Some nights...

Some nights, you just have to bake cookies.

Tonight, my kitchen is inundated with them.

There are 72 so far... but there are at least two more batches to come.

My roommate and I organized the ones that we have so far all onto one plate. I call it "the cookie-mountain at half-mast" - 'cause obviously we're not done yet.

It's a normal-sized plate, of the variety you'd eat off on any regular night. We used our combined geometry and chemistry knowledge to make a "compact crystalline structure," or something of the sort. All I know is, it's a LOT of cookies, and they're mostly piled onto one plate (one batch wasn't out of the oven yet when we made it)

Some nights, you just need to bake cookies.

In Spanish, one way to say that something is easy is to say "no tiene misterio" - in other words, it has no mystery, or there's no mystery to it. As if for complicated things you have to be inducted into some impenetrable secret. I've been thinking a bit about mystery lately... you know how kids love fantasy, and then as they grow older, it loses some of its charm? I've been wondering if there's a way to keep that sense of awe and magic. I have one or two ideas.

There is no mystery to making cookies, though. You just chuck a few ingredients into a big bowl, mash them all up, slide little globs of the stuff onto some metal trays and slide said metal trays into an oven for a bit. Take 'em out and ta-da! Cookies.

Once I taught some friends of mine, a Galician friend and her mother, how to make pancakes. They were astonished. It actually was like I was revealing a mystery to them. They were particularly flummoxed by the idea that you were not supposed to stir the batter until all the flower granules dissolved. They thought it was the weirdest thing. So I guess there is some mystery, some apprenticeship in baking after all.

Cooking however, I don't understand at all. Cooking is more of an art, I think, than baking. There are so many more different ways to do things, techniques and such. I don't know. Cooking baffles me, I'd much rather bake...

So on some nights, I just have to make lots and lots of cookies. It's good for the soul, freeing for the mind.

I leave you with a picture of the mountain at half-mast:










Over 'n out.
E.O.

p.s.: the final number of cookies is 109. Not including the ones we ate. xD