jookitcz

I've seen people bake cookies with store bought cookie-dough, but it's never really registered as what it's called.  Store-bought dough is for eating immediately, in my mind (although you shouldn't.)  And store-bought cookies are filed away in my head under the 'cracker' label.  They're just sweet crackers.  "Cookies" require 'cooking,' and also a mess on a grand degree, music, a system of filling trays and whisking them into and out of the oven and the three-step cooling-storing system.  There should be at least three recipes, but more are better.  And there should always be some cutting back on sugar, adding more flour (because they always look so drippy), and generous over-dosings of cinnamon and allspice.

I love allspice.  I don't know if I've told anybody.  But sometimes if I'm going into the spice cabinet for something else, I'll pull out the allspice and take a whiff just because.  It smells like love. 

So today I pulled out the yellow apron and the blue headkerchief and baked my little heart out.  Chocolate chip cookies first, because those are the only ones Keegan eats.  The rest of the family has given up on tasting them any other time than the day of baking, the poor, ephemeral things.  Then oatmeal cookies, because Dad eats them for breakfast, even though they're always the last ones left in their tupperware.  Then there's some room for experimenting.  Today I also made apple cookies with extra apple (and extra allspice, shh), which are delicious and fluffy and soft, because they are made with milk.  Then I tried two new recipes. 

The first was something called a Lemon Crack.  Possibly named because Jean Pare was on crack, because there is no way that recipe made four dozen cookies.  It was the only one I didn't double.  It's something like a sugar cookie with lemon peel and lemon juice.  Lemon zest is amazing to me, and if I could, I would put it in everything, so the recipe was automatically appealing.  Unfortunately, my mom does not have a zester.  Fine, whatever, I'll grate the lemon rind on the cheese grater.   The result was... frustrating.  I got maybe a teaspoon of zest, when I was aiming for two tablespoons.  But I threw in some dried cranberries and extra lemon juice, and they were still lemony.  Next time, though, I will have zestier cookies.

Then the last, Orange Bran cookies.  Basic cookie dough, plus orange zest, orange juice, and 'bran flake' cereal.  We didn't have that, but we did have a couple cups of stale raisin bran, which performed proudly in its stead.  So the cookies also had a few raisins in them, because I was too lazy to pick them out.  We also didn't have any oranges, but we did have a couple of tiny, soft tangerines in the bottom of the fridge.  And this time, instead of grating them, I spent half an hour delicately peeling the zest off the fruit with a paring knife, and then chopping it up.  Verdict?  Dad came in from working outside, gave one a suspicious glare, stuffed it in his mouth, and asked, "What the hell is this?"

"A new cookie?"

Pause.  "It's good."

And they are pretty, in my opinion.  They're pale with dark brown bran flecks, which adds a different visual element to our cookie boxes.  Which is important.  All in all, I think I made about 30 dozen. 

And that's all I have to say about cookies today.

Today was the first day I ever drank milk directly from the carton.  You see, I'm not really a 'break the rules' kind of girl.  I understand the rules.  I know the reasons behind the rules.  After all, if everyone drank milk directly from the carton instead of first pouring it into an extrinsic vessel, there would be bacteria transferred to the fertile mouth of the carton.  The carton would be left out of the fridge too long, contributing to spoilage.  And we would all take a step backwards from that ideal point of evolution where no one minds the burden of cleaning an extra piece of glassware, because we are all self-actualized and find joy in even the most mundane of activities.

But sometimes, you have to look past the rules.  You have to realize that if you are the only person drinking from that carton, and that you really like milk, that it won't last long enough to spoil... well, the only harm that's left is utterly abstract.  And if you have, for example, a box of delicious cinnamon Life cereal that was on sale at the grocery store which tastes amazing with a little milk, yet gets soggy if you fill a bowl with both cereal and milk and let them mix over the course of breakfast--

No, I think I was justified.

I'm considering inventing a new kind of vegetarianism, for myself.  I'm calling it, "Band-aid Vegetarianism."  Why?  I like vegetables okay, but I rarely think to myself, "Man, I could really go for some broccoli right now."  Actually, I do, but it's more along the lines of snap peas and artichokes for me.  And while I have a moral problem with the animals' quality of life in factory farms, I'm okay with raising animals to kill and eat in general.  I wouldn't want to do the killing myself, no, but if I had to kill to eat, I'm sure I would learn to be fine with it.  Occasionally.  I might hunt down all the vulnerable potato plants in the area first.

