It’s the most wonderful time of the year! School is starting! Everyone is ready for the heat of summer to be over, and for all the crisp fall excitement that a new school year brings. While we are in denial about Sunday night homework anxiety panics, we are looking forward to new shoes and new school supplies. There is nothing like a fresh, fragrant box of crayons!
Before I allow the wave of nostalgia to completely sweep me away I have to remember that filling lunch boxes can be an awful tedious grind of a routine. It is difficult to keep all the lunch plates spinning in the air while trying to provide a nutritious and delicious meal to be consumed in a flash, in a loud room, filled with quick-to-judge pint-sized peers. I am afraid that those cute little notes I put in my kids’ lunch boxes were hastily pocketed, because those mean girls at the table were too cool for such sentimentality. And if the vixens of the fourth grade were scornful of those yellow post-it tokens of motherly love – what were they saying about the organic oatmeal raisin chocolate chip cookies?
It is such a punch list – to make it healthy, tasty, portable and appropriately cool. No wonder we give in to buying packages of Chips Ahoy cookies. They are uniform, anonymous and safe for the perilous world of scornful fourth graders. But they are not fun to bake.
Cookie baking is a great family activity. When you are tender and vulnerable to the Sunday afternoon homework anxieties, pull that fourth grader into the kitchen. Forget about the teachable math moments of measuring ingredients accurately. Sift a little flour onto the kitchen counter, and roll some dough balls around. Have a chat while you wait for the oven to preheat. Nibble on some chocolate chips – someone needs to taste test them for quality control. Show the love while eating the cookie dough – it means more here in the kitchen than some corny lunchbox note. Burnt cookies never tasted sweeter than these.
And putting a batch of homebaked cookies in a box and sending it off to a far away college does a lot to assuage the growth pains at both ends of the mail route. Everyone will remember how the time slowed for a while, while the butter was softening and the cookies were baking. We always wanted the process to hurry along, so the cookies would be done, and out of the oven. Now we want the cookies to bear the sweetest memories across time and miles.
I digress. Bake some cookies for everyone. You can never go wrong.
Trust Martha to figure out that there are three kinds of chocolate chip cookies: crisp, soft, or cakey. It all depends on the amount of butter you add. She probably has reams of top secret think tank research about brownies, too.
https://www.marthastewart.com/346831/crisp-and-chewy-chocolate-chip-cookies
https://www.marthastewart.com/344840/soft-and-chewy-chocolate-chip-cookies
https://www.marthastewart.com/313548/ultimate-chocolate-chip-cookies
Do not be this person. Do not be a vegetable sneak. Those fourth grade girls will make your life a living hell, and I will pay them to do it! https://www.food.com/recipe/chocolate-chip-zucchini-cookies-61402
Instead, be like Nigella. Warm, earthy, sweet and flavorful. And perhaps you will develop a cute British accent.
https://www.nigella.com/recipes/chocolate-chip-cookies
Here is the original back-of-the-packet recipe from Nestlé for their tollhouse cookies. You can’t go wrong, however intimidating Martha and the mean girls seem. https://www.verybestbaking.com/recipes/18476/original-nestle-toll-house-chocolate-chip-cookies/
And don’t mention it to my children, but I also found that keeping a box of Ghirardelli chocolate chip mix on hand is like finding a dollar in a pair of blue jeans that has just tumbled out of the dryer. Warm and toasty and a pleasant surprise.
Have a most excellent school year!
“I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman
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