It’s All in the Chip
I made chocolate chip cookies with my kids on the Fourth of July this year. For some reason, I feel this a very patriotic thing to do. I didn’t try to make red, white and blue Jello, or strawberry and blueberry whip cream stuff. Although those always look great on the picnic table and can almost be the centerpiece. Everyone thought we made a particularly good batch of Toll House — but honestly — have you ever met a chocolate chip you didn’t like? Of course, chocolate chip cookies are always best with a glass of cold milk, but eating them around the pool, people really didn’t seem to need it. They went just as well with chlorine.
It would not surprise me if the Toll House is the Number One cookie that servicemen and women crave the most when they are overseas. When I lived in the Netherlands and tried to get my friends to put chunks of chocolate in their cookie dough without melting it first — well, that was just wrong!
My mom used to love to tell me the story about how Ruth Wakefield invented the cookie in 1930 at her Toll House Inn. My mom grew up in down the road from the inn located in Whitman, Massachusetts. Mrs. Wakefield was making butter
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Her love and warmth radiated from her kitchen. In our more sophisticated age, we find so many more reasons to cook with kids. First, there’s the math: measuring cups and spoons, fractions, doubling recipes, counting cookies. It’s all there. Second, there’s the science. Have you ever tried to explain to a five year old why or how an egg changes when it’s cooked? Miss Frizzle did a much better job than I could. And third (and in a perfect world this would be first), there’s the tasting. How many other types of math projects are you able to eat when you are done? And the tasting will always lead to experiments. Mrs. Wakefield knew that. In my time, it was “All by Myself Cookies,” but now my kids have started with graham crackers and chocolate