It's All About the Dough

I have a recipe in my card arsenal that is simply labeled, "Cookies." It is a beat-up, old index card, and the juvenile hand-writing would suggest that I penned the recipe when I was about 10 years old. Perhaps this was when I had just started adding cards to the file that I'll now hand down to my own children. I likely copied it verbatim from my mom's recipe, housed alphabetically in her dingy, forest green recipe card file. Literally, the recipe is all about the dough. At the bottom of the card, the instructions say to add any of the following: 1 cup of chocolate chips, 1 cup of coconut, 1 cup of raisins, 1 cup of dates, or 1 cup of oatmeal. The choice is yours as the master baker in your kitchen. In all of the years that I have pulled this card from the file and assembled the ingredients, I don't remember a time when my choice for completing the recipe wasn't with chocolate chips.

Don't let the existence of a recipe box or an "arsenal of recipes" fool you. I am not a master chef or a master baker. When I ask my family what I can fix for them on a special occasion (birthday, last day of school, all A's on a report card), I generally get a strange look and a request for some restaurant in town. Despite the fact that I love to be in the kitchen, maybe it's not the place where my family loves to see me.

To solidify this argument, I submit my experiences with a phenomenon in the Midwest known as the "pot luck" or the infamous "pitch-in." In South Central Illinois, church members, office mates, and other assemblies of people often collaborate to host a shared feeding at an overloaded feeding trough. Filling the galley of tables (generally the white, plastic variety) strewn end to end are dishes of all types and categories. Meats, casseroles, side dishes, salads, desserts, appetizers, and more are jammed as tightly as one can squeeze them. Organizers will attempt to put the meatier portions of the meal toward the front end of the table where Hefty® paper plates are stacked several inches tall. (They must be Hefty® because generic paper plates will never be able to withstand the weight of the food that will soon be piled in much-too-large portions on top of them.) Gradually, as one moves to the end of the table, offerings include side dishes, then salads, then desserts. After the meal has been served and the clean-up has begun, the task no cook EVER wants is to retrieve a dish that is still untouched. Either by sheer appearance or smell alone, this is the dish that has been deemed inedible by all of the passers-by as they pick and choose their portions for the event. The "untouchable" dish will now need to be taken home by some woman in shame. She'd literally rather leave it there unclaimed than apologetically admit to God and all assembled that, "Yes, this was my dish. I'm sorry." Guess who has been that woman on more than one occasion? Sadly, me.

Perhaps it is because I have taken my lumps and learned the hard way, but I would never try to sneak one cup of raisins in my generic "cookie" recipe in exchange for one cup of chocolate chips. In my household, that would be un-American and also uneaten. I've also learned that I cannot just include one cup of any old chocolate chips. Brand name is of no importance to my sweets-loving family, but if I don't pick up a bag of semi-sweet chips at the store, then I can promise there'll be a bit of a ruckus and maybe even some "inedibles" left on the plate. In our household, milk chocolate chips just will not do. "They are too sweet," my husband will say. Semi-sweet chips just make for better cookies. Too much sweetness ruins the recipe for us.

This gives me pause as I consider the chocolate chip cookie analogy. Previous chapters have pointed to just the right persons offering just the right mix for just the right combination—your dough. You need women of salt. You need the bitter taste of vanilla. You need the binding power of eggs. You need the fullness of soda. But the recipe concludes with chocolate chips, an ingredient that life will supply without asking and without permission. Plenty of chips will fall into the batter, awaiting the mixing of a wooden spoon. Some of them are, at best, only semi-sweet. Let me offer a few: a wedding, the birth of a child, a promotion, a new home, a dream vacation, the death of a parent, a car accident, the loss of a job, the disintegration of a marriage, bankruptcy, cancer. How do we become women who, by the grace of God, can say, "Let the chips fall where they may?”