“Well aren’t you going to chop up the butter before you put it in the mixing bowl?”
“I mean, I can, I don’t see why I need to though.”
“It’ll make it stir better.”
“Fine, we can chop up the butter if you want.”
“Okay, fine.”
As I listened to our chefs Fatima and Chris argue over the culinary art of butter stirring, all I could think was, “That’s A LOT of butter!” It was 13 sticks actually. We were standing outside in the kitchen area attempting to make 300 chocolate chip cookies with very limited resources. No chocolate chips were available so we used a giant block of chocolate and butchered it with the same knife I’m pretty sure the students use to dice up poor Bessie. After adding approximately a ton of sugar and a coopful of eggs, four people dug into the batter to help mix, while the school’s cooks watched the crazy Americans with a mixture of awe and horror etched on their faces in addition to a dawning understanding of why obesity is reaching epidemic proportions in the United States.
The school doesn’t have a gas oven, so every meal served at the school is cooked in a stone oven fueled with firewood. The cook and a student assistant got a fire going in the hollowed out stone dome and then raked the coals until the flame went out. The three trays of cookies were shoved inside and the opening sealed with some flat wood while a fire in the back of the oven kept the heat in. After five minutes the cookies were prefect. We passed them around to the cooks and a few of our student assistants who had never had a homemade chocolate chip cookie before. We overheard the cooks off to the side and the general gist of the conversation was, “Wow, these are really good.” “Well, yeah, but did you see how much butter they put in them?!” Apparently, the deliciousness of chocolate chip cookies won out over the risk of potential heart failure because the cooks asked us to write down the recipe for them.
We were trying to keep the cookies a secret so we could surprise the students with them at dinner. Our plan worked a little too well because 1) the students didn’t know what the cookies were and 2) they didn’t know where they came from. Although, I won’t lie, it was kind of entertaining watching them tentatively pick up the cookie, taste it and put it back down on the plate while deliberating whether it was a bread or a desert. None of the cookies were left after dinner though (well with the exception of the two cookies that Lan snatched off the plate of an absent boy) so I think that mean they were a hit? Honestly though, these kids grew up with dulce de leche so you can’t reasonably expect them to get excited over a cookie.
-Jamie