The toll house recipe says carefully add the ingredients, mix this with that, dry stuff first... Bag all that. Get a big bowl, and throw in everything except the chips & the nuts. Mix this around. If the butter is soft it goes fast. If the butter is frozen it takes patience. Then add the chocolate chips and the nuts.

Scoop out heaping tablespoon fulls of dough and put them on a baking pan about two inches apart.

[A few notes: Instead of butter you can use margarine or some butto-marga-blend. Don't leave out the salt, it's what really makes chocolate chip cookies happen. If you're worried about your health what are you eating chocolate chip cookies for? Some people have complained that my cookies are too rich and they get dizzy or feel buzzed. Mix at your own risk.]

The dough can be saved in the refrigerator for 5 days or so. Probably longer. Maybe indefinitely.

Now the baking. The parameters to cookie baking are virtually unlimited - altitude, humidity, oven thermal-stability. Again, punt the neurotic approach. Set the oven to about 375F degrees. If you remember to preheat, even better. A cold oven tends to make them melt before they bake so you get flat crispy cookies rather than what crispy on the edges and gooey in the middle, but these are fine aesthetic points.

Bake the cookies in for 9-10 minutes and then check them. Raising or lowering the rack can effect how the cookies bake but its not clear exactly how. All sorts of hypotheses can be considered while the cookies burn in the mean time. Just keep giving them another minute or two until they are done.

I think that cookies are done when they are brown on the edges and bottom but just transitioned from the dough state in the middle. Sort of a dough triple point. Cookie nirvana. When they look done, take them out and eat immediately. You will be horribly burned but it's worth it. Enjoy

that he almost always has the dough in his fridge, ready to whip up into cookies. From his instructions it is clear that he has definitely made inroads into mastering the art