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Rerun: Chocolate Chip Cookes

September 3rd, 2010

I’m not sure if there’s a cookie more “cookie” than the chocolate chip cookie. Sure, there are sugar cookies and snickerdoodles, peanut butter cookies and oatmeal scotchies … but there’s just something just so … just so quintessential about the chocolate chip cookie, it’s hard to put into mere words.

If you think you know everything there is to know about this simple delicacy, think again. I’ve done some extensive research and let’s just say my eyes were opened. I would now like to share some of my new found knowledge with you. Check out these impressive bullet points:

  • I always assumed the chocolate chip cookie was so named, due to the fact that it is a cookie what contains the chocolate chips. Not so. Turns out it’s named after its creator, The Earl of Chocolate Chip Cookie. Apparently, the Earl was gambling one night and wanted a tasty dessert. He had a mighty hankerin’ for some M&Ms, in order that he might keep playing cards and not make a mess. Unfortunately, the popular candy-coated safety-bonbons would not be invented for another two hundred years. Undeterred, he asked his servants to bring him cocoa chunks baked into a biscuit, thus keeping his hand free of all mess, save a few crumbs. It was such a popular invention that people immediately named this creation after its inventor. This is why even today we call chocolate chip cookies, “Earls.”
  • The modern chocolate chip cookie requires flour.

Don’t believe me about the flour thing? Check out this actual true story. A few weeks ago, my youngest daughter Rachel came home with a school project. The project was for her Skills for Living class and was simple: make a chocolate chip cookie and bring it to class for grading. This was an excellent project because I can’t think of a single skill more important than making chocolate chip cookies. And I don’t mean that in my usual sarcastic tone, either. Chocolate chip cookies are how you win friends and influence people.

Rachel loves mixing things together and applying heat to them, so this is one school project she wasn’t going to waste time on. She set to work right away on it and I left her to it, plopping myself down in front of the television to watch another riveting episode of iCarly.

Perhaps thirty minutes after the cookie project began, I began to enjoy the wonderful aroma of hot, fresh cookies. About two minutes after that, I began to sense something had gone terribly wrong. The smell of burnt sugar had now displaced the wonderful home-baked smell I enjoyed such a brief, brief time ago. I calmly walked to the kitchen, opened the oven door, and decided it was time to remove the first batch of cookies, although they still had at least eight minutes to go:

Those were the first five underdone cookies. The sixth “done” cookie was the one I scraped off the bottom of the oven:

“I think I did something wrong,” she declared. I agreed. So I started to walk down the recipe, checking off items like a NASA flight director looking for all systems go. When I got to “3 c. flour” she responded with, “Oops.” She accidentally used the 1/2 cup measure instead.

(Incidentally, we don’t have a one-cup dry measure any more. It disappeared mysteriously a few years ago. It was there one day and gone the next. For a while we figured it was “around here somewhere,” but I’m beginning to lose hope. I’m sure it went to the parallel universe containing all the mismatched socks.)

And the cookie project? Not to worry, though. We still had some percentage of the batter left and we could definitely add flour to it and still get an “A”. It was time to change the Skills for Living class into Math for Cooking.

First we had to see how much batter we used. So we scraped everything off the cookie sheet, put it on a plate, then weighed it.

As you can see, it was one big, sugary, chocolately mess. It was horrible. I think it took me at least twenty minutes to eat it. Our next step was to weigh the remaining batter. Once we had these two figures, we could easily calculate the ratio of used vs. unused batter, like so:

That was close enough to “half” for me. Knowing we were 1.5 cups short on the full batter, we were now 3/4ths cups short for the remaining recipe. A quick dump of flour, a few twirls of the batter, and presto! Good as new.

About a week later she came home and proudly announced, “I got one hundred on my cookie!” Unfortunately, I had to correct her. “You mean you got one hundred on your Earl.”

Originally posted March 10, 2009

Posted in Reruns | 4 Comments »

Male Brain, Female Brain

September 1st, 2010

Male vs Female Brain

So last week I happened to mention that my super-duper-high-speed weight loss phase of the diet was over and presented “six days in a row at basically the same weight” as evidence. I thought it was a very straightforward statement, but the ladies did not quite take it as I intended. Paraphrasing several replies: “You can’t quit now Charlie!” “Hang in there!” “Cheer up or we will hunt you down and force feed you rice cakes!”

