This happened the other day with a cookie. It was a double chocolate truffle cookie from a fancy restaurant downtown: deeply chocolatey and with this fantastic chewy middle that teetered on the edge of gooey. I ate it in small bites, breaking off edges and corners one tiny morsel at a time, trying to make the cookie last. It was good, really good. Even as I pinched up the last few crumbs and laid my napkin on the table, I knew I’d have a hard time getting this cookie out of my head.

Sure enough, that rich chocolate flavor and fudge-like texture were still haunting me days later. I could taste the cookie whenever I closed my eyes. The desire to make a batch for myself grew by the hour.

I started combing through recipes, trying to find one that seemed promising. I discarded them all. Nothing sounded quite right. What I really wanted was my favorite brownie recipe, but in cookie form. The recipe is originally from one of my mother’s cookbooks, but I’ve tweaked and prodded it over the years until the brownies are exactly how I like them: deeply chocolatey with a chewy middle teetering on the edge of gooey.

Could the solution really be so simple as baking my brownie recipe as cookies? For the sake of getting that decadent flavor out of my head, I had to try.

Brownie batter is generally much thinner than your average cookie recipe, and mine is no exception. Using a silicone mat (like a silpat) really helped to keep them from running everywhere. I baked the brownie cookies at normal temperature (350 degrees for this recipe), then started checking them at about the ten minute mark. I took them out when the edges were firm and the middles no longer jiggled.

The cookies–and my hopes!–puffed up nicely in the oven, but then collapsed as they were cooling. Ultimately, they ended up as flat as pancakes. Delicious pancakes that my husband ate with much enthusiasm and many reassurances of cookie bliss, but pancakes none the less. The intense chocolate flavor was definitely there, but not the fudgy center that I had been hoping for.

Next time (because there will be a next time), I’ll try increasing the flour to give the cookies more structure and also increasing the heat to help the cookies set faster. Here’s the recipe I’ve been working from:

• Gooey Fudgy Brownies

Or maybe I’ll give in and try one of these recipes:

Definitely not a bad experiment! I’m still in pursuit of a perfect brownie cookie recipe, but at least the craving has momentarily subsided. At least until I find myself back at that restaurant.

Read about Emma Christensen.

I often thought back to one of my vacations (to Zihuatanejo, Mexico) where I had the most amazing whole pan-fried garlic red snapper. I desperately wanted to reproduce the recipe, but knew that cooking a whole butterflied fish would probably take more effort and a much larger fry pan than I was willing to invest in.

So, when I was perusing the Whole Foods fish counter a few weeks ago and saw these beautiful whole Vermillion Snappers staring back at me, I just couldn’t resist the temptation any longer.

I bought the whole fish.

I asked the fishmonger to clean it and remove the scales for me–he happily obliged. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but I was determined to cook it, keep it easy and make it taste good.

Luckily, this turned out to be much easier than I had ever anticipated.

I kind of had an idea of what I wanted to do with it, so I did a quick web search when I got home and decided on a recipe for Baked Whole Red Snapper with Garlic. It looked simple and sounded delicious, so I saved it to my Plummelo recipe box and got started.

Cooking a whole fish in foil is actually quite simple. Make sure your piece of foil is large enough to lay the fish on and to completely envelop it–almost like a parchment packet. Spread a little olive oil on the skin to prevent it from sticking (optional), season with salt and pepper, stuff the cavity of the fish with fresh herbs, lemon slices and butter and then add your liquid (to encourage steaming). In 45 minutes you have an amazing, juicy, flavorful meal that would pair well with just about any side dish.

The results of my snapper experiment? Amazing! It was moist, flavorful, delicate and delicious. My husband and I agreed that it was some of the best fish we had ever tasted. I will definitely be using this trick again in the future.

