Balancing Act
Cookies to the Rescue Again
Have you ever noticed how baking (and eating) cookies can cure just about anything? Except maybe high cholesterol. Even if your cat is on her fourth month of antibiotics and your last paycheck went to the Roto-Rooter man. Even if, at bedtime the night before, your fourth grader says he completely forgot, but he needs to figure out when the steel plow and the sleeper car were invented before school the next morning.
Yes, it was one of those days. On the phone with my mother, I was elevating complaining to an art form, when she uttered the magic words: "We need to make cookies tonight." Suddenly, the "Alleluia" chorus sounded in my brain, and all was right with the world.
The prospect of eating freshly baked cookies for dinner-even when you're not a kid anymore (footie pajamas aside)-has a funny way of seeing you through the day. Which is why I gave up my dream of becoming a dietitian. Cookies for dinner somehow doesn't seem like good advice.
When we make cookies, my mom and I cheat; we buy the rolls of cookie dough in the store. If you don't have to make the dough, you're at least 10 minutes closer to eating the cookies. Or eating the dough itself, a habit I've passed on to my son-much to my mother's dismay ("We're not going to have any cookies if you don't stop eating the dough!"). When I was a kid, my mother warned me that eating raw cookie dough would give me salmonella, a warning that I not only didn't heed, but I flat-out made fun of. Turns out she was right. Oh well…I survived, and so will my kid.
Plenty of dough made it into actual cookies, though, and we had scores of Halloween pumpkins, ghosts, and cats to decorate. Although we're an artistic family, we came up short in the visual arts category. Consequently, none of us can so much as draw a stick figure. Our cat cookies turned out purple with lots of tails missing, and our ghost cookies ended up orange with spots of brown. And all of them are iced haphazardly.
My dad usually avoids the kitchen frenzy until the cookies come out of the oven. And then he has the same reaction every time: he (a type-1 diabetic who doesn't eat dessert) takes a bite of an unfrosted cookie and pronounces it too sweet. Meanwhile, my child has decided that using a knife to frost the cookies is delaying his gratification too long and is dunking his cookies into the icing. To each his own.
Then, of course, comes the decision about what to do with all of the lovely cookies you've just spent hours of your life on. My mother always insists they can't stay in her house. And since there's only so many cookies my son can consume before DCFS accuses me of malnutrition, we have to find someplace for them to go. Grandparents are always a safe bet, as are the college students my parents teach. But many of them wind up coming to work with me. For women in our prime dieting years (in other words, we have a pulse), we sure can wolf down anything sweet.
But the end result is really just the icing on the cookie, as it were. The best part is spending that time together and making memories. And hopefully avoiding salmonella. TPW
Yes, it was one of those days. On the phone with my mother, I was elevating complaining to an art form, when she uttered the magic words: "We need to make cookies tonight." Suddenly, the "Alleluia" chorus sounded in my brain, and all was right with the world.
The prospect of eating freshly baked cookies for dinner-even when you're not a kid anymore (footie pajamas aside)-has a funny way of seeing you through the day. Which is why I gave up my dream of becoming a dietitian. Cookies for dinner somehow doesn't seem like good advice.
When we make cookies, my mom and I cheat; we buy the rolls of cookie dough in the store. If you don't have to make the dough, you're at least 10 minutes closer to eating the cookies. Or eating the dough itself, a habit I've passed on to my son-much to my mother's dismay ("We're not going to have any cookies if you don't stop eating the dough!"). When I was a kid, my mother warned me that eating raw cookie dough would give me salmonella, a warning that I not only didn't heed, but I flat-out made fun of. Turns out she was right. Oh well…I survived, and so will my kid.
Plenty of dough made it into actual cookies, though, and we had scores of Halloween pumpkins, ghosts, and cats to decorate. Although we're an artistic family, we came up short in the visual arts category. Consequently, none of us can so much as draw a stick figure. Our cat cookies turned out purple with lots of tails missing, and our ghost cookies ended up orange with spots of brown. And all of them are iced haphazardly.
My dad usually avoids the kitchen frenzy until the cookies come out of the oven. And then he has the same reaction every time: he (a type-1 diabetic who doesn't eat dessert) takes a bite of an unfrosted cookie and pronounces it too sweet. Meanwhile, my child has decided that using a knife to frost the cookies is delaying his gratification too long and is dunking his cookies into the icing. To each his own.
Then, of course, comes the decision about what to do with all of the lovely cookies you've just spent hours of your life on. My mother always insists they can't stay in her house. And since there's only so many cookies my son can consume before DCFS accuses me of malnutrition, we have to find someplace for them to go. Grandparents are always a safe bet, as are the college students my parents teach. But many of them wind up coming to work with me. For women in our prime dieting years (in other words, we have a pulse), we sure can wolf down anything sweet.
But the end result is really just the icing on the cookie, as it were. The best part is spending that time together and making memories. And hopefully avoiding salmonella. TPW