SAA Ep. #72: When Cookies Talk

About two and a half weeks ago, I reread this fascinating, albeit rambling, blog about my own awkward methods of losing weight. After reading it, I realized I needed to take my own advice. Over the holiday season, I'd put on a little weight.

And by "the holiday season," I mean July-December (Independence Day is a holiday, right?).

And by "a little weight," I mean 20 pounds.

So I went back to being a good little Calorie Nazi, and in the past two and a half weeks, I've dropped at least 4 of those regained pounds (I weigh in on Mondays, but it was 4 pounds at the last count).

Things have gone well. I've stayed well within my calorie limits. I've exercised a lot. I'm feeling awesome.

But something happened today that I did not expect. Something awful, and wonderful...and awful...

A few weeks ago I'd ordered some Girl Scout cookies from my favorite local Girl Scout. I had ordered them before I decided to start counting calories and losing weight. I figured then that a few cookies wouldn't hurt. But now that I'm a Calorie Nazi again, these cookies aren't just cookies. They're cheerfully packaged, sugar coated, high calorie discs of evil.

I took these cookies into my home, knowing how few of them it would take to cancel out a whole week's worth of workouts.  I didn't know what to do, so I took them out and looked at them.

...that's when the real struggle began...

I heard a voice, a faint voice, say "Gracias."

"What was that?" I asked, knowing I was in the apartment alone, unless I'd completely forgotten about taking in some new Hispanic roommate....

"Oh, don't worry about TAL. He isn't much of a conversationalist," another voice said. This one was much higher pitched, and much more annoying, than the first. "Are you going to eat us now? Oh, please do!"

"Who said that?" I demanded.

"It's me!" the voice said with a giggle. "Your box of Lemonades!  We are crunchy and sweet! Eat us! Eat us like butterfly pie!"

Amazed, I stared at the five different boxes of cookies on my counter. "But...you're cookies. You can't talk!"

"Of course we can talk," another voice said. "Either that or you're crazy. Hunger can do that to people. I suggest you eat us."

Flabbergasted, I shook my head. "Um...which one of you spoke that time?"

"That was TMI," a completely different voice answered.

"Mango, I told you NOT to call me that!" The cookie box sighed. "I'm Thin Mint. THAT was Mango Creme."

"And I'M," proclaimed another box if cookies, seemingly indignant that I had not addressed it yet, "Caramel DeLite. Formerly known as Samoa. You can call me Sam."

"I call you DeLITEful!" Lemonade squealed with a giggle.

"Asante," said the first voice.

"Let me guess," I said. "That was Thanks-a-lot."

"Oh yes!" Lemonade exclaimed. "TAL is so funny!"

"You're...all funny. Weird funny," I said.

"Weird? Me?" Sam said haughtily. "You just be glad it's just us. There are more of us, you know. Ol' PB Pattie is REALLY a nutter." 

"And Shout Out isn't here, either," Mango said gruffly. "I'm glad you didn't order any of that jerk. If I have to hear that fool shout, "LEAD" one more time, Imma lead him off a cliff."

"I'm surprised short bread isn't here," Lemonade laughed. "That guy always likes to Tag-a-long."

"Must you ALWAYS be so cheerful?" Mango asked Lemonade.

"You know what they say, when life gives you lemons, eat cookies!"

"Yes. Eat cookies," Sam agreed. "If you're through with the introductions, we really would like for you to eat us now."

Again, I shook my head. "You...you WANT me to eat you?"

"Oh yes!" laughed Lemonade. "Getting eaten is our purpose in life."

"She's right," Thin Mint agreed. "We were made to be eaten. You can start with me."

"No, me!" said Mango.

"No, me!" said Sam.

"Hsieh Hsieh," said TAL.

I took a moment to gather my thoughts, then said, "Look, guys...uh...cookies. I'm afraid I have some bad news. ...I am counting my calories."

"That sounds like fun!" chimed Lemonade. "Are calories like butterflies?"

"Uh, no." I said. "And...I'm afraid all of you have too many calories."

"Yay! We're wrapped in a calorie butterfly cocoon of joy," Lemonade breathed happily.

