Once upon a time, when I was a little college sprite, I had a pal who spent her summers working as a Kelly Girl in Indiana, answering phones, doing various thankless tasks, and counting the weeks until she could come back to Pittsburgh and raise a little hell. One of her most thankless tasks was sorting returned bulk mail, where she went through dozens of large plastic buckets of envelopes, labelling the envelopes with multicolored stickers (color dependent on zip code), bundling the envelopes together, placing a different set of labels on the bundles, and, finally, throwing them all away. My pal used to refer to this nonsense as La Marche Futile (which was also the name of the Anglo-French Silly Walk from the Minister of Silly Walks sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus), and I could not help but agree with her.
I mention this little piece of trivia for two reasons: 1. If ever there were a Marche Futile week at LuthorCorp, this would be it. I can't complain, as it means that we're busy enough to continue to justify LuthorCorp's keeping me on the payroll; furthermore, while I am merely in the grip of work-related and computer-training-related madness, two of my coworkers are going through family emergencies, terrible health-related family emergencies, bad news abundant. In such circumstances, it is churlish to complain about speedy deadlines and cranky customers, so I will not. I will merely acknowledge that damn, it's tiring, and dispiriting, to silly-walk all day long. 2. No matter how far you have to walk, no matter how long it takes you because your walk has become rather more silly, there is no walk so silly that it can't be kicked to the curb by a batch of chocolate chip cookies. Kristi, these are for you.
Chocolate Chip Cookies, version the First: Positively-the-Absolutely-Best Chocolate Chip Cookies
makes approximately 50 3" cookies
The name of this particular cookie, along with the recipe, comes from the ebullient Maida Heatter, and while I can't take the credit for the name -- or the recipe -- I can agree with her, heartily, and I do. It comes from this book, the one that finally pushed me into culinary school; just read her headnotes, full of phrases like "if you bake these, your friends will not be able to resist them, and they will tell you that you should start your own cookie business, and if you do, I will be first in line to buy them," and just see if *you* don't want to open up your own shop. 
As Ms. Heatter notes, the foundation of this recipe is the original Toll House Cookie recipe found on the back of the Nestle's Semisweet Chocolate Morsels package; to the basic recipe she adds an extra teaspoon of vanilla and an additional four ounces of chocolate chips, and she replaces the chocolate chips with cut-up semisweet chocolate bars, just as Ruth Wakefield, the creator of the Toll House Cookie, did. She also refrigerates the dough before baking, which helps the cookies bake more evenly and take on a beautiful golden color.
8 oz. (2 sticks, 1 cup) unsalted butter, softened
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. vanilla extract
3/4 cup (approximately 5 1/4 oz.) granulated sugar
3/4 cup (approximately 5 1/4 oz.)light brown sugar, packed into cup
2 large eggs
2 1/4 cups (approximately 11 1/2 oz.) unsifted all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda (Ms. Heatter recommends dissolving it in 1 teaspoon hot water, to ensure that it is fully dissolved and will not create evil bicarb lumps in your cookies, but if the thought of doing this exhausts you, you can just run it through a strainer and add it along with the flour)
8 ounces (2 generous cups) broken walnuts (these can be left out if you're not fond of nuts in your cookies)
16 ounces chocolate chips or semisweet chocolate bars, cut into chunks
Adjust two racks in your oven to divide oven into thirds. Preheat oven to 375 degrees (Gas Mark 5). Line two sheet pans with parchment or aluminum foil (I like parchment better).
Beat butter until soft. Add salt, vanilla and sugars and beat until fluffy and sand-colored. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat until just incorporated. Add half the flour and mix until just incorporated. Scrape the edges of the bowl with a rubber spatula. If you have hydrated the baking soda, add it to the batter now, followed by the rest of the flour. (If you have mixed the soda in with the flour, there is no need to hydrate, but you should still add the flour in two batches, to avoid floury backsplash when you turn the mixer back on -- trust one who has learned this the hard way.)Off the mixer, add the walnuts (if using) and chocolate and mix until evenly added to batter. The chocolate will seem like rather too much chocolate to add, but be patient and keep stirring gently, and all will come out well in the end.
