BBQ sauce thumbprint cookies

Also oyster sauce. And cheese dip. And later, ranch, mayo, and cottage cheese

It’s been a while, dinguses!

So it’s been a full two weeks at my new job over at The Takeout. I still cannot believe that I can call myself a full-time food writer now. You’re going see my verbal and culinary diarrhea everywhere now and you cannot stop me. I am truly a force of nature. Just watch. My next job will be President of the United States. As President, my first task will be to mandate that everyone eats cat food for breakfast. Beneath their masks, of course.

Getting adjusted to working from home after years of working in a restaurant has been very strange, though it is growing on me. I have been told that later it may actually drive me bonkers, but for now the transition into becoming a daywalker again is steadily getting easier.

Many of you have expressed concerns that this newsletter will go away, but my editor at The Takeout has been very supportive and assured me that I can still be here with you. It may take a little while to strike a balance, but that is just the nature of being Dannis Ree, the greatest food writer in all of history. It is my burden to win all the awards.

I still get to be myself and stir up my usual trouble over there, too. My first feature went out last week: I made a monster Sauce with all the leftover condiment packets I’ve hoarded for years. That article is also the primo shit you crave from me. So we are all winners today.

“Dannis Ree,” you say, thoughtfully. “Your power steadily grows. Yet you must still evolve your brand and innovate through food, and that way, broker world peace. What frontier will you conquer next, other than your own b-hole, which is infinite?”

I am generally not a baker. This is why I decided to become the greatest cookie maker in the universe.

Today I decided to bake thumbprint cookies. These cookies have finger holes in them that you fill with something, typically wet and sticky. But which fillings would be best? I decided to experiment with six of them, each one more disturbing than the next.

I would bake two sets of cookies. The first batch would be filled with barbecue sauce, leftover cheese dip from Culver’s, and oyster sauce.

“Why, Dannis, did you choose these fillings?” you ask.

Children, please do not question genius.

The second batch, exponentially more disgusting, would be ranch dressing, cottage cheese, and mayonnaise.

Now, there is a catch: This second batch will be discussed in a paid-subscriber edition later this week, as this is too much innovation to unleash for free, and everyone will roll around on the ground clutching their heads.

I mean, come on. Ranch dressing-filled cookies.

Everybody loves cookies.

If there is strife in the world between human beings, and you hand them cookies, they will look at the cookie in their hand, look up at you, and they will smile. I have now solved every human conflict. Just give people an endless supply of cookies and they will stop being assholes to each other.

For today, I decided to use a recipe that has a very small yield, because making and eating 238427129 cookies filled with barbecue sauce, oyster sauce, cheese dip, ranch dressing, cottage cheese, and mayonnaise, would actually introduce me to my grave.

The dough involved in thumbprint cookies is very dry and crumbly.

I was sad at this stage because I thought I had ruined my cookies. Ruining cookies will make anyone sad and expose them to a sensation of ennui.

To be honest, I still do not know exactly what the word “ennui” means. I even have a useless English degree. Did I do it right?

But through sheer will, I used the superhuman strength of my baby-sized fists and compressed this dry-ass dough into misshapen balls.

I have some misshapen balls but I will not go into this subject any further.

Again, using my massive strength, I pushed my miniscule thumb into each of these balls, turning them into craters.

Even the mightiest men fear me because of this ability of mine.

I began to fill the cookies.

When you fill thumbprint cookies with things like barbecue sauce, you must temporarily disassociate yourself in order to complete such a task. This is a great mental exercise, and nobody should do this under any circumstance. I realize that not a single one of you asked for this, so really, I am punishing myself for no reason.

Ennui.

Not even a thumbprint cookie can handle the flow of ranch from Aldi.

This is a cursed image. It’s like the movie The Ring. Now that you have seen it, you have become cursed and the only way to survive is by showing other people this newsletter.

Harvey, Mr. Bee, and Pepper paid respect to the cookies.

The first thumbprint cookie I would try was the Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce-filled one.

I bit into it and immediately started laughing. This was an unexpected reaction. The thing is, if you’re a Sweet Baby Ray’s fan, it’s probably because it’s so intensely sweet (which is why I generally dislike it). Once it is baked into a pastry, its sweetness magnifies greatly when the moisture evaporates. I could not get over how sweet and thick it had gotten. We put this shit on meat?

I bet Sweet Baby Ray’s would make a pretty good Fruit Roll-Up style treat. This is an idea for another day.

Next up was the leftover cheese dip we had after a run to Culver’s.

Culver’s is very good. If you have never had Culver’s, you must go right now. When we order fries we typically order a cup of their cheese sauce, which tastes like actual cheddar. Imagine that. Cheese sauce that tastes like real cheese!

I liked this one very much. Because the shortbread was rich and crumbly, it reminded me of a Cheddar Bay Biscuit from Red Lobster, only sweetened. It did that savory and sweet thing together fairly well. Red Lobster, if you are listening, please make a dessert Cheddar Bay Biscuit. I will be the only one eating it, but that’s all that matters.

The final one in this lineup was the oyster sauce-filled thumbprint cookie.

I fuckin’ love oyster sauce. It’s really good to season things like vegetable pee pee poo poo i am a stinky diaper boy and do not let Davida near your keyboard while you are trying to write a very serious newsletter. Anyway, oyster sauce is really good for making glazes or marinades, or for facials.

I do not recommend eating an oyster sauce-filled cookie. It had the same fruit leather texture that the barbecue sauce did, except holy shit, did it have a wallop of oyster reduction to it. I could not get the MSG-like aftertaste out of my mouth for a while.

Good thing I had a mayonnaise-filled cookie as a chaser for later.

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Thanks for being with me, everyone. If you liked this, make sure you forward it to your friends and enemies, and also share on social media (the newsletter grows every week):

And do not miss the paid-subscriber one with ranch, mayonnaise, and cottage cheese, a memory of which I am not particularly relishing right now. It drops Friday.

For those of you who haven’t done a paid subscription yet, keep considering it. Not only has it kept the newsletter going, it’s helped sustain Davida and I through this piece of shit hell year.

This is what you can expect to see later.

I love you all, and if you haven’t voted yet, please do so tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll be leaving oyster sauce-filled cookies on your doorstep. For four years.