January 16, 2015
Dear Everyone:
I’ve been on a
cookie-baking binge lately, if two batches can constitute a “binge”.
So far, I’ve made
a batch of Snowdrops (also known as “Chocolate Crinkles”) and a batch of
Chocolate Chip, with the provision that said
Chips were
milk chocolate,
rather than the traditional
bittersweet chocolate.
I happen to like milk chocolate better and it’s my kitchen.
Also, for the
record, when the recipe called for “chopped nuts (optional)”, I chose
the option of substituting more chocolate chips for nuts.
There is a theory that there can’t be too many chocolate chips in
a Chocolate Chip Cookie, and I’m doing my best to test that theory for
the Good of Mankind.
Way back when I
was considerably shorter than I am now, about in the Fourth and/or Fifth
Grade, one of my assigned chores was making lunch for everyone each
morning. For starters, that
meant making nine sandwiches.
There were seven of us kids, plus our Dad.
Both Dad and oldest brother, “Byron”, got two sandwiches each,
because they were bigger than the rest of us.
Each morning, I
would line up eighteen slices of bread on the kitchen counter and
proceed to slather mayonnaise on one row and mustard on the other, then
add some meat, or something, to go in the middle.
Then assemble each sandwich and wrap in
waxed paper.
This was before
plastic wrap and
zippered bags, remember.
Seven paper bags
each got a sandwich (or two), followed by three cookies and a piece of
fruit, generally apples or oranges, depending on the season.
That was lunch and it covered all the
Major Food Groups as they
were known at that time.
Milk was added in the school lunch room, provided the student had a paid
subscription.
From time to
time, Mother and I would turn the kitchen into a minor Cookie Factory.
We would double, or quadruple, a given recipe and mix it up in
her trusty workhorse of a
KitchenAid® Mixer.
We had at least four to six baking
sheets.
As soon as one sheet came out of the oven, laden with fresh
cookies, another would be ready to go in.
The hot cookies would be transferred to cooling racks and new
cookies would be added to the baking sheet as soon as it was cooled
enough. Every twelve to
fifteen minutes, the process would repeat.
Before you knew it, the kitchen would be knee-deep in cookies of
all flavors and sizes.
The next step was
to package the cooled cookies, preferably before the boys found out what
was happening and tried to stage a raid on the proceedings.
Three cookies went into a waxed paper bag.
Turn down the top edge and press with a warm (not hot!!!) iron.
And presto!
Pre-packaged cookies.
Then the packaged
cookies went into large paper bags labelled with a Magic Marker:
“Peanut Butter”, “Snicker Doodles”, “Oatmeal”, and such.
The filled bags went into the large freezer, which stood outside
the door on the downstairs patio.
This took a lot
of time, but cut down considerably on lunch manufacturing during busy
mornings. Each person got
their lunch bag, with a freshly made sandwich.
Each person headed out the door downstairs, paused at the freezer
to pull out a cookie-bag, bent down to grab a piece of fruit from the
bag or large box sitting next to the freezer, and headed off to the bus
stop with a complete lunch in hand.
If anyone took an
extra bag of cookies, and didn’t get caught in the process, well, that
was between them and whichever priest was manning the
Confessional on
Thursday.
Penitent:
“I took an extra bag of cookies.”
Confessor:
“How many cookies in a bag?”
Penitent:
“Three.”
Confessor:
“The will be three ‘Hail Mary’s’, two ‘Our Fathers’ and
don’t-do-it-again.”
Ah!
The Good Old Days!
As for the
cookies that I baked more recently, I delivered a group of each kind to
“Jeannie” last week. I have
since learned that “Jeannie” likes to “dunk” her cookies in a cup of
coffee.
Know what happens
when you dunk a Snowdrop cookie into a cup of coffee?
The Snowdrop
magically transforms into a chocolate sponge, immediately becomes
saturated with hot coffee and promptly plummets to the bottom of the
cup, where it sits until the drinker has sipped enough hot coffee to
uncover the chocolate sponge and gobble it up, possibly with the help of
a spoon.
The Coffee
Drinker has specifically requested Oatmeal cookies in the near future,
in hopes that they will make better “dunkers”.
Love, as always,
Pete
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