The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever!

I do feel that, after six months, I live here in Barcelona.  I don’t feel like a tourist.  And this has created some tension in me, because I still don’t know the city inside and out the way I want to.  And I need that “tourist energy” in order to motivate me to get out and about.  But because we do live here, there is laundry and homework and exercise.  There are bedtimes to be met, taxes to be filed, papers to write.  And so when the weekend comes, Saturday usually means shopping and errands, and on Sundays I often want to do nothing more ambitious than read the newspaper, do a little cooking, maybe go to the park.  The last thing I feel like doing is taking an excursion to some new place that’s on our list of things to do before we leave.

This weekend, for example, felt a lot like a weekend we could have spent in Brooklyn.  My one agenda item was to weed out and organize our office/art room.  I thought about taking before and after photos to post, but I was too embarrassed to show you the before shots, so I didn’t. On Friday night we toodled around on the internet researching where we want to go in Greece this summer.  On Saturday Alec shopped and I took the kids to the pool.  I whipped up a batch of chocolate chip cookie batter (see below). Then Alec watched a movie with the kids while I tackled the dreaded office.  Andrea, our sitter, came, and Alec and I went to see The Fighter and then out for (really good) Thai food. 

Today, we slept in, and I got a big pot of Frankies’ red sauce simmering on the stove, C.C. finished her book, and Milo and Alec watched the Barca game.  We went out to the park with the kids and their bikes, and then came home at which point I returned to the office to finish up.  I made some banana bread and baked the cookies.  A perfectly normal, relaxed, enjoyable weekend.  Should we have walked the barceloneta?  Gone to the botanical gardens?  Seen the latest planetarium show at the science museum?  Nope.  Tomorrow is another day. 

But for today, you need to know more about these cookies.  A couple of years ago, the New York Times published Jaques Torres’ recipe for chocolate chip cookies.  The key piece of the process is letting the batter rest, and the key ingredient is chocolate feves, oval disks of very good quality chocolate.  Vahlrona makes them, for example.  Well, last week at the market I noticed that the spice lady had feves.  I had never seen them before.  So this week, I put them on the list for Alec to get.  I’ve been hoarding regular old chocolate chips that my mules from the US have brought.  I thought it might be too much to ask them to go hunt for feves.  But now I have a local supplier.  So yesterday, I made the cookie batter and then let it rest overnight in the fridge.  I baked them today.  They are delicious, as always, although a little different.  I can’t really explain how, it’s just that the butter, sugar and flours are different.  The eggs are different.  So it all adds up to a different product somehow.  But not an inferior product.  I made them with only all-purpose flour, for example, because I cannot find bread flour here.  So use whatever you have, but just make them.  Okay?