"Again," I said firmly. "NO. You have too many calories. That means I can't eat you."

A collective gasp rose from the cookies.

Even Lemonade sounded disheartened when she...it...said, "But...but...what about the cocoon. We were going to be reborn in your tummy to fly evermore."

"Lemon," Mango said calmly, "I WILL punch you in the face."

"Cookies don't have faces!" Lemonade squealed. "But if we did, I would have a sour puss!"

Mango growled. "This is serious. I mean, what do you mean you can't eat us. I'm nutritious! I have nutrifusion, enhanced with nutrients derived from fruit. I'm healthy!"

"Oh, puh-leeze!" Sam scoffed. "You can read your own box and still miss the words 'artificially flavored.' You aren't healthy. The cookie is a lie. You're just a big box of lie cookies."

"Yeah!" Thin Mints agreed.

"Merci," said TAL.

"Oh yeah, Sam," Mango retorted. "What about you, huh? Your name is a lie. Yours too, THIN Mint. Its a clever marketing scheme. If you're THIN, how can you possibly be unhealthy? Right? RIGHT? Ha! You're not even thin, really. You're just small-chocolated.  And YOU, Sam. Caramel DeLITEs? Who are you fooling, you caramel coconut fatty fatty fathead."

"Ha! That's funny," Lemonade laughed gleefully. "And mean."

"Everyone calm down," I huffed. "I think it's fair to say that none of I are as healthy as you claim."

"But what about my nutrafusion?" Mango asked.

"Sounds like hippy food to me," I said with a shrug.

"Yeah," Sam said sullenly. "If hippies got their food from laboratories instead of hippy farmers."

"Shut it, you," Mango threatened.

"Look," I sighed, "I can eat you guys. I will. I promise. But...it might take me awhile. I will have to eat you one at a time, and not every day. It could take months to finish you all."

Mango seemed satisfied. "Well, that should be okay. We do have a good shelf life."

"You should," Thin Mint snickered. "You have a lot of artificial preservatives."

"You could just put us in the freezer," Sam suggested.

"Oh, yes!" chirped Lemonade. "The freezer is like an icy winter butterfly cocoon of joy."

"There's your hippy cookie," Thin Mint said dryly.

I had had enough. "Ok. Everyone into the freezer. Thin Mints, you first."

"I really do think you're just going crazy from hunger," Thin Mint said as I put the box inside the freezer.

"It's better this way," Sam said as his turn came. "I taste even better when frozen."

"Oh, just put me in the freezer already," said Mango. So I did.

"You know what I've always wondered about Girl Scout cookies?" Lemonade asked as I picked up her box.

"What?" I asked hesitantly.

"How come we don't taste like actual Girl Scouts?"

I sighed and put her in the freezer.

Then I picked up TAL, expecting to hear some annoying word of thanks in some weird language. But he was silent. So I put him in the freezer and closed him inside with the others.

But as I turned away to continue my dictatorship as Calorie Nazi, I heard a faint voice whisper, "Thank You."

SAA Ep. #27: Cooking with Fail!

Tim Hawkins is probably my favorite comedian.  He's got this fabulous routine about biscuits being so good they'll make you want to slap your mama.

My grandmother, now she was the best cook in the world.  Don't argue with me on this, because if you think your grandmother is/was a better cook, then you're wrong.  My grandmother was the best. 

I mean, I love green beans.  I love them raw or straight out of the can, no salt added, whatever.  If there is such a thing as a green bean connoisseur, then I am one.  Oh, but my grandmother was an artist.  She could do things with green beans that would make me want to slap my mama. 

Only, yeah, Tim Hawkins was right.  I don't really want to slap my mama, and no amount of culinary genius could drive me to such a point.  I love my mama.  She's the greatest mama in the world.  I am, and have always been, and will always be a mama's girl.  Nothing in the world is going to change that.  So don't get me wrong when I say that my mama did NOT inherit her mom's cooking gene.

Her canned green beans were still good when reheated in the microwave of evil (guess who's been watching too much Megamind?).  Since I spent most of my life being overweight, it's safe to say that my mom's cooking wasn't bad.  It was good, but not anything...ANYTHING...like my grandmother's cooking.

