Milk and Cookies

Looking at Martha Stewart’s Baking Cookbook a few days ago, I suddenly had the urge to make chocolate chip cookies. “These cookies,” writes Martha, “have a higher butter to sugar ratio so they’re crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside.” (I paraphrased that quote because I’m too lazy to go look it up.)

Anyway, Martha’s cookies require dark brown sugar and all I had was light. I decided to look up another recipe to see if there was one that incorporated light brown sugar. There was! Guess whose? Some guy named David. The cookies from his book “The Great Book of Chocolate” came out wonderful:

And if this post were about cookies, I’d spend the next few paragraphs telling you more about them. But, alas, this post is about cookies and milk. And now for the milk.

On a recent visit to the farmer’s market, I finally encountered the Dairy Farm known as Ronnybrook. I’m not sure why Ronnybrook is in my brain: maybe because I once read that the ice cream at their Chelsea Market outpost is the best in New York? In any case, I approached the counter and asked for a jar of milk. How 1950s!

“Have you had our milk before?” asked the woman selling it.

“Nope,” I confessed.

“Well you’re in for a treat,” she said. “It’s the freshest milk you’ll ever taste. Once you try ours you’ll never drink anything else again.”

What a promise!

“But it’s not like other milk,” she continued. “Because it’s so fresh, once you open it you only have about four days before it turns.”

Hmmm.

I also spied some creme fraiche which I bought (more on that later) and she said a similar thing: “Once you open it, you only have a few days before it turns.”

I suppose that’s the penalty for buying fresh un-chemicalized dairy from the farmer’s market. (I also bought a dozen eggs from one of the farmer’s. I’ve yet to try them–they’re now almost a week old.)

Anyway, BACK HOME…

I did as most milk drinkers do and positioned my new milk jar and the tall glass I poured for myself by the window so I could take a picture with some natural light:

As you can see, it’s late in the day so there wasn’t much natural light.

I poured Craig, my milk and cookie guest, a glass too. We took a David Lebovitz cookie and dunked it into the Ronnybrook milk. Verdict?

“Yum.”

“Yes.”

“I like.”

“Me too.”

Then we drank the milk. I had placed it in the fridge for a while so it was nice and cool and creamy. It did, indeed, taste quite fresh.

[It reminds me, now that I write about it, of this creepy writing teacher I once had who had us read a play where a woman breastfeeds her child on stage. The next day in class he said: “This play fills me with a primal thirst. I just want to slurp” and then he made the most disturbing slurping sound I’ve ever heard.]

In conclusion, it’s nice to drink fresh milk straight from the cow–or straight from the farm that owns the cow. As spring approaches, there’s really no excuse not to buy as much as I can from the farmer’s market and avoid the mainstream stores as much as possible. Although, it must be said, mainstream milk lasts longer.