But not all meat is raised on traditional farms.  There are, it seems, "farms" that conform to this particular business model.  The article discusses a pork factory company in the southeastern United States that produces so much and such volatile waste that people fall in pools of chemical pig manure and die.  That's beside the enormous environmental damage.  In my mind, this is obviously an immoral use of land and animal, and causes more harm than fair. 

Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model.

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure.

It's an interesting article if you're feeling morbid.  Unconscionable to even dream of supporting of this monstrosity by chance, and beside the issue, livestock is a pretty inefficient way of feeding the human body.  The animals we eat need resources to support them, plus the food that the animals eat requires resources of its own.  And we sit on top of this ginormous inefficiency pyramid!  Well, if I want people to take me seriously, I mean, as an economics major, I can't let myself be tarred by that kind of inefficient... thing.   And  as for my Environmental Studies concentration, well, that goes without saying.  Vegetarianism of some kind might very well be crucial to my sense of proper scholarship.    I'm going to ignore the business minor for now. 

The problem is, I rather like meat.  In my mind, chicken is a kind of palette for gastronomic creativity, and red meat is just delicious.  But what if I just ate them for special occasions, or when I'm at home?  Thus, band-aid vegetarianism.

Lucky for my conscience, I hate pork.  Joseph Luter III, chairman of Smithfield, mentions, "Most vegetarians I know are neurotic."  I wonder if maybe it is impossible for anyone with a heightened social conscience to look at the world and not be a little neurotic?

Chocolate is immediate and undemanding. That is why people like it. It glues them to reality. It trumps all the nice things in this function. Kisses? Inferior to chocolate kisses. The brain does not always participate willingly, the mind has a tendency to wander, it is avoiding, I believe, complications. Complications are wearying and unhealthy, and so a sense of mental self-preservation makes them distasteful. Complications lead to second-guessing, lead to moral decisions with only vague guidelines to steady them. Complications lead to confusion, and confusion is almost always abstract: by nature, confusion detracts from reality. Confusion is looking at reality and saying, "I am not sure what you are." That's abstract. It makes reality hang its head, "Oh. Sorry." And it goes to bother someone else, not you. You are left writhing in uncertainty with no guide at all.

This is why females are notoriously drawn to chocolate. Men don't need it, generally, they don't crave it. I suspect they have a stronger sense of reality, or how does one explain that level-headed, rational stereotype? Even when men are unreasonable, it tends to go to aggression, which is simply a retreat to a simpler schema, a simpler hierarchy of reality--the hierarchy of dominance. It is an attempt to make reality clearer, not the self-doubt and mood-swinging perception changes of their poor female counterparts.

Women seek chocolate because chocolate is a simple substance. Taste, because of its intensity and infrequency, feels closer to the brain than any other sense. Sight and sound are ambient; we do not even realize they are resonanting from our own organs. Smell is weak, and touch is so often uncomfortable that I think we habitually ignore it a little. Taste, however, is surprising and direct. We rarely taste only a little. And chocolate takes full advantage. Chocolate wraps around the tongue unrelentingly, with homogenous texture and flavor. Here is sugar, here is fat, here are mood-enhancing chemicals wrapped in a primally nourishing package. To the human body, which hasn't evolved with its decadent American society, survival is not yet vitamins. Survival is still sugar and fat. And in chocolate, they taste unadulterated.

We appreciate complexity in food. We enjoy the varied textures in a salad, or the varied spices of a pasta sauce, or even the careful chemistry of those unholy expensive gourmet chocolate truffles. We appreciate these, like we appreciate art, but we rarely crave them. They do not come to mind as soothing to a troubled brain, or comforting to a heart immired in complexities of its own abstract derivations. We crave the simplicity, the intensity, and the immediacy of plain chocolate.

Chocolate is the flour that my grandma would add to gravy to thicken it, if we replace gravy with our perception of reality. And that's a rather bad metaphor, crossing taste buds. Chocolate is the mix added to water to create cement. It binds (not gastronomically!). It reminds. It reattaches a person to the physical reality that has been eluding them. I personally can almost never stand eating chocolate without something to distract me, a book or a movie or a friend's conversation. It gives me a headache to do nothing but taste it, like it's too jealous to allow for sharing the senses even so much to allow for breathing.

But does it ever taste good.