The Cookie Diet

Confession:  I love cookies.  I'm not sure there's a cookie out there that I don't like.  Let's travel through my cookie timeline.....

One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting on my knees on a chair at the kitchen counter, helping my mom make peanut butter cookies.  I've written before that my mother was not much of a cook, but I think because she loved peanut butter, she made an exception here.  My job was to make the criss cross marks with a fork.  I still like to make them!

Another childhood memory:  My maternal grandparents lived three hours away, so we didn't see them more than four or five times a year.  Grandma knew that I loved her ginger cookies, so she would always have some on hand for me when we visited.  They were usually cold because she would make them ahead of time and pull them out of the freezer before we arrived.  I have never been able to duplicate her recipe.  They were soft, chewy cookies, so not like ginger snaps, but also not dark like molasses cookies.  I still remember being excited to get there and see that she had remembered (I was grandchild #21 or so, so it was pretty impressive that she kept track of those sorts of things).

As I grew older, along came Girl Scouts and with it, lots of cookie sales.........Thin Mints are still my fave, but what stands out to me in those years was going to our troop leader's house and making snickerdoodles.  I had never had them before and I thought that they must have been invented by Girl Scouts because the name was so weird (and we seemed to do a lot of strange, unfamiliar things in that troop)!

After Girl Scouts, I tried 4-H for a year or two, growing a flower garden and attempting woodworking.  What I remember most is going to some extension office with my homemade lemonade cookies and winning a ribbon.  I can still picture the judges taking little bites of people's cookies......I think I got bonus points for originality.  I recently found the recipe, copied in my early teen handwriting.  I really need to get around to making those again.

Home Economics class in junior high brought about cooking lots of things we had never had at home (who the heck makes Baked Alaska??)  At Christmas, we attempted to make spritz cookies, using a cookie press.  I say attempted because I have just never been good with that sort of thing.  I remember thinking mine were just plain ugly.  And then we boxed them all up and took them to a local nursing home, which was a frightening experience, but I won't relate any of that here.

Many, many good Christmas memories at home, begging my mom to make my seasonal favorite, the snowball cookie!  To this day, I LOVE those.  We also made dozens of cut out cookies, which my brother and I frosted using powdered sugar, food coloring and paint brushes.  My brother would attempt some sort of artistic perfectionism, decorating one cookie to my six.  Invariably, he'd poop out after frosting about a dozen and I'd be stuck finishing the rest.

I have now raised my own cookie monsters who all have their favorites.  College Daughter loves magic cookie bars, Middle Child loves oatmeal raisin, and Only Son's fave are peanut butter temptations (the ones with mini Reese cups in the middle).  For a number of years, I participated in a Christmas cookie exchange and would come home with 10 dozen different kinds of cookies.  The kids would come home from school super excited to check out the assortment.  I think I may have enjoyed their reactions more than I did eating the cookies.  But I still ate my fair share.