Help! Help! The Kitchen Is Exploding!*

*Note: this was one possible consequence of my attempting to bake cookies, but the kitchen did not, in fact, explode.

There are days when Marina goes off to work and I stay at home, due in part to unsynchronized weekends, and also to the fact that Marina has to work in San Francisco some days, while I am a full time telecommuter. In light of this work situation, and in a clever inversion of the '50s paradigm of the American household, I decided I would bake chocolate chip cookies to be waiting for her on her return home.

Am I a hero for inverting social role stereotypes? Some might say so. Some might say so indeed, especially since I didn't burn down the house, not even after two bourbons-on-the-rocks which accompanied the baking. (Is that the proper pluralization? If not, why not?)

Did you know there are a lot of ingredients that go into making cookies? I was lucky enough to buy just enough butter, when I bought two sticks at Safeway today. As it was, we'll need to buy more butter prior to tomorrow night's adventure in Dungeness Crab.

It all started two nights ago, around 10 p.m., when I asked Marina if I could get her anything. She kindly said I could make her some chocolate chip cookies. I hesitated, because what I had in mind was more on the lines of a glass of milk or a cocktail. But hey, I'm a romantic, so I figured I would give it a shot--"Uh oh, we don't have vanilla extract!"

I know, I know, that's what guys always say, but in this case, it was true. We really were out of vanilla extract.

So I made Marina a deal. We put off the cookie-making until today, when I was off of work and she would be coming back to Santa Cruz after working in the city.

I intended to bake in the morning, but one thing led to another, and it was four o'clock before I sat down to take stock of the process. That's when I realized we didn't have cooling racks. I know some people--Marina and my mom, for instance--said that I could use wax paper to let the cookies cool, but the recipe was precise in saying that you transfer the cooling cookies from the baking sheet to a wire cooling rack. It's called a recipe, not a suggestion.

So I had to make a hurried dash to the store to pick up a cooling rack or two, after a morning excursion to buy salt, butter, vanilla extract, and, of course, bourbon.

When I set forth, I have to say that it looked like chaos waiting to be unleashed upon the world, or at least upon Woodrow Avenue.



There would have to be method to prevent madness, and also to preserve our limited counter space. As I added the flour, baking soda, and salt to one small bowl, and the softened butter--butter can be softened in the microwave, FYI--white sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla extract to a mixing bowl, I clipped shut each bag and moved it back to the proper location. Who knew that organizing a kitchen could pay off?

It was a daunting prospect, so first I followed the recipe for a needed element of the cookie-baking process:

1) put a big ice-cube in a tumbler;
2) drown the ice-cube with bourbon;
3) sip the bourbon while figuring out how to bake stuff.

At first, things looked, well, gloppy, like a bowl full of ingredients.





But then, food began to take shape. Adding eggs and beating the mix with a whisk made things begin to stir and change--I belatedly thought of trying to figure out Marina's fancy electric hand-mixer, but that would be like Hannibal invading Rome with electric flying elephants: far too easy, and lacking in character-building.

I would soon learn that the worst enemy of mankind, far beyond pestilence, greed, and mankind itself, is flour when you want to mix it with something else. Good grief. At least I gave my arms a proper workout, but flour really makes you work for it. Now I know why everyone likes just buying cookies at the store.

But I persisted, and eventually I was able to stir in chocolate chips, and the mix looked like a bowl full of Impressionist art.



After that, it was simply a matter of spooning it on to baking sheets and sliding them in the oven, setting a timer, and then pulling them out to cool.

When I say "simply", of course, I mean after figuring out how to use another spoon to get the stupid cookie mix out of the tablespoon and on to the baking sheet in some coherent pile.

In the end, everything came out amazingly well. I'm not saying I'm ready to take over the baking of a wedding cake, but I'm really quite happy with the results, as odd-shaped and globbed-together as they could be.





And the timing couldn't have been more perfect. Marina got home just as I put the last batch on the cooling racks, so she entered to a house that smelled like cookies. That's just awesome.

I don't know quite why I'm so tickled about this, but I think there is a special satisfaction in baking something, because you are combining ingredients from scratch, which is much different than frying chicken on a stove, because you aren't really changing the basic components that much when frying chicken. When you bake cookies, you are actually converting a lot of different elements into a radically different product.

That's probably why I'm so crazy about these cookies.



As a corollary, I've decided that the phrase "You can't have your cake and eat it too" is absurd. You can always bake more cake.

Clearly, I'm giddy on power. Maybe I shouldn't be allowed to do more baking.

Or maybe that's just the bourbon talking.