Apparently, my grandmother's cooking gene skips a generation, because my older sister seems to have inherited it.  I have...well...not.  And the way I see it, she's got four kids and a hubby to feed, so she's welcome to the cooking gene.  I don't have as much need for it since I've just got myself to feed.

The thing of it is, I've inherited my mom's cooking ability, only it's worse.  It's much, much worse.  Take the most evil cooking you can think of...and multiply it by six.  That's my cooking.

Sure, I can manage a few basic things.  I can hard boil an egg...usually.  I can make a decent bowl of pasta (with jarred pasta sauce).  There are even some dishes I can make that might make you want to slap your mama.  My guacamole is so amazing that it has been dubbed rockamole (and no, you can't have the recipe, because I don't use one...what I do with avocados, limes, onions, and cilantro is magic.  MAGIC I TELL YOU!!!).  I'm also pretty good at making those giant cookie cakes.  My most recent success was this masterpiece that had my friends raving (both over the appearance and taste):

Yes.  It's a cookie.  A cookie that looks like a pizza.  Go ahead, say it.  I'm awesome.

But I'll let you in on a little secret.  I don't make my own cookie dough.  It's store bought (so is the icing).  I won't tell you which brand of cookie dough I use because I'm mean.  I'm just going to say that I've tried many different kinds of cookie dough, and the kind I use is by far the tastiest.  It's also the cheapest I've found anywhere.  There's a little hint, but that's all I'm giving you.

So yeah, I can cook enough to keep myself happy.  I can even impress people occasionally.  I even went on a spaghetti squash kick for a while and surprised myself by making squash edible.  Squash typically doesn't make me want to slap my mama.  My mama knows what squash used to do to me.  I was never a picky eater--never.  I'd eat yucky broccoli or whatever gross stuff she put in front of me.  But I drew the line at squash.  I couldn't eat the stuff.  Mama tried to make me. 

One of the earliest memories I have is mama trying to force me to eat a forkful of squash.  I was three or four.  I was wearing a pink sweatshirt, or maybe she was.  I remember that pink sweatshirt vividly, though.  I remember it so well because as my mama was forcing squash down my throat, I vomited it back up all over that pink sweatshirt.  Pink and yellow.  Sweatshirt and squash.  Emblazoned in my memory forever and ever. 

Mama never made me eat squash again.

But I figured out that I like squash now...or I did...until I ate so much spaghetti squash that I hated it again.  That's the thing with me.  I usually get on a food kick and eat so much of one certain kind of food that I end up hating it.  That's the extent of my success with food.

Add to the success my many fails--like the time I blew up the microwave trying to cook an egg without cracking it first (doh!), or the time I got all ambitious and tried to make perogies and used the wrong kind of flour so that my dough was hard, salty, and completely inedible, or the time that I forgot to put sugar in my cobbler (surprisingly, it was still kinda tasty--like eating biscuits with jam--but I still fail).  More than once, I've accidentally poured pasta down the sink.  One time I did the same thing with a pot of boiled potatoes I was preparing to mash--on Thanksgiving Day, which meant I had to run to the store for more potatoes at the last minute.

I have issues scrambling eggs (they never look how they're supposed to look).  I forget to cut the fat off chicken and wonder why it tastes all rubbery.  I put cilantro in pretty much everything (seriously, I could write a whole blog about my love of cilantro, and maybe I will someday).  My idea of a good bowl of soup is something that has Campbell's written on the label (insert joke about any soup I eat being Campbell's soup...cuz that's my last name, too). 

The family I "nanny" for has learned that they can trust me with only the most basic of food preparations.  If I'm ever to make dinner, the usual procedure is: "We have plenty of leftovers in the fridge for you to microwave."  Sometimes I'm asked to nuke some chicken nuggets or stick a pre-made pizza in the oven, but they know me.  I am not to be trusted in the kitchen.

But it's okay, because green beans still taste great when I eat them with a fork...straight out of the can because I'm too lazy to get a bowl.

And come to think of it, it's kind of a relief to know that most of the things I cook aren't going to give anyone cause to inflict bodily harm upon their own mother.