There is something about the transformation of a simple cut of pork into sausages and salumis that smacks of alchemy. Our relationship with Italian delicacies like prosciutto, pancetta, and mortadella is usually limited to ordering them from the deli counter of a market or Italian specialty food store, so it’s easy to believe that this feat can only be accomplished by aging nonnas laboring away somewhere in a hill town outside of Bologna. We assume they know things about pork and charcuterie that we could never hope to, so we step to the counter and humbly order our quarter pound of sopressata like everyone else.

I never considered trying to cure pork on my own until I found myself far from the dependable supply lines of Italian food that I had become accustomed to when living in my native Boston. While staring at an overpriced, watery, shrink-wrapped hunk of pancetta in a market recently, I decided that it was time to give it a go. I wanted to make linguini carbonara—the first thing other than Trader Joe’s microwaveable burritos that I learned to cook—and I wasn’t going to make it with this unsavory looking pancetta.

Pancetta is often referred to as “Italian bacon” but the label falls short of describing its unique flavor. Unlike its American cousin, pancetta isn’t smoked, so it imparts a more subtle flavor to dishes rather than dominating them. It’s excellent not only in classic pasta sauces like carbonara and amatriciana but also with vegetables such as asparagus.

Curing your own pancetta is probably the most rewarding of all home charcuterie projects. It requires few specialized ingredients (which you can order from Butcher & Packer) and is quick to prepare. And the result is phenomenal. Your home-cured pancetta will surpass what you can get locally and will give something extra to everyday dishes.

Making pancetta does require one ingredient you’ll want to track down locally: pork belly. If you don’t have a butcher nearby, try a local Asian market, as they typically carry pork belly in their meat section. In terms of technical knowledge, all you need to learn to make pancetta is how to roll and tie the pork belly once it has been cured, something you can pick up relatively quickly from a Cook’s Illustrated tutorial. And drying the cured pancetta can be done easily using spare space in your wine fridge or a cool basement.

I won’t tell you that making your own pancetta is entirely simple or that I didn’t make a few mistakes along the way. I managed to knock the bowl of curing mix I had carefully prepared off the counter and found myself trying to fend off my two golden retrievers—intent on cleaning up for me—with one hand while trying to scoop the curing mix into a dust bin. But that’s part of home cooking. It’s never as simple as it seems on television, but the results are always worth it.

And, I’d imagine, to the food-passionate circles of which I dream of being part, such a declaration would be akin to telling, say, a whale activist that I like everything about saving whales except for having to actually cut those storied nets and save them.

I read food magazines and chef memoirs. I study recipes. I watch as much cooking as my basic cable package allows. I bore (and quite possibly drive away) those around me with talk of meals way before and way after the fact.

And see? You’re probably already thinking, “Wow. How unique of you.”

Yes, in the eyes of the walk-the-walk cooking world, I’m just another non-low-brow American with an appetite.

But, to be honest, I just don’t have any major desire to really start cooking. Or at least not quite yet. Because it doesn’t make sense for my life quite yet. Cooking for myself in an apartment that boasts not even the tiniest splash of countertop; purchasing ingredients with a bank account that’s overdrawn bi-weekly; preparing said ingredients to almost surely come out inedible—it all strikes me as a bit masochistic, if anything. Practice makes perfect, yes, but practicing is expensive. And demands a countertop.

Is this wrong though? Does a love for all things food have to be yoked with the actual act of cooking in order to be legitimate? In terms of my aforementioned social aspirations, I think it does. Without having experienced the process of bringing meals to life, I fear that my passion comes off as unsubstantiated. I can spend my days sitting in my counterless apartment-for-one romanticizing the world of food, but until I’ve experienced its less romantic aspects (save for weight gain), can it really be called love?

Well, it certainly is love, but perhaps to please the masses and silence my insecurities, I should just make something. I am 25 years old, after all. And if anything, it’d be interesting to see what my obsession is capable of bringing to life.

Step one: a salad! How about Cilantro Lime Crab Salad? But with plain Greek yogurt in place of the mayonnaise. A salad is something I can keep in the fridge. And one which I don’t feel guilty about picking at compulsively. Lean proteins. Vegetables. Happy fats.

Wish me luck…