I used to give Lisa a lot of crap for not being a better cook. I always thought that it was due to the fact that she really did not care about food. She could have cared less about food… In fact, her view was that food was a pain in the rear. It was a pain to shop for it, it was a pain to prepare and it was a pain to clean up. She never found comfort in food and seemed to only eat because her body would not have it any other way.
On the other hand there’s me… I love food. Food is my friend. I have a pallet that is excited by flavors of all different kinds of food. Simply put I like to eat… However, I like to eat good food. Not fast food, not bagged food, not boxed food…
I also have a bit of a sweet tooth and enjoy a little something sweet after dinner. Just a cookie or two will usually suffice. Due to this, over the years I have consumed my share of the mass produced dry and crumbly store bought cookies. I would from time to time ask Lisa to make cookies, Toll-House cookies to be exact. The kind mom used to make when we were growing up. It seemed every time I asked Lisa for them, she would laugh at me. She would walk off laughing. Not some wimpy laugh either. She had this full laugh that came from the depths of her being. It drove me crazy when she did that to me. She would just keep laughing as she walked off.
So, last night it was my turn. I decided I was going to make Toll-house cookies. Not the kind you find in the refrigerated section of the local grocery store. The real kind with lots of butter and extra nuts. I even found a recipe that suggested increasing the flour by fifty percent in order to have a fuller more cake like cookie. That’s the kind I like…
Everything went pretty well except for one tiny thing. When they say add the flour to the butter, eggs and sugar slowly, they really mean very, very slowly. Here’s the thing, I used the big Kitchen-Aid mixer that sits on our counter and for the most part just collects dust. All was going well… I mixed the sugar, butter, eggs and vanilla extract as per the directions. What you wind up with at this point is a somewhat fluffy paste. As things progressed I found that if I turned up the speed on the mixer the fluffy paste looked better and seemed to have a better texture. I was at about half power when I figured that the mixture was good to go and it was time to start adding the flour.
Since its kind of difficult to pour the flour straight from the bowl into the mixer while it is running, I figured I would just use a big spoon. I also figured since the directions said add it slowly, a spoonful at a time would be my best bet. The first couple of spoonfuls were not too much of a problem. However, on about the third spoonful I guess the mixture had not had time to absorb the previously added flour completely. Not to mention, I decided to add a great big heaping spoonful and had turned the mixer up to about three quarter full power. As I added that big heaping spoonful of flour, I guess I got my spoon a bit too close to the mixing blade. The blade caught the spoon and the whole mess quickly became a cloud of flour dust. It was kind of a perfect storm in the cookie making process I suppose. While things started to unravel a bit from there, I quickly figured out that the mixture really needs time to completely absorb each addition of flour before it can safely and without consequences take on more and more flour.
I quickly rebounded and finished up the process and cleaned up the mess. The cookies were delicious and Matt thought that I was some kind of super hero. He said that it had been so long since he had tasted real homemade cookies that he had forgotten how good they were. Matt finished up his cookies and as he walked out of the kitchen he said that I should consider making some peanut butter cookies. I just couldn’t help myself, I just laughed at him and turned and walked away.
Sometimes, things become a lot clearer when you when you are forced to look at life through someone else’s eyes…
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