Guilty pleasure
I know I’m usually Sally Sustainability, praising the virtues of fresh, whole foods, but sometimes you have to let go and eat a Dorrito.
Life has been unusually stressful the past two weeks and I’m pretty sure that we’ve had enough Brooklyn Summer Ale to fill a kiddie pool twice over. It’s time to stress bake and turn to comforting foods from our childhood, when we didn’t worry about stuff like nursing homes and mortgages.
While I have many foods that I treasure from my youth, my favorite family food is the nameless chewy peanut butter cookie bar that my grama has been making for the past 30 years. These cookies have been known to cause fights in my family and could easily be used as currency. She only makes them at Christmas, while we circle the kitchen like sharks, waiting for the cookies to hit the platter. Eventually she started putting them in personalized Ziploc bags so we’d stop fighting over them, though it doesn’t stop us from stealing bites out of eachother’s bags.
To me, these have always been grama’s cookies. While I’ve made most of her other beloved dishes, I’ve never been able to encroach on this territory, at least until this weekend. I managed to sweet talk her into making a batch of the tasty treats so I could learn her techniques. Here are the results, and no, you can’t have any. Read the rest of this entry