It reminded me of a blog post I came across a couple weeks ago. It was an essay of sorts on fiction writing, specifically, “How to write male characters.” (Primarily, of course, for female writers.) Here’s the brilliant excerpt:

I had always assumed that women understood men. We are, after all, pretty simple. Generally, we say what we mean. Guys don’t generally try to lay down a trail of hints that have to be figured out.

Apparently, a lot of women don’t know that. Apparently, when a guy says, “Your hair looks nice today,” a lot of women assume there is some hidden meaning, such as:

  • Your hair usually looks terrible. It’s about time you did something right with it.
  • Your makeup is a mess, but at least your hair is OK.
  • You’re fat. The hair compensates a little, but you’re still fat.
  • Let’s hop in bed, you nymph, you.

The reality is that when a guy says, “Your hair looks nice today,” the secret encoded message which he hopes you pick up is, “Your hair looks nice today.” In the vast majority of cases, that’s all he means. No more. No less. There is no implication that your hair looked bad yesterday or that your makeup suffers by comparison or that you have a weight problem or that it’s time for a roll in the hay.

Furthermore, the guy is not fishing for some return compliment. It’s quite plausible that the guy in question doesn’t even view his comment as an actual compliment. Likely as not, this guy is merely making an observation akin to “Nice weather we’re having today,” or “The Dow is up ten points today,” or “The Padres are making a nice run at the division championship this year.”

So ladies, when a guy says, “Your hair looks nice today,” the correct response is, “Thank you! That’s so sweet of you to say so.”

Some examples of wrong responses are:

  • “What was wrong with it yesterday?”
  • “Don’t you like my mascara?”
  • “I’m trying to lose ten pounds, so cut me some slack, all right?”
  • “Sorry, but I’m not that easy, you dirty-minded lecher.

You can click here for the original article. And I’ll try to be more careful next time. :)

p.s. Happy New Month! Can you believe it’s September already? Or September 2010 already?

p.p.s. Check out my new Facebook “Like” feature below. Go ahead and click it. Lots. Then I’ll be famous. I promise I won’t forget all the little people I stepped on to get to the top.

Posted in Main | 10 Comments »

Week 2: So Far, So Good

August 30th, 2010

You’ll be happy to know I made it past my little plateau. After six days in a row essentially “stuck” around the same weight, I did manage to lose a little more. Here’s the graph, with Week 2 overlaid on Week 1, for comparison:

Graph 3

You can see how many days were in that 229-ish range, but I’ve come out of that fairly cleanly with a couple of 226 days in a row. That’s a good way to kick off Week 3.

Eating-wise, I’m doing about the same. I’m still avoiding all meat, dairy, sugar, fat, bread, artificial sweeteners, fruits, and veggies. My diet consists entirely of a half pound of gummy bears and six beers per day. I’ve never felt better.

On a more serious note, I have thrown in three attempts at exercising and would like to (read: really should) do that a bit more. It’s just cuts into my beer-drinking time so much.

Week Two
Starting Weight 233.0
Lost So Far 7.0
Pounds To Go 27.0

Daily calorie counts are still low, so I really should start eating a little more. The thing is, I really do feel pretty good. When I’m hungry, I eat, and since I’m probably eating a third of what I was eating before, I’m actually rarely hungry. It won’t last, I know. I’ve done this enough to know that. So I’ll just take advantage of it while it lasts. (With my luck, it’ll run out right at Halloween.)

So that’s this week’s update. So far, so good. And don’t forget, it’s never too late for you to hop on board!

Posted in Return to Onederland | 11 Comments »

Unnatural PB&J

August 27th, 2010

I first came up with this idea some twenty years ago. I think it happened one day when I ran across one of these:

Much like pizza, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are, of course, proof of intelligent life in the universe. The first day those two people bumped into each other at the corner and realized this combination was dog-gone good, life hasn’t been the same for us mere mortals.

