Clementine’s butterscotch brownies: Let’s kick this project off right

Wouldn’t it be great to easily find a recipe from the thousands that have come out of the L.A. Times Test Kitchen? We think so too. That’s why a small team of us are working on a searchable database that will quickly help you find what you’re craving, be it sangria, fried chicken, a hearty Spanish soup, tonight’s dinner, an appetizer to take to a weekend party, a vegetarian main dish or a peach cobbler.

One of our database wizards, Anthony Pesce, has managed to cull and parse thousands of recipes from our internal archives and now five of us are painstakingly going through each one to clean up the display. Soon, design will step in to help us get to a smashing look, feel and functionality.

We hope to get this project to you by Thanksgiving, and until then we’ll be meeting weekly, if not more often, to solve issues and figure out next steps.

PHOTOS: 89 recipes that scream summer

OK, enough about the sausage making. Here’s the good part: Someone will be assigned to bring a dish he or she came across during this back-end cleanup process to each meeting. The assigned cook can pick any dish -- sweet or savory, simple or complex.

To that end, I made Clementine’s butterscotch brownies this morning for today’s meeting. The brownies were requested in 2011 from a reader who visited the terrific Westside bakery.

A couple of notes. These bars were assertively salty and at the same time sweet and rich. They came out exactly like the photo, except I didn’t have walnuts so I used 4 ounces of chopped semisweet chocolate. (I had pecans but I didn’t have time to toast them.)

I think these bars would be pretty amazing with a scoop of Bulgarini’s tart yogurt gelato. Someone else in the room suggested a scoop of crème fraiche. (The atmosphere can get pretty contentious in these meetings.)

We meet again tomorrow. I’ve assigned myself a white bean dip from Russ Parsons. My plan is to serve that with a baguette from Bread Lounge. This is one version of leading by example. Watch and learn.

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