Cookies

Another entry in the intermittent series of Foods I Love...   Chocolate chip cookies--need I say more? Tonight, I mixed up a batch of dough from scratch. During my latest confinement with the Frankenfoot 2.0, we've been making do with the pre-made cookie dough that one can buy in the grocery refrigerator section. It's right there with the turnovers, cinnamon rolls and other Pop 'n' Fresh goodies. They are simply delicious, and, as a bonus for a Woman of a Certain Age, there are only a dozen in the package, and so one cannot mindlessly consume waaaay too many cookies in one sitting.

As I was creating this dough, I was taken back to my childhood in which baking chocolate chip cookies was the job of the 10-13 year old girl in our house. My mom was a busy woman and she really didn't have time for something so mundane as "chocolate drop cookies" as we referred to them. Since there seemed to be an endless supply of 10-13 year old girls living in a house with six sisters, she rarely had to stir up a batch. It was so easy---just read the recipe on the back of the chocolate drop package and success would be yours.

I recall a couple of times when I was really craving cookies and we had no eggs in the house. If you've been paying attention, then you may be thinking, "How could your house have NO eggs? Weren't there 100 hens in a nice red coop out in the yard?" Yes, indeed. And so I just went right out there, and poked around in the nest boxes from which I saw a chicken's curious head poking out and until I got the four eggs I needed. I needed four eggs because no one in my house ever just made the recipe as written on the chip package. It was always doubled or tripled.

In fact, I learned how to add fractions by baking cookies. The recipe, as perfected by the woman at the Toll House Inn (if you don't know the story, read it here)  has a number of fractional amounts: 3/4 cup this and 1 1/2 cups that...so when you were the 10 year old girl doubling the batch, you could just measure and dump those ingredients twice, or you could get smart and figure out how to add fractions. Or maybe you learned adding fractions by realizing that 3/4 and 3/4 could be measured with the 1 cup and the half cup! Or whatever...math was not my best subject, but I was awesome at adding fractions because I'd done it with manipulatives in my mom's kitchen so often.

Anyway, tonight as I got the dough all mixed up, I thought that I should bake a couple of cookies in a small pan to check and see if the flour proportions were correct. And I remembered the term we used in my mother's kitchen:  "try cookies."  I hadn't thought of "try cookies" in decades. It means that you are to drop a couple of cookies' worth of dough onto a small pie pan or something, and then bake them first, before going to the effort of baking an entire tray of cookies, only to discover that they don't have enough flour.

I realize now that we did this because of the high altitude of my childhood home. Most recipes are made for the cook who lives in a range of sea-level to 3000 feet. Our oven sat at 6300 feet, so every baking recipe we used from a box, a cookbook, or a magazine had to be adjusted slightly. So, when you mixed up the cookie dough, you needed to bake some "try cookies" to see how much more flour you needed to add---a fourth a cup, a few tablespoons---it varied with the humidity, the variations of my mother's flour, and how big the eggs had been. When the "try cookies" were nearly baked, you could just peek in the oven and see by their shape how much extra flour you'd need to add for the rest of the dough to make "just right" cookies.

One afternoon, I wasn't paying attention and I had a disaster. I had the "try cookies" in the oven, I checked them and saw that I'd need to add a bit more flour. Absent-mindedly (who knows what I was distracted by) I picked up the flour sifter I'd dumped some flour into, and started sifting. And sifting. And then I picked up the spoon and starting stirring and almost immediately I realized that I'd put a lot of flour in that sifter, and I'd dumped it all into the bowl, and no way did I need that much---noooo waaaay. I looked at the bowl with the crumbles of dough that couldn't incorporate that much flour and knew I had created a disaster.

I didn't know what to do. I do know that I had really messed up by being inattentive and drifty. I remember feeling my face go pale, my saying in a little moaning voice to myself, "Oh no, oh no!" and I actually ran outside and jumped on my sister's bike and rode down the lane as fast as I could for a few minutes. Then, I stopped, and turned around and came home. And I guess I added some milk, or maybe another egg, or maybe one of my sisters came in and saved the day, or maybe my mother did...I don't remember. I just remember seeing all that flour clumping into the dough and realizing I'd dumped in about five times too much and panicking and riding the bike. Where was I going to go? I don't know...I was just in a state.

Anyway, right now, I have a dozen yummy chocolate chip cookies waiting for me to enjoy, two at a time, for dessert for the next few days---with cold milk---of course!  And then, there is a little plastic bowl of cookie dough in the fridge, all ready for me to bake twelve more when those run out. MMMMM....cookies...