Do you come here looking for advice? Friends, I have none.
OK I lied, I have one piece of advice.
We all know what the recommendations are to get through this collectively as a society. So do whatever you need to do, to survive and stay happy under those restrictions. You know what is best for you. Do it.
You know what gets to me the most? Television. I hate it. It’s the most convenient way to keep the kids from going insane, but it’s also a non-stop inane, random, annoying voice in my head. Radio does not affect me the same way and I can’t quite put my finger on why — perhaps because when you’re using audio as your primary medium, it has to at least be coherent. We’ve been binging kids’ podcasts, but the TV’s still on an ungodly amount of the time, because although we live in a rural area, it’s just starting to melt here and outside is otherwise covered in ice and snow. Will my kids go entirely feral if I arrange for the TV to have an accident? We may find out.
The funniest thing (funny in a kind of karmic way) was that I finally thought I’d figured out how to sit quietly and think about nothing for fifteen minutes a day. I don’t know how to say this in print, because it sounds like I’m bitter, and I’m not. I’m not upset about it at all. I just think it’s funny. This thing I try to call a career was bending to my will, sort of, and I was going to meditate and find answers, damn it. Now I just curse at the tv and look after kids 24-7 and wonder how the hell my grandma had time to do anything but chop vegetables and cook.
Do you remember that movie, Empire Records? If you can get your hands on it, watch it. It’s the ninetiest of 90’s movies you’ll ever find. Liv Tyler is a hilarious angel and Robin Tunney and Renée Zellweger have a pop culture moment.
But for some reason the character that fascinated me the most was Lucas. He tries to save the record store by taking all the money in the vault to Atlantic City. And he blows it. He blows it so badly that there’s nothing left to do but go zen for the rest of the movie.
That’s kind of what this was like, except replace “Atlantic City” with “global pandemic.” I got nothing to complain about now. Things are uncomfortable, but we’re fine, and a lot of other people are not. Here we are.
In the spirit of collective solidarity, I bequeath to you a small but shining gift.
When I went to university, the food court area was this long, wide, elevated hallway called the HUB (I think… it’s been a while, I could be wrong). There was a sandwich shop in the HUB, and I used to get lunch there once a week because I was a poor student and ought by rights to be eating bagged lunches. But these sandwiches — ok, really, the bread — was so good, once a week I’d get a plain fricken’ lettuce, tomato and cheese sandwich with mustard and mayo, just to eat that bread. And a chocolate chip cookie. If you hit the cookies on a fresh day, they were the most heavenly slightly salty chewy melty goodness of a chocolate chip cookie you can imagine.
I have a bit of a history of obsessing over cookies. I’m… picky. Like, these are not the Girl Guide vanilla cookies of the 1990’s… those are probably impossible to reproduce without industrial processes and preservatives and other weird ingredients like a magic cauldron. But these homemade chocolate chip cookies — this recipe I thought I could crack.
So I started experimenting. I rapidly found out that my idea of the perfect chocolate chip cookie did not match the internet’s idea of a perfect chocolate chip cookie, AT ALL. I tried the Toll House cookie and even the huffily complicated New York Times cookie, and it was very meh. Too caramelly, too much brown sugar. Too cakey.
So I went my own way, testing and refining as I went along. Think less bakerly tweaking and more mad scientist with flour and eggs. Eventually, I had a breakthrough — the recipe I was looking for more closely resembled a sugar cookie than a typical chocolate chip cookie. Eureka!
Yesterday, friends, I did it. I created the cookies I’ve been pining over for the past fifteen years. I give the recipe to you freely, but with a word of caution. They are impossible to leave alone, and if you are quarantined with them, you’ll probably eat them all. That’s OK. Just eat them, and don’t feel guilty, and when this is all over you can share a batch with your neighbor. OK?
Let me know how it goes.
Theatre of Christi’s DANGER DANGER Contagiously Delicious and Utterly Top Secret Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe
1 cup salted butter
½ cup brown sugar
½ cup white sugar
½ tsp baking powder
1 egg
2 tsp vanilla (3 if you’re feeling saucy)
2 cups flour
Chocolate of Some Type (see below)
Preheat oven to 350ºF. Soften the butter a bit if you have to — put it in a non-metal bowl and heat it in the microwave for 10 second intervals — but don’t get it too soft as it’ll change the texture of your cookies. Try to just soften just enough so that you can cream it with the sugar but still have it kinda stiff. I unashamedly commit the cardinal sin of using salted butter in my recipe because it seems to turn out the right amount of saltiness. If you don’t like it, use unsalted butter and add salt as needed.
Cream butter and sugar together in a medium-size bowl. Add baking powder, egg, and vanilla. (Real vanilla is A Thing I Have Been Humbled By and I heartily recommend going all fancy on your vanilla extract.) Mix everything together then add flour. Dough will be a bit crumbly.
Mix in Chocolate of Some Type. The best thing to use is a 70% chocolate dark chocolate bar, chopped into chip-sized bits with your largest butcher knife. Pick the biggest and cheapest 70% bar you can find; it doesn’t have to be the best quality chocolate. If you don’t have perpetual chocolate stashed in your cupboard like I do, use chocolate chips, or Smarties, or whatever Type of Chocolate suits your fancy. But do try them with the dark chocolate when you can do regular shopping again, because sweet + salty + perfect chocolate is *chef’s kiss*.
Spoon onto a baking sheet. I use a teaspoon for this because if I use a tablespoon the cookies turn out too big. Makes 12-24 depending on how aggressive you are.
Bake for 10-12 minutes at 350ºF. Can freeze the finished cookies, or just freeze the dough to stress eat later. (I mean, technically you’re not supposed to eat raw cookie dough, so maybe don’t take chances with food poisoning since we’re in a pandemic, but in times of a normal amount of stress I will never not eat cookie dough. You can all be trash pandas with me when the pandemic is over. Or don’t. Food safety is thumbs up, be safe y’all.)
Dep’t of Sunshine and Sanitation: Quarantine Version
File under: Diversions and Other Edutainment
Adam JK (@adamjk on instagram) has free printable feelings pages to draw on
My kids are loving the What If World podcast
Audible just released a bunch of free audiobooks: stories.audible.com
NASA has a series of videos for kids on building Expeditionary Skills for Life
Now I'm craving cookies. :)