'Tis the Season

'Tis the season and I've turned into Donna Reed. It started out innocently enough. I bought a cookie jar. Of course, you can't just have an empty cookie jar (there is a law written somewhere). My husband was no help. His first words when I showed him my prize cookie jar wasn't to ask the cost ($20 plus 40% off, thank you very much), but to demand I make my mother's raisin oatmeal cookies.

Now, I am not a baker. Give me a 20 pound ham and I'll make it sit up and beg, but I'm lost when it comes to anything involving flour. I've always felt there was something vaguely dirty about "creaming" anything. When it comes to baking, I figure I'll end like Richard Jeni when he went to make a tuna salad sandwich and ended up in the burn unit with mayonnaise in his hair. This is where the Donna Reed syndrome hit me. I didn't faint, have a dizzy spell, or even call my Mother crying about where I went wrong when my husband made his suggestion to bake. Instead I started feverishly sifting through thousands of cookbooks to find Mom's raisin oatmeal cookie recipe.

You remember Donna Reed. She of the 50's TV Moms whose oven never set on an empty roasting pan. She wore pantyhose and heels all day...AT HOME! (I figure that if God had wanted me dressed before noon on my day off of work, he would have tattooed clothes on me.) Her answer to any of her children's problems was to have another cookie and send her husband out for ice cream. And I was turning into her!

It wasn't so bad at first. I pulled out the cookbook my mother had lovingly made and sent to all her children to find her cookie recipe. It certainly seemed easy enough and 2 hours and 3 skin grafts later I had 3 dozen delicious cookies crumbling through the cooling racks on my kitchen counter. I was so pleased with myself I even took some of the cookies to work and soaked up the praise. The problem began when, on my day off, I decided that I would make some more.

This wouldn't have been a problem except that I decided since the raisin oatmeal cookies were such a hit I would try something different. I could even do several types of cookies and give them away as Christmas gifts! Now, when my mother-in-law passed away, I inherited 47 cookbooks, 2 card files, and 2 manila folders crammed full of recipes. (I made myself dizzy counting that high.) This doesn't, of course, count the cookbook my own Mother sent. I have more recipes to help hamburger than there is hamburger in the entire state of Tennessee. I even have a Brunswick stew recipe that begins by saying "Frozen squirrels are acceptable, but fresh squirrel has a better flavor...". This is one of the older cookbooks I have inherited.

I leafed feverishly through "The Kids in the Kitchen Cookbook", "The Best of Country Cooking 1999", and "The Delta Kappa Gamma Cookbook circa 1971" looking for cookie recipes. I even took a chance on pulling out some of the card files despite knowing that it would take a sledgehammer and the jaws of life to get them back in the box. I've cleaned out the local grocery store of baking soda, vanilla, and anise. My cookie sheets have logged more miles between the oven and the counter than a commercial airline pilot. My right hand is permanently curled into the "sift" position.

I think I began to realize I had a problem when I looked through an Elmer's Glue haze at the 47 empty coffee cans I was decorating with sequins and magic markers to hold my cookie collection. It also could have been when my husband sat up in bed and announced that he could not sleep with someone who kneaded the pillow 583 times so that it would "rise". I realized that something had to be done. You'll be happy to know that I've cut back to 1 cookbook a day and no longer have vanilla breath at 8am. It's a start.