Commune Cookies

Another thing about a small apartment, when the older kid’s having a flute lesson at one end of it, it’s imperative that the jacked-up younger squirt be creatively corralled, if one’s to get one’s money’s worth. Usually, I spirit the little devil off to the Boerum Hill Food Company for hot chocolate and a cookie, but he’d already observed President’s Day by sending a cup of cocoa flying at Housing Works Used Book Cafe (just missing a fellow patron and a display of brand new hardbacks). Plus, there are a lot of brass monkeys out there today wishing they’d had the sense to stay home where it’s warm. Inky and her flute teacher were in the bow. Figured I stood a chance of keeping Milo in the stern if I let him crack eggs, hork down some chocolate chips and fool with the brand new digital timer I bought to replace the one he dropped to its death.

Like that wasn’t home-fucking-schooly enough, I adapted the recipe from a 1970’s kids’ cookbook, Kids Are Natural Cooks, by a Cambridge, Mass collective known as the Parents’ Nursery School, with illustrations by Lady McCrady. It’s my total hippie fantasy. Three-year-olds making their own cheese, butter and pretzels. What am I saying? That sounds like a total nightmare! Anyhoo, I snuck a little white flour into the original recipe, substituted Triple Sec for vanilla (we’re out) and changed the name from Crunchy Cookies to

Commune Cookies

Preheat the oven to 350˚.
Put a stick of butter on the counter.
Read The Boy Who Looked Like Lincoln twice, The Lorax once, and reinstate martial law with regard to those who seek to create a public disturbance in flute territory,

Place 1/3 cup of the now-softened butter in a bowl with 1/2 cup of honey. Begin the stirring process.

Suspend the stirring process to ask the cabin boy if he has washed his hands since disembarking from the subway. Wait while hands are (allegedly) washed. Resume the stirring process.

Add one egg and one teaspoon of Triple Sec or some other calming substance like the pot juice the Parents Nursery School cooperative no doubt substituted when they ran out of vanilla. Stir that up while waiting for your summons to arrive.

Sift in:
1/2 cup of white flour
3/4 cup of wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
3/4 teaspoon of sea salt
and 1 teaspoon of cinnamon.
Continue stirring. You’ll wind up with something resembling the Peanut Butter Playdough on page 25. Always makes me feel a little woozy, thinking of those little cooperatively-run fingers moistly exploring the nether reaches of nostrils and oral cavities before probing that edible playdough, some of which will be eaten, but some of which will be packaged up for another round of playtime fun.

Prissy, my smelling salts!




When the color returns to your cheeks, you may stir in one cup of chocolate chips and one cup of chopped nuts. I used walnuts. Apparently, there were no nut allergies in 1972. I’d love to see the public outcry that would greet the parent who dared bring in a batch of homemade granola, Chris and Jody’s Nut Bread, or, for that matter, Peanut Butter Playdough to snack time today. Make sure you have clearance before unleashing them on the possibly susceptible (and litigious!) young. Eat them all yourself, if that’s what it takes. But first ------> Bake for 9 minutes on an ungreased cookie sheet and cool on racks. I’m all about the racks these days, another sure sign that it’s 2007, and not some mythical, hippie-dippie, Montessori past.

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[cookie recipe] [nut allergy] [hippie fantasy] [flute lessons] [peanut butter playdough]