COOKING: Baking with Buddy Day 1

I'm already working my way through Buddy's book. It starts simple, with cookies. I have/can buy ingredients for 8 of the 10 recipes, so I'm going to have 8 days of cookie making plus at least 2 days of retried for anything that didn't come out right, making up for those 2 recipes that I can't do. Buddy says to make notes of everything to remember how each thing came out and what to do differently next time for improvement, so I'm going to do that here and detail how things go, recipe by recipe.

I've read 50 pages of the book so far and it's fascinating. I'm already learning so much. Today I made Double Chocolate Chip cookies. They weren't hard to make, and I loved all the tips along the way. Even so, I can tell it's going to be hard to relearn everything the right way. I have a bad habit of overcooking cookies to make sure theyre done, and even today when he warned right in the recipe to not cook over 15 minutes no matter what and that the cookies were supposed to look underdone, I still struggled with taking these still wet looking cookies out. I looked at those cookies, and back at the book and said "but Buddy, they don't look done! Can't I put them in for even two more minutes?" but I read it again, and he said no matter what, don't do it. So I kept them out, put them right on the cooling wrack, cooled the pan and put another batch in. Surprise surprise, the one with over 25 years experience was right. After cooling a few minutes, the cookies hardened and came out perfectly, not over or under done. The taste was only so so though, probably bc instead of using the unsweetened cocoa that he strongly recommends, I used my sweetened kind bc that's all I had. Didn't think it would make much of a difference, but it did change the tase as I followed every thug else to a T.

I'm excited to keep going on my 10 days of cookies. They won't be all in a row bc then we'd be drowning in cookies and I need more ingredients, but I'm going to make them as mug as possible. I can't wait to get to the eclairs, cream puffs and cannolis that follow the cookies.

Outside of the world of baking, I'm trying my own recipe for dinner tonight. Chicken in the crock pot with homemade chicken broth, fresh salsa and provolone cheese. I did a baked version a few months ago and it was Bill's favorite thing, he's requested it weekly ever since. I decided to try to improve on it with the crock pot, so we'll see how it goes!