Recipe for Happiness

This could be a picture of me--it's not, but the look on that little girl's face and her fistful of cookies, her delight in that huge glass jar filled with delicious cookies--I can relate!

It's funny where inspiration comes from. I was reading an issue of USA Today this morning and reading The Final Word, Craig Wilson's weekly column. The title was: "The formula for happiness: Cookies and milk." I started thinking about my life-long love of cookies.

I am sure I loved cookies from the time I could dissolve them between my gums, but I don't actually remember eating cookies until I was old enough to make them. I started making them young. I used to watch a cooking segment of a local, King 5 show, paying close attention and being in awe of Bea Donovan, when I was a mere 12 years old. Bea was very organized, lining up her ingredients in tiny dishes, dumping the contents of each in a big bowl in the order called for in the recipe: flour, baking soda, cinnamon, oatmeal, chocolate chips, nuts, raisins. It all was so carefully done and it appealed to me tremendously. My Mom wasn't the greatest cook, didn't really care about baking, so I took over. I became the cookie maker and for a long time I measured out each ingredient into bowls and put them all on a cookie sheet, dumping each one into the bowl just like Bea Donovan. I began to collect recipes, then, too.

From the beginning I had opinions about cookies. I recall telling my mother that her friend Gerry's cookies weren't as good as they could be because she didn't sift the flour. I had watched her bake some cookies one day and noted her exclusion of this very important step. I also insisted on the best ingredients, the Toll House Chocolate Chips, the Quaker rolled oats, the better cinnamon, the nuts that had to be chopped, the freshest raisins. I baked cookies all the way through junior high and high school so when I married and started having children the habit was already formed. I baked cookies once a week. They never lasted longer than that, anyway. By the time I had my two daughters my recipe box was filled with a wonderful variety of cookies: Snickerdoodles, Oatmeal Raisin from the Quaker box, Chocolate Chip Cookies, Ginger Cookies, Frosted Kalua Cookies, Spritz, Sugar Cookies, Shortbread, Russian Teacakes, Frosted Nutmeg Logs, Grandma Butler's Date Bars, Grandma Ammon's Tarts, Aunt Carol's Roll and Ball Cookie Starter, Carolyn's Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies, Cocoa and Bourbon Balls, Peanut Butter Cookies. My mouth is watering just thinking about them. Somehow I managed to keep my figure in those days, even though I was probably eating six cookies a day, if not more. It must have been the energy involved with raising kids and keeping house that allowed me to munch at will without becoming a blimp.

In about 1979 I bought my husband Maida Heatter's Cooky Book, because he was interested in cooking and had started making cookies, too. This cook book put the exotic into our cookie jar. Now we were making Big Old-Fashioned Chocolate Cookies (with chocolate glaze!), Chocolate Mint Sticks, Pinwheels, Oatmeal Snickerdoodles. When we divorced I insisted that I get copies of those pages in the book before I would let him take custody of it. In 1993 I met my Greek man and with him came more cookie recipes: Melomakarona (honey macaroons), Brandy Balls, Snow Balls. I have a recipe notebook now, in addition to the recipe index box, with all the cookie recipes I've cut out of the newspaper, out of magazines, from labels on packages, been given by friends. I certainly have enough for my own cookbook.

I love the results of making cookies, but I also love the making of them. I love to cream the sugar and the butter, adding the eggs and vanilla, the taste of it at that point. Then measuring and sifting the dry ingredients into the creamy mixture in the bowl and finally chopping the nuts and adding the raisins, chocolate chips or whatever extra added yumminess is called for in the recipe. I like dropped cookies best as that allows me to lick my fingers often and I don't let a drop of the dough go to waste, using a spatula to get the very last bits from the bowl, which are mostly consumed by me. What can be said of the aroma of cookies baking, except that it is one of the top ten most wonderful smells in the world? At the end they are all lined up on the counter on paper towels, cooling, filling the kitchen with their great smell.

I don't make cookies as often anymore because now there are no longer any kids to chase to keep me svelte--all those cookies go directly to my hips as they pass so deliciously over my taste buds. I make cookies to take to potlucks or to family gatherings or to send to my kids at Christmas and I make them once a month for my husband because he likes to have a "little something" after dinner. I am glad he requests them because if he didn't I don't know how I would come up with excuses to bake them.

There is a new baker in the family now. I was so thrilled the last time my granddaughter, Alison, came to visit me. She was drawing at the table and suddenly looked up at me and said, "Grandma, can we bake something?" Who am I to say no? I immediately got out the old recipe file and looked for one that would appeal to her. She required "cimmanon and vanilla" and since her Grandma likes oatmeal and chocolate chips and nuts, we made Oatmeal Chippers. I measured, she dumped ingredients into the bowl. Together we whipped up cookies made with love. We waited impatiently for them to bake and then we ate a whole bunch of them.