Mmm... Chocolate

I am addicted to the Food Network. I love it. I think it's one of the single best inventions television executives have ever come up with it. Tyler Florence, I live for reasons to find terrible ways to cook so I can Food 911 you. Sandra Lee, you're annoying, but you have some not so bad recipes. Southern Lady who calls oil OyAL, your food is too fattening for me, but I find you amusing. Rachael Ray is a goddess and I worship at her feet. I actually make her recipes. Rock Starr has a crush on Giada DeLaurentiis and will actually willingly watch her show and eat what she makes. I love the Food Network. I love to spend Saturday and Sunday mornings watching In the Kitchen Cooking School. And Chocolate with Jacques Torres? Holy Crap, I'd weigh five hundred pounds if I ate what that man made.

Jacques Torres used to have this show on PBS called The Dessert Circus. He used to get audience members over to his counter to help him out or he'd throw chocolate at them randomly during the show. I remember my mom and sister and I would occasionally watch this show on Saturday mornings when no one was rushing around to be anywhere. Some of the stuff he made... Mmmm, chocolate.

So today, I decided to actually cook for the Object of My Affection for once. Most people find it hilarious that Rock Starr does, like, eighty percent of the cooking in the house. I like to cook intricate things with lots of spices and flavors. I like to cook with pasta or with Mexican food or things that require more than one skillet. Omar doesn't. And he doesn't always like to eat that stuff either. So if it's a choice between being forced to eat chicken with scallions and artichoke hearts over fusilli pasta or cooking it himself so that the chicken is simply baked and has a side of veggies, he'll cook it himself so he can have that baked chicken with veggies.

Anyway, I digress. I'm cooking for Omar. So I decided to start, I'll make cookies. I am a total failure as a cookie maker. I bought Tollhouse premade cookies and slapped into the oven for seventeen minutes. I made Omar store bought cookies. I feel okay with this failure, but it causes me some worry about later on in life. My mom didn't spend all her free time in the kitchen baking, but I remember quite a few Sundays where she made my dad different batches of different kids of cookies or a pie or something that required not just a skill set for baking, but actual affection for both the process and the people she was laboring for. Don't get me wrong, we had Oreos and Chips Ahoy in the house on a regular basis, but if my mom was going to make cookies, she made cookies. Not even her Christmas cookies had elements of store boughtness. None of this Pilsbury or Tollhouse premade crap. She made her cookies by hand and her pie crusts. Until she started conning Baby Sis into making biscotti, but that's a whole other thing. ("Baby Sis, can you make some Daddy some biscotti? He really loved it the last time you made it and I've got too much work to make some. Maybe Lucy will help you." Fat chance Lucy will help you, kid. She's too busy ironing Daddy's shirts because Mom has too much school work.)

Anyway, even my super busy always had too much school work to do Mom made homemade cookies. It's my day off and I don't bring work home and yet I made premade cookies. I'm okay with that decision, but I hope five, six years down the road I remember this as my little blue or green eyed moppet looks at me and says, "Mommy, can we make cookies?" Will my first instinct be to reach into the fridge and grab that roll of refrigerated dough from the grocery store or to grab the flour from the freezer (I do not know why Omar insists on keeping the flour in the freezer, but it does save counter space in a small kitchen) and start looking for brown sugar in the cabinets?