BEST SO FARS

When we lived in New York, one of our favorite bodega treats were Tate's chocolate-chip cookies. Oh man, they are good. Go get some. Anyhow, soon after discovering Tate's, we found we weren't alone in our admiration for these delicious morsels. Jeffrey Steingarten, longtime food editor at Vogue, totally agrees! In his hilarious and informative book, It Must've Been Something I Ate, he cites Tate's as being one of the two "finest" chocolate-chip cookies made (the other one is a brand called Kathleen's). "Through a remarkable feat of reverse engineering" he comes very close to copying the prized cookies in his personal recipe for the "best so far" chocolate-chip cookies. We make these cookies constantly. A giant framed copy of the recipe used to hang in our kitchen. I decided to christen our new (old) Braun mixer with a half-batch last night.