Adventures in Publicity

My husband spent the week in L.A. and Seattle, promoting the new book from America’s Test Kitchen, Cook's Country Best Lost Suppers. He is so good at his job that not only did he manage to sell the book to L.A. Times food writer Rene Lynch, but he even got her to take a look at Sag Harbor Days and provide a link by describing how I freeze balls of cookie dough and bake them off two at a time every morning for the childrens’ lunch boxes. Doesn’t everybody in Sag Harbor do this?

It actually is a very convenient thing, and will prevent you from eating an entire batch of freshly baked cookies in one night, if you have that tendency. Not that I do. Just saying. I make the dough, scoop it out onto a cookie sheet, and then freeze it for about 30 minutes. I place the frozen cookie dough balls in a zipper-lock bag and keep them frozen until I need them. Frozen cookie dough can be baked straight from the freezer if you add a minute or two to the baking time. Homemade cookies become something you can take for granted. In fact, every once in a while one of the children will ask for a bag of chips for the lunchbox instead. When this happens, I try not to lash out at the little ingrate. I just save the dough for her friends, who are truly grateful when they come to my house for afterschool snacks.