This is is my 901st post.

I made chocolate chip oatmeal cookies yesterday, and let me tell you, they were damn good. They looked good too. I made them big and flattish - crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside. This was the best damn cookie recipe I've ever concocted.



I also made paella. It was my first time, so it wasn't exactly perfect, but it was pretty good nonetheless. The only major issues were that it ended up a little too wet, and I hadn't plated it well. I should have reserved extra shrimp, fish, mussels, etc to go on top. I should have also made the pieces of chicken a little browner. I will definitely make this again, though!



Note: Did you know that our insistence on saying the "ll" sound in paella as "pa-el-ya" can be traced to the old Castillian pronunciation? My mom says "pa-e-ya" is mexican, while "pa-el-ya" is castillian, and research proves she's partly right. Pronouncing the "ll" as "ly" is, apparently, arhaic Castillian. It survives as a dialect in some parts of the Iberian peninsula, but that's it. When I was in Spain, it was almost always pa-e-ya. You heard pa-el-ya here and there, but there wasn't a lot of it.

It's a little odd isn't it, though? We say "ka-bal-ye-ro" for "caballero" (ca-ba-ye-ro) and "pol-yo" for pollo (po-yo), but we say "ka-ba-yo" for horse, and in spanish, that's spelled "caballo", with the double l too. It's almost like how we sometimes replace the "ch" sound with an "s", as in chayote and sayote, and chili and sili. Anyone have any thoughts on this?Chewy%20Chocolate%20Chip%20Oatmeal%20Cookies.docx

Labels: baking, cookies, cooking