Do you ever have a cookie that you just can’t get out of your mind? Maybe it’s the first taste of a Levain bakery cookie on a visit to NYC. Maybe it’s your grandmother’s ginger-molasses…or the very first bit of the simple Tollhouse cookie of your youth, fresh from your mother’s oven.

For me, there are a few ultimate cookies. Dorie Greenspan’s World Peace Cookies (any version—her latest 2.0 appears in her latest book, Baking with Dorie) is one of them. This cookie—-A Triple-Ginger Chocolate Chunk Cookie, in Susan Spungen’s excellent book Open Table that came out right as the pandemic hit, is another. Just looking at these photos can warm me head to toe. I can feel the melt of that chocolate, the crisp edge the dusting of sugar gives the edges. And that’s just the photo. Wait until you make them.

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Let’s get this right out in the open: Some people’s aggressive (public) holidaying has had me in hiding the last few weeks. Well, not hiding exactly, but hunkering inside, holidaying with my own people—privately (ie. off the ‘gram and other social). It’s not that I’m a scrooge or Bah! Humbug! Far from it. I live for Christmas. We got our tree the Sunday after Thanksgiving (a real beaut), it’s officially trimmed (this year, I hunted down charming old vintage ornaments that make me happy every time at look at them) and All I Want for Christmas radio on Pandora (yes, still Pandora!) is playing around the clock.

Also, there have been cookies: lots of cookies, and it’s only just beginning.

But, when other people’s tinsel-dripping twelve-foot trees and perfectly gilded mantles have you feeling envy, instead of inspiration, it’s time to tun out. Is the point of holiday-ing to spread joy, or to show off how much you have it together in life?

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One of the first truly remarkable cookies I learned to bake when I became a professional cook was a chocolate crinkle cookie, which we made in the tiny pastry kitchen at Savoy restaurant, a then New York Times three-star restaurant where I cooked and baked under Peter Hoffman. We made 2 perfect cookies which appeared on the pastry menu night after night, along with a seasonal pastry and three delicate sorbets. Later, at Cafe Boulud, where I worked the pastry line, I learned the recipe for two more perfect cookies—the recipes for which I jotted down in a tiny notebook that I now keep in a safe, like a brick of gold.

Bad cookies are a dime a dozen, but truly great ones come from truly great, thoughtful bakers. Bakers who don’t want to eat sugar just because. Bakers who want you to feel treated without tipping the scales. Bakers who know your time and ingredients are precious and when they give you a cookie recipe, it’s going to be truly worth it.

My friend Aran Goyoaga is such a baker.

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In the previous several years of having school-aged kids, my kiddos have had babysitters, after-school clubs or play groups to entertain them after hours many days of the week, while I worked. Now that they’re bigger, it’s strangely possible to pick them up from school, buzz them home for a snack and set them loose to run in the yard, while I aim (key word: aim) to get a few more things done at my desk, in earshot of where they play. It’s a system I’m slowly adjusting to: our new After School. Mostly, I like it.

Some days, After School comes hard and fast. On those days, cookies help, especially a week out from halloween, when we’ve got chocolate on the brain. This mama especially likes it if the cookies have an element of intrigue, like MISO.

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