Cookies

Did you know I gained ten pounds maybe this semester? It's all thanks to our new oven, way to go KCK! People with ovens can stand over them all day and it's really warm. Given recent weather events in the greater ave du Parc area, this is very important.

So, for most cookies, you start with butter and brown sugar. You have to take the butter out of the fridge and let it sit on the counter first. Actually, slice off the measure you need, put it in the big mixing bowl, and break the butter up into small chunks so it can warm up and thus be easier to cream. Mom always had that big box of margarine squares, which made measuring a lot easier, and was a lot cheaper than butter. But here in Quebec the margarine is white and creeps me out. I shell out for the butter.

One small thing that might have interfered with my weight gain is the time spent creaming the butter and sugar together in cookie recipes. Feel my arm! You don't have to beat as much if you use shortening, but maybe let Hostess be the purveyors of hydrogenated fat. Mom had a pastry blender, which helped a lot. If you are using a fork, don't use a wimpy one or one with a plastic handle. They break. You don't want to answer for that. If you use a wooden spoon, make sure it's sturdy. They break sometimes too. You can use vegetable oil for some recipes, but it might make the dough too soft unless you cut back on other liquids.

Did I mention you need two bowls? One big one for the wet ingredients and mixing the final recipe, and one medium to sift all the dry ingredients together.

The sugar shouldn't have lumps if you want to make your life easy. If it's a solid bag-shaped block, put a slice of apple in and make cookies tomorrow instead. The sucanat and dried cane juice, or other kinds of raw sugar should work ok, I've never tried them. I have no idea what to do about stevia--it's sweet and that's good but does it contribute to the cookie properties we so desire? Mom always used demerara sugar, so any lighter sugar looks really strange to me. We were a brown family. Only use white sugar in a cookie emergency, it is kind of boring.

If you use eggs, beat them a little first. Just lightly, Spanky, they're going to get beaten into the sugar butter as well. You can use egg replacer or flax eggs too. Ask some vegan how to make those. I can't help you. Eggs shells back in the carton? Who knows why Mom did that. Was she saving them for something? You'll also need some vanilla at this point. Teaspoon by teaspoon, it's worth the extra expense of real vanilla. Maybe you could make your own extract if you buy a vanilla bean and some alcohol. Mom had some big jars of co-op vanilla she couldn't afford, so she traded her first-born for them. That's all I'm worth? Four litres of real vanilla?

The dry ingredients are something else entirely. If you buy whole wheat organic free trade dolphin friendly flour, and if you don't live in the outdoors in midwinter Quebec, keep the flour in the fridge. There are bugs everywhere, and they love co-op food. WWOFTDF flour also goes rancid, even if bugs don't get to it. If you don't remember when you bought your flour, and it wasn't sealed or in the fridge, quickly sift through a cup or so of it to look for bugs. My roommate says if you pick them out, it's all good, because it's going to be sterilized in the oven shortly anyway. I just throw that flour out and try again. Mom had a good point once, in that flour with bugs in it shows you that at least something can live in it.

Baking soda and baking powder are generally not things that bugs can live in, so that's not such a worry. They will last you a really long time. Maybe best to seal the soda in a jar after you open the box, though, so it doesn't absorb the superpowers of everything around it. Once--OK, lots of times--when I was a kid--OK, I was fourteen--I couldn't tell the difference between the two jars of soda and powder, so Mom marked the inside of one of the lids "soda". That worked until I used the lid to make cleaning paste. If you haven't marked the jars, soda is the grainy one, the one Mom was asking for when she was cleaning, the one in the white jar, and powder is the powdery one, in the blue jar. Best to bring her both jars if you're not sure.

Salt--well what could go wrong? Mom never added salt to anything. I don't remember any cookie deficiency in her baking, so maybe it's not necessary. But then again, maybe she had magical powers that could take over for the chemical reaction salt provided in the recipe.

There are other things, like oatmeal, wheat germ, oat bran, coconut and so on that go in the dry ingredients. Are there flax seeds in the oatmeal? Were they there when you bought it? Count the legs. Do you still think they're flax seeds? Wheat germ goes rancid easily too, keep it in the freezer or fridge.

And what is with this sudden obsession with food hygiene? Nothing to do with the two garbage bags of "food" I threw out in September, the crusty bags of former nourishment that even the mice abandoned sometime in 2003 (judging by the age of the mouse shit surrounding the area). Always take a good look at the food you're about to eat. Finding a hole chewed in a bag after you've been chowing down is just too little, too late.

Then you mix the dry ingredients into the wet. It doesn't stick together? Put in some water, a tablespoon at a time. NO amount of baking will make dry cookie batter stick together.

Grease the cookie sheets or don't grease the cookie sheets. If you do, use the foil wrappers from the butter or margarine. Mom keeps them in the door of the fridge. If you don't, you might wish you did. Or, maybe there's enough butter in the cookies already so it doesn't matter.

Here you might "drop the batter by spoonfuls" or "roll into one-inch balls and flatten with a fork" or some other such standard cookie-production mechanism. Really, that's your business, I've done all I can.