Refrigerate the dough for about 1/2 hour. This is not a necessary step; it makes the finished cookies nicer, in my opinion, but if you're impatient for your cookies and don't want to dither around with refrigerators, you will still get a very nice cookie if you skip this step.
Drop the cookies by rounded tablespoons onto the lined baking sheets. Ms. Heatter recommends that you roll the cookie dough drops between your wet hands, place them on the cookie sheet and flatten them to 1/2"; again, it makes a more attractive cookie that bakes evenly, but if a lot of fuss is not on your agenda, you can skip this and have more irregular-looking, but still delicious, cookies. Bake two sheets at a time for approximately 12 minutes, rotating the sheets from front to back and top to bottom halfway through. When the cookies are baked through, remove them from the oven, let them sit on the sheets for a minute, and decant to cooling racks, using a wide spatula.
Chocolate Chip Cookies, version the Second: Orange Chocolate Chip Cookies
makes about 40 cookies
Nick Malgieri heads the baking and pastry program at my culinary alma mater, where he put the fear of God into his charges -- that's what happens when Swiss-trained bakers become baking teachers -- but he did so with thoughtfulness and considerable humor, and made us better bakers for it. He is also the author of some truly splendid, solidly-written, beautifully-photographed (by the superb photographer Tom Eckerle) baking books, including How to Bake, A Baker's Tour, Cookies Unlimited, and the one closest to my heart, Chocolate: From Simple Cookies to Extravagant Showstoppers, which was published while I was in school. I still remember with gimlet clarity the book release party our class catered for Chef Malgieri: we had made what felt like thousands of cookies, molded chocolates, little cakes, and truffles. As we packed everything in the old pastry kitchen on 92nd Street to take to the (at the time) brand-spanking-new school space on 23rd Street, we discovered, to our dismay, that the truffles had suffered a weather-based mishap, and we would have to make more. I will never forget that moment: six of us frantically chopping chocolate, melting it in a bain marie, adding quarts and quarts of cream until we had truffle ganache, setting up a production line where we frantically scooped and rolled and dipped and rolled again. Reader, I am proud to say that we remade every single truffle, and still managed to deliver all of the food early.
This cookie recipe, happily, is much, much easier than making a thousand truffles in 90 minutes. If your sole exposure to chocolate chip cookies is the Toll House version, these will come as a nice little surprise. If you are a fan of Terry's Chocolate Oranges, these will come as a little slice of heaven. As is the standard around PTMYB, the recipe is Chef Malgieri's, but the directions are in my own words.
2 cups (approximately 10 ounces) all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon (I tend to leave this out, but it does add a certain little something to the finished cookie)
6 ounces (1 1/2 sticks, 12 tbsp) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup (7 ounces) granulated sugar)
zest of 2 oranges, finely grated
2 large eggs
12 ounces milk chocolate chips
Arrange oven to divide oven rack into thirds. Preheat oven to 350 degrees (Gas Mark 4). Line two sheet pans with parchment or foil.
Combine dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl and stir to combine. Chef Malgieri recommends sifting the dry ingredients, once combined, onto a piece of parchment. I usually blend this with a wire whisk or my English cake whisk, the one that looks like a tennis racket, until it is well aerated, about a minute or two.
In a mixing bowl, using the paddle attachment if you have a stand mixer, beat the butter and sugar gently until combined well. Add the orange zest and beat just until combined. Add the eggs and beat until smooth. Scrape the sides of the bowl with a spatula, add the flour and mix to combine. Stir in the chocolate chips.
Drop the batter by heaping teaspoons, 3 inches apart, onto the lined baking sheets. Bake for approximately 15 minutes, rotating the sheets from front to back and top to bottom midway through baking. When done, the cookies will have spread and puffed slightly, and will be a beautiful blond color. Decant to cooling racks. Try not to burn your mouth when you eat them. Have a glass of cold milk nearby just in case you do.
(What, no gingerbread waffles? They're coming. They'll be here in time for Sunday breakfast. No foolin'.)