and yes, that is good enough for me.

So, generally, I have to admit…I don’t cook. I suck at it, I don’t enjoy it, I don’t have the motor skills nor memory to keep several things going all at once in the kitchen and quickly get overwhelmed by the simple tasks in front of me. I’m sure there is prescription medication that could help me with this issue, but for now I muddle along and stay generally in charge of “dinners out”.

However, once in a very blue moon, I bake something really simple…cookies (well, once I baked something out of a box and now I can’t recall what it was, some kind of snack bar from a packaged foods company that starts with a K and has a name sounding similar to the clown on the Simpson’s). Last night the moon was as blue as it can get, and I made some cookies (with some help from Maya’s expert eye along the way).

I started with the chocolate chip cookie recipe from Easy Cookies. My hope was that this site would be geared toward children. If it were, then there was some hope I could get through the cookies without showering Maya with too many stupid questions. The very second instruction in the “easy cookies” recipe baffled me and sent me to google to do some research.

“Cream the butter and both sugars”

A concept totally lost on me, but I found some overly helpful and frightening advice at baking911.com. Maya told me most cooking sites seem to be designed to keep you out of the kitchen, and she may be correct. You have no idea how I fretted about the this process prior to Maya telling me to mostly ignore it. I even almost backed out of making the cookies entirely, but since I had mentioned them earlier in the day and Maya said she was already looking forward to them, retreat was not an option. Really, the tone of this stuff had me thinking we would need to rent a laboratory up at the University just to get the correct conditions for this highly technical creaming process. I suspected we might need to invest in some additional tools, or perhaps we should hire the work out to an expert. Fortunately, Maya put my fears at ease, and for the most part, the Kitchenaid Mixer did all the work.

Now, I can’t just make chocolate chip cookies, what fun would that be. Again, Maya helped me out here by telling me that the quatity of chocolate chips recommended by the recipe would leave us with a mess (it seems like all of the recipe was halved, except the chocolate chips). I figured I’d grab whatever leftover nuts, or what not, we had in the cabinet…but the almonds were raw and apparently someone (it was me) ate all of the hazzlenuts that were in an already open bag I had seen in there previously. BUT, I found an open bag of sweetened coconut and some mesolithic Almond extract to add with half as many chocolate chips as were recommended by the recipe.

I am generally in favor of a hint of almond in my snacks. I like Almond in my lattes and many years ago (last time I made cookies) I made peanut butter cookies, BUT not peanut butter cookies, because I used Almond Butter. The result…Hard, Flat, Greasy and FANTASTIC almond snacks. I highly recommend that you try it with your favorite peanut butter cookie recipe, but be forwarned, your cross-hatches on the top will be vaporized in the cooking process. I don’t know the science here, but you have been warned, they will be hard, crispy, flat and delicious.

Which reminds me of a funny story not at all related to the cookies I made last night, so let’s digress from the topic at hand for just a moment…

Way back in the mid-90’s (when the biggest crime our president commited was perjury regarding a blow-job, ahh the good old days) I provided telephone techinical support for Adobe PageMaker 4,5, and 6. If at that time you typed in “hard and greasy” into the knowledgebase you would get an article that contained corrections for the cookie recipe that came as part of the recipe card templates for PageMaker 4. I think the title of the article was “PageMaker 4 cookies are hard and greasy”. I couldn’t find any quick references to this little bit of publishing software history out there on the net, so I thought I’d mention it and hope I’m not violating any NDA I signed last century. Speaking of funny publishing software history stories, as I recall one of the senior techs told me that the first PageMaker 4 release would anounce that “The Space Needle Could Not Be Found” when you first launched it because the default printer at the old Aldus building used to be called “Space Needle” and that setting slipped into the final build. I have no direct experience with that one, but as I recall it was in the database at the time as well.

So, back to the topic at hand, the cookies from last night. It all went very smoothly with Maya’s assistance, and in the end the cookies were really delicious. The recipe made just under a dozen of them (wouild have been a dozen, but some of my cookie wads were bigger than others). So, take the recipe from the website above, add a healthy dash of Almond Extract and about 3/8th of a cup of sweetened shredded coconut and about half the chocolate chips they recommend, and enjoy…

In completely unrelated news…I burned some idle cycles today adding the Amazon link feature to the “Stray Random Quotes” plugin for WordPress. I don’t do PHP, so this was good little project to start dipping my toes into it. I imagine with the economy going the way it is the big MS based projects might run a little thin, so I getter get on the open source stuff to some extent. This was a quick and dirty modification of the existing script to add a spot for my associate id and the ASIN of the product associated with the source of the quote. No where near polished enough to distribute or even recommend as an add on to the current plugin, but it is serving my purposes, so I’m happy with it.