small my table

Some people make lemon out of lemonades. Other people make peanut-butter chocolate chip cookies out of their pain. Just kidding. After calming down yesterday, I felt like a bit of a maroon for wasting so much time and emotion on something as foolish as football. What's more, I finally felt like the world righted itself, and once again, Boston became Boston, the land of close, but no cigar.

Anyway, yesterday's post was rushed and crazed, but the recipe is legit. I have been playing with this recipe for a long time. I've tinkered with it because I think peanut-butter chocolate chip cookies are the only cookie that I really enjoy eating- I associate something about them with comfort. So, I feel pretty confident that this recipe will not fail you. The only watch-out is the whole wheat flour- it's a texture that's not for everyone, and it does tend to make your cookies more substantial (which is another reason you should mix this all by hand- overmixing will make a brick out of you). If you click on the picture, I've put up a more aesthetically conventional version of the recipe should anyone wish to try it.

I know it probably seems like I am on a quest to study Type II Diabetes by developing it myself, but here is some evidence that I don't dine on cookies and chocolate pudding:



It occurs to me that I can be completely neurotic about the strangest things. For example, I cannot make a salad with vegetables that are all the same color. For that matter, I cannot make a dish that is all of the same color. Even though I could care less about the taste of one over the other, I will often buy a yellow or red bell pepper just so that my salad is not completely green. Sometimes, I will choose not to put cucumbers in salad for the same reason.

The weirdest thing about this compulsion is that I think I picked it up in home economics class. What kind of a dork actually remembers anything from home economics, much less carries it with her throughout her life? Apparently, this kind of dork. When I think back on it, I am a bit shocked at how much I used to enjoy home economics. Even at that age, no one would have pegged me for housewife-material. Yet I always took the class so seriously, you would have thought advancing to the 8th grade depended on it.

It was self-sufficiency, I can see now. My mother and I never had this warm, nurturing relationship. She never taught me much- at most, I learned from observing her while I was confined to the duties of chief dishwasher=in-residence. I know it wasn't just that though. It was more this notion of helplessness. It still makes me wince when one of my cousins shrugs off her inability to cook anything. I would have the same reaction to any male cousins of mine, except they've all learned to cook, interestingly enough.

At any rate, it's not as though I am some master chef by any means. I really only cook well enough to feed myself, but that's all I was really going for. One of the few rules I had for myself when starting school was that I did not want to stoop to the days of pizza boxes and ramen noodles. Luckily, I've found that I not only have access to decent produce, but also find a certain relaxation in the chopping and preparing and whatnot. The above is a batch of vegetables and tofu that will shortly be topped with lettuce and portioned into containers for lunch for the rest of the week. It works out pretty well.

Tomorrow, it's back to navel-gazing, and also an explanation for the song of the week.