But one day, while munching on yet another cup, I sat and pondered: what exactly is that stuff inside the peanut butter cup? Because I’ve seen peanut butter before, and this ain’t it. As my mind further strayed from the path, I also thought about these:

That’s a box of jelly donuts, folks, and I thought the same thing: what exactly is that stuff inside a jelly donut? Because I’ve seen jelly before, and that ain’t it. Then it hit me. Oh my. What if I were to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich out of these two items. It sounded wrong. Was I about to embark upon some unholy scientific adventure and end up with a creature known for generations to come as, “Charlie’s Monster”?

But I couldn’t help it. The idea intrigued me so. All I needed was some bread. Tada! Angel Food Cake. It looks like bread—how could this not work?

So finally, after contemplating this for half my life, I decided it was time.

Warning: The following blog post contains scenes of an explicit peanut butter nature. Viewer discretion is advised.

The first step was to extract the peanut butter from the cups. This is a very delicate process because as you all know, exposing Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to the earth’s atmosphere causes them to vanish immediately. Look what happened to the first set, just seconds after opening the package:

I have no idea what happened to them, so I was more careful with the second package. As far as extracting the filling, turning the cup over and scraping across the bottom seemed to work.

I also tried it with a semi-frozen cup and that seemed to work better. If you try this on your own (note: do not try this on your own), you may want to attempt freezing as well. Anyway, after extracting the filling from four cups and eating the remaining twenty, I ended up with a small bowl of peanut butter, like so:

Next, the jelly! It’s a similar procedure involving the subject, a knife, and a camera under poor lighting. I decided to cut around the center of the donut using some of my mad pumpkin-carving skillz.

I have to admit, this was a view I’d never seen before:

I carefully spooned out the “jelly” and added it to a second bowl. With the two spreads now ready, all I needed was the bread. Cutting angel food cake is also a delicate business. I’m used to thwacking four-inch thick slices off the cake. Getting bread-thin pieces was a bit of a challenge. But we’re talking about history in the making. I had to rise to the occasion.

Spreading the “peanut butter” was more difficult than I expected. It was much stronger than the angle food sandwich infrastructure. I had to pre-spread it in the bowl, then lay the pieces on top of the bread:

The jelly was a similar challenge, the chief danger being the complete destruction of the bread due to the spreading process.

But in the end, the deed was done! The earth didn’t crash into the sun and my house was not surrounded by townsfolk with torches and pitchforks.

“The Unnatural Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich, along with veggie sticks, green grapes, and milk is part of this complete breakfast!”

Rachel, ever eager to play the part of my guinea pig for all the internets to marvel at, prepares to take the first bite of the monster:

There she goes!

And the verdict?

Hmmm… apparently not her cup of tea. By now, however, I was brimming over with excitement. After all, I’d been thinking about this moment for decades. I had to try it myself. Here I go….

You know what? I actually liked it. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. And the first bite was a bit … strange. The peanut butter gave it a bit of grittiness for which I was unprepared. But once I got past that, I ate the whole thing without a problem. And also without ice cream. It occurred to me too late that this would have gone great with ice cream. Although, in hindsight, I should have served it with a side of garbage disposal.

I hope you enjoyed this reprint of a guest post I did at Peanut Butter Boy nearly a year and a half ago. Have a great weekend, everybody!

Posted in Friday Fun | 9 Comments »

Short Honeymoon

August 25th, 2010

Welcome to the post I typically write at the end of the second or third week of a diet. The first week of a diet (I as posted just two days ago) is filled with rainbows and unicorns. I stay on track, I eat like a bird, never get hungry, and lose nearly a pound a day. Then the first or second weekend hits and reality sets in. That’s when I write my “Honeymoon’s Over” post, pout for a few minutes, then hunker down for the long haul.

That’s normal.

What’s not normal is posting the second week post this close to the first week.

For those of you outwardly shouted “Way to go!” over my four and a half pound loss in the first week but inwardly thought “I hate that clown—it took me a year to lose four pounds,” I have good news for you. My weight on Tuesday was exactly the same as it was the previous Thursday. I had three days in a row at 228.5, then one at 229, then one more at 229.

As the outgoing Cathy would say: AAACK.

But, that’s okay. There’s no rule that says the Honeymoon is supposed to last a specific period of time. It happens, we pout a few minutes, then hunker down for the long haul. Even if for the 104th time.

:)

Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments »

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