More Cooking Adventures

It's not often that I find myself arrested by a recipe with an urge to try it immediately, but it happened yesterday. A few weeks ago the New York Times did a profile of Twitter-users who tweet recipes. The most impressive of them is, in my opinion, Cookbook. She tweets entire recipes in the allotted 140 characters, with the help of a battery of abbreviations and sometimes curious punctuations. This epicurean Morse code is sometimes difficult to parse, but the effort of condensing them and eliminating all those pretty words seems herculean. Anyway, over the weekend the following popped up in my feed:

"Olive Oil Cookies: beat egg/7T oil/5T wine. Fold+c flour/6T sug/.5t mince fresh rosemary/.25t bkgpdr&s+p. Form~20t's; 12m@375F/190C to brwn."

"Hark!" I said to myself," Hath someone shown me the way to eat olive oil and sugar at the same time!?" And I sprinted to my kitchen. A scant 25 minutes later, the lovely, chewy little morsels you see to the right came out of the oven with a puff of olive oil scented steam. A note, however. (And this was a theme of the weekend.) The dough for these cookies came out more like a batter, so I added a little more flour to thicken them up. This may have been unnecessary, but I couldn't see a way to "form" anything out of the slurry that resulted from the above proportions.

In any case, the cookies came out (with a little extra baking time, which confirms my suspicion that my oven runs cold) delicious, chewy in the center, crispy on the edges, and with a complex, sweet, mildly salty, peppery flavor that surprises and challenges the taster. These cookies go equally well with wine and coffee and on their own. Oh, and being lighter than butter cookies (blessed, blessed olive oil), it's easier to eat a whole batch in one sitting. Try these immediately!