i want cookies!!!

Everyone in my family is a cookie monster. Isa, my sister, is the cookie making instigator in my family. If I could use one adjective to describe her, it would be 'ambitious'; she woke me up today in a cookie frenzy, ecstatic about all the goodies she wanted to make, despite their difficulties. She wants to make the old-school candied fruit and pecans 'slice & bake' cookies we used to make when we were children, taken from a November 1985 edition of Woman's Day; the more traditional chocolate chip cookies, to which my sister always thinks the more chocolate chunks, the better; oatmeal and cranberry cookies, my favorite; sugar cookies with sparkly sprinkles; and the fastidious marmalade trenches, which though they are good and like shortbread, they crumble a bit too much for my liking. She even wants to make these peanut butter surprises, chunky sugar cookie sandwiches with a peanut butter center, ALL IN ONE DAY, but I will try to convince her not to.
So then, Isa wants to make cookies, and because we all want to eat them, we let her go nuts. My mom and I sit around the kitchen, handling eggs, and sifting flour, giving advice, reminiscing on what went wrong last time we made these or those cookies, or like me, mostly sitting on the side acting like the supreme cookie judge. What happens is that like me, Isa is a scattered, distracted, too-ambitious baker/cook that once she starts and sees how much work she really has to do, and how high the pile of dirty dishes will be, she wavers. We all try to pull it together, watching the oven when she takes off to talk on the phone or to attend her laundry, or chiming in when the sugar cookie dough isn't as elastic as she'd like it to be or when she thinks she didn't put it enough chocolate chips.
The conversation is pretty hilarious. Gossip. Bitching. Plans. Cooking related chit chat. Gossip. Bitching. Sometimes all at once. We are often interrupted by my father, raiding the recently stocked cookie jar, or my brother-in-law being an affectionate husband, or a ringing phone.
But eventually we all get back to baking, with Isa's ambitious plans seen through by the collective whole.



I can't say it any better than the Cookie Monster: