C is for Cookie

And we all know who that's good enough for. But even our beloved Cookie Monster has jumped on the health food bandwagon. His namesake sweet treats, once consumed with such unbridled enthusiasm that the crumbs launched out of his mouth like shrapnel, have now been relegated to a 'sometimes food'. He has since incorporated fruits and vegetables into his diet as 'everyday foods' all for the health and well being of America's youngsters. This is certainly a wise and valiant effort in my opinion (hence my fascination with Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution show), but sometimes, sometimes, you just need a cookie.

These cookies were made for absolutely no reason. They were inspired by a last minute grab from the baking aisle. The chocolate chip section of said aisle has grown since I was a kid helping my mom whip up batches of traditional chocolate chip cookies, using the recipe right on the back of the bag (it never fails). Your options then were semi-sweet morsels or...other semi-sweet morsels. Now there's dark chocolate of varying percentages, butterscotch, PB and chocolate mixed (dangerous!), white chocolate, milk chocolate, chocolate chunks, mini chips...easy there, Bubba Blue, the list goes on. It was the milk and white chocolate SWIRLED chips that caught our eye. Keep in mind, this was actually the same day my friends and I shopped for our Bake for Hope supplies. We knew we would be donating all of our baked goods and thus, not able to consume any of them. So naturally, we enacted a cookie back-up plan which pretty much entailed baking an extra batch of cookies that we could eat. These swirled chocolate chips became the star of our superfluous confections.

They look pretty psychedelic, right? You can understand how a bag of these ended up in our cart that day. They're swirly and alluring and made me envision chewy, golden cookies perfectly studded with these two toned chips. Most chocolate chip cookie recipes are the same -- cream brown and white sugars with butter (or half butter/half shortening if you're my mom. And if you are my mom and you're reading this, you'll soon be emailing me to point out my typos), beat in eggs and vanilla, add dry ingredients and mix until incorporated. Then you get to stir in your chips!

This is the best time to lick the bowl, by the way. My brother and I became very skilled in keeping an eye on our mom and waiting for her to turn her back on that bowl of cookie dough for just one sweet, split second for us to get a spoon, or when necessity called for it, a finger into that bowl. She was blessed (cursed, in our opinion) with cat-like reflexes and usually we got away with a mere tiny lump of dough before she shooed us away with a warning to await the finished products. Occasionally she would pluck the beaters from the mixer and hand us each one to devour as we pleased. Raw egg paranoia be damned! This is cookie dough we're talking about. Never turn down cookie dough. You will live to enjoy another scoop.

Typically we crouched by the oven, eyes plastered to the ticking timer, slowly counting down the seconds to fresh-baked cookie Nirvana. Assisted by the heat of the oven, the perfectly scooped balls of cookie dough (formed by Mom's signature two-spoon scrape -- no fancy ice cream scoopers for uniform balls in those days) began to sizzle and squish down to objects that eventually resembled real, homemade cookies.

SIDE NOTE: Why did I make that sound like I grew up in 1804? Not quite sure about that...

Naturally, Mom had moved on to other tasks around the house at this point, so we always did her the favor of shouting BEEEEEEEEEPER! at the top of our lungs when the timer went off. Just in case the shrill electronic pitch wasn't loud enough to wrangle her back to the kitchen to retrieve the cookies from the oven.

What started out as a display of baked-for-no-particular-reason-other-than-to-snack-on-them cookies has evolved into a nostalgic piece of chocolate chip cookie memorabilia. We all link our memories to certain things -- pictures, smells, names, and more often than not, food. So go grab a bag of the craziest morsels you can find and bake your own memories!