Cookies...

Here we go...all sorts of cookie memories. "Thanks, Barbara" I say, with a smile and a rumbling in my stomach as thoughts of cookies take control of my body.

My earliest run-in with store-bought cookies was in utero. No...really! My Mom and Dad had moved to Glens Falls, NY early in their marriage, and Dad worked at the Nabisco company while he was going to flight school to learn to be a pilot. Because there wasn't a lot of money and because there were items that were rejected for sale by the inspectors at the company, he would bring a lot of 'goodies' home. Boxes of Mallomars were the ones that most often came home with him. Mom told me that they 'practically lived on them.' My being was very new, and while I was safely growing in the warmth of my mother's body, I was being fed my first chocolate. Poor Mom found herself also rejecting the Mallomars, as well as everything else she put into her stomach all day, for nearly nine months.

They didn't stay upstate for long. They moved back home and I was born and reared in a home where my mother baked the BEST cookies in the world. I grew up smelling freshly baked chocolate chip, peanut butter, oatmeal raisin, spicy ice box cookies, chocolate brownies, brown sugar brownies, among others. We rarely had grocery store cookies in our home. When we did, I thought they tasted like cardboard. The only cookies I actually liked that weren't homemade were fig newtons that I had at my Grandmother Beebe's house and Oreos that were devoured at my friend, Chris' house.

When I got married I baked dozens of cookies per month. I rarely bake them now because I eat too many of them when I do! It is a treat when I make them. Mike loves them, but he doesn't eat many sweets, and I'm the one who ends up with them on my lips and hips for years. We do bake with the grandkids sometimes, and they enjoy doing that, as well as eating the results of our labors. I like to make cutout cookies sometimes...sugar cookies, lemon cookies, cinnamon spiced ones. Then, I like to decorate them with icings. At Christmas I make all the old favorites that Mom made, and I send them to the kids. That works quite well for all of us.

At this moment, I'm feeling a great need to head for the pantry, get out that bag of chocolate chips and the rest of the ingredients and fire up that oven. Mmmmm...I can taste them now....to heck with the hips!