This weekend I was cycling manic and thus, at 5 pm Saturday, I decided I would make the Swedish Ginger Snaps from the Times’ “Style” supplement, which should really be called “An Assemblage of Articles So Fatuous They Make the Sunday Styles Section Look Like Foreign Policy Review.”
Why did I make these cookies? Because of their secret ingredient: bacon grease. I love that a recipe calling for 3/4 cup of rendered fat can coexist mere pages from Scarlett Johanssen and Her Fabulous Rack. I was inspired because just that morning, I made bacon and eggs for breakfast. So I decided to save the grease.
Of course, it wasn’t nearly enough grease, so after lying torpidly on the bed for 6 hours (cycling depressive), that was when I decided I would go on my freak baking spree (whee!). On my way to the store to buy another pound of bacon, I realized that these cookies would be suitable only for meat-eaters, and thus, I’d have to make a nonmeat cookie option (a phrase I don’t think existed before I typed it just now) for the vegetarians in my life. Now I needed a second batch of cookies. Oatmeal cookies, I rationalized, would make the cookie duo Part of A Complete Breakfast.
Did you know you needed a food processor to make the Meat Cookies? Had I read the full recipe beforehand, I would’ve known. Oh well. Oh, and also, I couldn’t rationalize buying a whole tin of ground cloves, so I went without that ingredient as well.
We own only one cookie sheet, which meant that I had to devise a highly efficient system that allowed for cookies to be in constant rotation from bowl to sheet to cooling rack without any lag time. (Did I mention the manic part?)
So it went
- Preheat oven
- Try to find extention cord to put exhaust fan in window
- Have minor nervous breakdown as a result
- Put bacon on to fry
- Prepare oatmeal-chocolate chip-dried cranberry mix
- Try not to forget about the bacon
- Realize that brown sugar has hardened into a lump of obsidian
- Shrug
- Place the oatmeal cookie lumps on the sheet
- Accidentally burn bacon
- Start mixing the Meat Cookie ingredients together
- Finish the bacon
- Kitchen Mixer Tragedy Interlude (see above)
- Take Klonopin
- Pull oatmeal cookies out of oven
- Fearfully add the bacon grease to the Meat Cookie Recipe
- Mix manually, and inadequately
- Chill the dough in the freezer for ten minutes rather than the proscribed hour in the fridge so as to avoid the Imaginary Inefficiency Penalty of having to turn the oven off and then back on
OK, flashing forward a half-hour later, the results: A smokey ginger snap. Not disgusting at all. Hooray.
And then I felt all hollow and unsatisfied inside. Why is the finishing never as exciting as the getting there?
Stroke me.
