Anything for a Chocolate Chip Cookie

As many of you know, I was married on June 12^th, which makes me a wife. Perhaps I’m no Susie Homemaker, but a wife nonetheless, and a very happy one at that. Thankfully, in addition to being monísimo, my husband Iñigo is anything but the stereotypical Spanish machista. That’s saying a lot in a country where you hear almost daily news reports about men killing their wives (wish I were exaggerating but I’m not). Íñigo is the main cook in our house and he pitches in with all the cleaning, except for the bathroom which I have stoically taken on in an attempt to compensate for my not so great cooking skills.

Anyway, as I struggle to come to grips with this new grown-up sounding label, every once in a while I feel the need to be a little more domestic. Last night was one of these times and, since Íñigo was out fulfilling a Spanish stereotype by playing soccer with his friends, I thought I’d try to fulfil an American one by baking some cookies. Now when I say baking I mean opening the box of Kroger brand chocolate chip cookie mix my parents brought us when they came over for the wedding, adding some butter and an egg, stirring the whole mess up a bit and lovingly placing spoonfuls of ooey gooey cookie dough on a makeshift cookie sheet (i.e. a piece of aluminium foil placed carefully on my oven rack). Then it’s off they go to the warm cocoon of my preheated oven, to be transformed in just 8-11 minutes into a chocolate melty delight. Sounds simple enough right? Yet with me in the kitchen, nothing is ever that simple.

You see there’s only one thing I like better than a nice warm freshly baked chocolate chip cookie, and that’s raw cookie dough. But alas, I am also a bit of a hypochondriac, which makes it increasingly difficult for me to enjoy the uncooked dough without obsessing about salmonella poisoning. So I decide to eat spoonfuls of the powder itself straight out of the box. It tastes almost just like the dough and eliminates the risk of an unpleasant aftermath. Except that while I’m eating the mix, I bite down on something which is obviously neither floury mix nor chocolate chip. I carefully extract the perpetrator from my mouth (so gross I know) and notice it looks a lot like part of a peanut. So I start inspecting the mix and eventually find about ten of his little buddies in there too. Now I’m really in a pickle: I want these cookies so bad, but is it smart to eat adulterated food products? If they truly are peanuts it’s ok because neither of us is allergic, but what if they’re not? The piece I crunched down on certainly didn’t taste like a peanut and the box said nothing about containing traces of nuts, but I am desperately reaching for any sort of logical reason to justify not throwing this box of cookie mix away.

I don’t think I have to tell you that we ate the cookies anyway, and they were actually pretty good. In such a modern home, beggars can’t be choosy and this was the last pack of chocolate chip cookie mix we are likely to receive for a while. Twelve hours later we’re still doing fine so I imagine it was not that big of a deal. Still, the next time I feel the need to be a stereotypical wife I think I’ll just snuggle up on the couch with a box of bon bons and watch some Oprah Winfrey. Except that we don’t get that here. Me cachís…