bouchon bakery nutter butter cookies + big summer potluck reflections

This post is about a bunch of food bloggers. And cookies and community. And a food processor.

Three Saturdays ago, we met one of our blogging heroes and met a bunch of new ones. Let me explain...

Karen and I consider ourselves the founding members of a chocolate chunk cookie cult that worships the recipe created by Alice over at Savory Sweet Life. We know many of you are also devotees to the most perfect chocolate chip/chunk cookie (I’m looking at you, Chris and Lori). 

So when we heard Alice was going to be the keynote speaker at a casual food bloggers' gathering just an hour away from home, we jumped at the chance.

Well, “jumped” isn’t the right word. Maybe I should say we started up the great “could someone please babysit our children for a day for free so we don’t have to tap into our sad 401k?” machine. Fortunately, Karen’s parents volunteered. We just had to make them dinner the night before the event. More than fair.

And so we went for our first day away from the kids for an entire day, together. Well, just the two of us and a bunch of nutter butter cookies from a Bouchon Bakery recipe. 

These cookies are as big as my head. Two PB cookies, the softest you’ve ever eaten, brought together by peanut butter creme, which we shoved inside a chocolate cake in a previous post. Our cookies are in the picture at the beginning of this post, sharing the plate at the top, but isn't all the other food really pretty?

We discovered nutter butters at the Time Warner Center Bouchon Bakery outpost after our son was born (it was our first outing in the city when he was four weeks old). Little man in a big stroller. And a big cookie for me and Karen. Each. We do not share.

These cookies are like bringing your A-game, giving a confidence that what you made is good. Just the boost needed when spending a day with 40ish incredible food bloggers. 

I could go through the day and tell you what we did, but bloggers who were there have done a better job than I could. Read them here. And here. And here. And here. Here. Here, too.

But this is what Karen and I are left with these several weeks later:

• Four years is too long to wait to spend an entire day with your wife without children. We love our kids dearly, and we can be better parents when we recharge ourselves.

• I don’t know how they do it, but the hosts and organizers of the event, the mother-and-daughters team at Three Many Cooks, seem to have a collective gravitational force that pulls wonderful people to them. Every single participant was so kind and generous with her thoughts and encouragement for each other (I say "her" because I was the lone "he"). I know this was because of the tone set by Maggy, Pam, and Sharon. We’re going to be giving away a signed copy of Pam’s new book, Perfect One-Dish Dinners in the next week, so stay tuned for that.

• I walked in wanting to meet two people, Alice (cookie high priestess) and Debra from smithbites.com, and left wishing I had more time to talk to everyone. Like a couple of days more. With each one of them. And eat all their food.

• The Alice we met was exactly the same person who wrote back to me in January when I asked if we could post our take on her chocolate chip cookies as our very first recipe post. She couldn't have been more encouraging to us to start the blog. And her talk at Big Summer Potluck was an arms-wide-open approach to all of us. Take chances. Be who you need to be, who you were meant to be. And if you don’t know exactly where this whole thing is headed, just keep going. Because you’ll figure it out.

• Abby Dodge (see her below) is super cool and incredibly funny. She has a new book coming out, Desserts 4 Today. Every dessert recipe uses four ingredients. That's crazy. And tasty. Also easy. Buy it. Or try out her Nutella Brownies first via SavorySweetLife, then buy it.

• KitchenAid, one of the generous sponsors of the gathering, gave away several of their wonderful appliances (I say that because I love my coffee bean burr grinder. It is killer). Karen walked away with one of their grand prizes, a sweet 12-cup food processor. In red. Nice.
• Erika at Ivory Hut is photography master. She also makes a gin and tonic sorbet. That make me love her more.

As we climbed back into the minivan to drive home, Karen and I both said it had been the best day we had in a long time. We were ready to get back to being parents. 

But the best thing was that the next day, Karen signed up for a photography class at the International Center of Photography. Something she had wanted to do since we moved to the NYC area. Seven years ago. It’s never too late to feed yourself, to grow, to learn, to be exactly who you were meant to become.


And then we ate another nutter butter and drove home.


recipe | bouchon bakery nutter butters (via nytimes.com)