and mixed and baked. Oh, and washed dishes. Over and over again. Thank god our friends were bringing over an appetizer of dumplings, or else I might have gone crazy. In essence, I learned a lot during those two days:

1. Last-minute dinner parties are fun. And stressful.
2. Whole Foods butchers are awesome. Unfortunately, pork belly is not always in stock.
3. It pains me to make stock and then throw away all those painfully-sourced ingredients - smoky bacon, marrow bones, chicken thighs, and vegetables.
4. But bacon that has been fried after simmering in stock for an hour tastes of only one thing - water.
5.With only an hour between each task, the most you can do during a day is go on a 5 mile run. After which, the intense porky smell in the apartment will make you feel ill for the next couple hours. Skip the run.
6. Cookies that contain 5 sticks of butter and three types of sugar can never go wrong.
7. If you think you have enough space in your fridge, think again. I have containers of red dragon sauce, collards, rice cakes, broth, pork shoulder, pans of pre-portioned cookie dough, and a pack of fresh noodles the size of my head.

And last of all:

8. After making all this food, you don't want to eat anything. Persevere. Push past the overwhelming pork / sugar smell that has surrounded you for 48 hours and eat. It is so worth it.

And in the end, it was. Fun, friends, and lots of wine, green tea, and food. Not that I plan on making ramen broth again for a very, very long time. Probably once I forget all the craziness of the past two days. Until then, I have other things to make. That banh mi is calling my name...

Last Week: Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops
Next Week: Chocolate Fluff-Filled Madeleines