Welcome to the blog for Colgate University's interdisciplinary course on food. This is the place to keep up with what students in the course are experiencing in their work at Common Thread Community Farm and through their everyday encounters with food.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Cookie Monster

I know I have written a lot about the holidays, but get ready. This is yet another entry about the holidays. Although Christmas is over two months away, maybe I’m starting to get into the holiday spirit due to the Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas decorations I see in adjacent sections every time I take a trip to Big Lots. Each year, in the days leading up to Christmas, my mom’s side of the family gathers to exchange gifts. My mom has three sisters so it is quite a large gathering with everyone. Just to give a little background, my mom’s oldest sister has two sons—both over the age of 29. One of her sons even has a daughter who is now nine. Then my mom’s slightly younger sister, yet still a middle child, has three children—two sons and a daughter. Finally, my mom’s youngest sister  has three children—one son and two daughters. Then there’s me and my older brother. Therefore, with all of the cousins and family members, there is always a lot of presents to buy, even if it be a nice pair of socks. My mom and aunts always claim that they’ll begin gift shopping right after Thanksgiving, especially since Black Friday is the day after. However, only one of the sisters seems to uphold this commitment each year.
Two years ago, since there were so many gifts to buy and in order to save money, the four sisters decided to buy gifts for their own children, but also do a cookie exchange instead of a gift exchange. Naturally, I am enlisted to assist my mom in this baking process. It’s a very fun activity and nice to spend some quality time with my mom, especially after being away at school for a bit. Unfortunately, I am terrible at both cooking and baking. I used to make snickerdoodle cookies, and even though they tasted good, I’m pretty sure they were raw every time I made them. Additionally, although I believe my mom to be a wonderful cook, she surely is not very good at baking cookies. I really don’t know where we go wrong each year, but the end result is usually a few dozen burnt sugar cookies that are not in the shapes of snowflakes as we anticipated, but rather thin and flat ovals. Moreover, some of our family members are gluten-free and or vegan so this adds another challenging aspect to our task. Each year I ask my mom, “Why are we trying to make vegan and gluten free cookies if we can barely make regular cookies?” Nonetheless, each year, we still try time and time again. After a few failed attempts, we end up with edible cookies that we are able to bring. Of course my brother and father, who both contribute little to the overall process, are the taste-testers, which eventually leads to us having a shortage of the number of cookies we need.
No need to panic. One of my best friends from home used to be in Girl Scouts and is very good at making a variety of cookies. Her mom and her will usually bake a ton of extra cookies to give to friends around the holidays—including chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, snickerdoodle, sugar, butter, white chocolate macadamia, shortbread, and jam-filled cookies. With the approval of my friend and her mom of course, we usually bring a few of their cookies for the cookie exchange if it is our last resort. Therefore, so many cookies are baked and eaten, just in time to leave some out for Santa ;)

I hope this inspires you to bake some cookies or eat some cookies. Included below are two links (that I do not own):
*one for different cookie recipes (this should be my study guide for the next two months)
* and a link for snickerdoodle cookies (which I hope you keep in the oven longer than I do)

Snickerdoodle: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/10687/mrs-siggs-snickerdoodles/?internalSource=hub%20recipe&referringId=362&referringContentType=recipe%20hub&clickId=cardslot%2019  

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