Karri Buck – Consultant, Virtual Assistant, Paralegal
Don’t Trust Peanut Butter People
My mom is a good cook. She’s not a fancy one and I don’t believe she’s ever cared to be. Give her a recipe and she will follow it to the letter. It’ll taste good when she’s done. I was kind of picky monster when I was growing up. BLT’s for lunch? No T on mine, thank you. And I really didn’t need the L, either. But mom didn’t think B on bread was lunch, I guess; even if she did serve it to me for breakfast.
I don’t know when it started, but one Sunday, many years ago mom informed all of us kids that we were on our own for Sunday supper. She could not care less what we ate, but we were in charge of cooking it ourselves. Often there was popcorn that mom made, which of course, we cabbaged onto as our own. We also plugged in the deep fryer and when the smell of hot grease filled the house, we would drop in mozzarella cheese sticks or cheese balls. Dad often had onion rings, but us kids were cheese fanatics. We popped those cheese balls into our mouth, the cheese at the same temperature as molten lava, while we bounced around the kitchen with our mouths half open, breathing at an unhealthy rate while we huffed “Hot! Hot!” as if somehow that was going to stop the burning. We had a remedy for the burning. It was ice cream. After we’d burnt the cover off our tongues, we then filled our faces with ice cream. Sundays were good days.
Occasionally we’d see mom drag out the Hershey’s baking cocoa powder. It took one spoonful of that as a child to realize not all chocolate was created equal. And there are also evil people in the world. People who don’t put a warning label on containers for wayward children. I digress. If we saw that powder come out of the cupboard on a Sunday evening, there was only one logical answer as to why. No Bakes. Mom would stand at the stove, arm crossed behind her back, swaying back and forth while she stirred the concoction of butter, baking cocoa, sugar and milk. Once it hit boiling, she flipped her wrist to watch the 30 second countdown on her Black Hills Gold watch. At the 30 second mark she whipped the mixture off the burner adding the oatmeal and vanilla. Then she dropped spoonful after spoonful of the fudgy mixture onto wax paper. She left a solid cookie or two worth in the pan, with which she disappeared immediately, a smile on her face as she announced the No Bakes were ready. She would always say, “They’re hot!” To which we paid absolutely no mind. We grabbed a big spoon loaded it with a cookie and proceeded to do the same ridiculous procedure as we did with the cheese balls. I realize we don’t exactly sound like the brightest bunch of crayons. I’d like to take this moment to note that there are at least 4 different college degrees amongst my siblings and I. We’ve also managed to have families in which our kids have turned out to be a mostly successful batch of humans. There is hope.
Those cookies were always a surprise and if I saw them, I knew all was well in the world. So imagine my surprise when one day at a 4-H event I saw that someone had brought No Bakes. I was so excited that there were other good people in the world. People that knew what delicious tasted like. I grabbed one of those cookies, my mouth salivating before the cookie ever crossed my lips. And then I discovered that there are people in this world not playing with a full deck. These people belong in a padded room somewhere. Because what hit my mouth, instead of the rich fudgy goodness to which I was accustomed, was the brown stuff straight from the pits of hell. It was peanut butter. Some fool had added peanut butter to a perfect cookie. I was outraged. I didn’t follow a lot of rules in life, but I knew better than to spit out food, so I choked down that nastiness and began searching the crowd for the responsible party. They were never found.
Over the years, I’ve learned there are a lot of people with poor taste. People that are bent on ruining one of the most perfect cookies God ever let man make. I don’t trust these people. Ok. Maybe I do. But I certainly question them. A few years ago I was explaining to someone about these cookies and the fools that ruin them. The person said, “But I don’t understand. You just eat chocolate in the cookie?” Yes. Yes I do.
I’m still raising some of my kids and they know a good cookie. One of them learned the lesson the same way I did. He looked at me later and asked “Why would they ruin a perfectly good cookie?” I had to tell him it’s a fallen world. Adam. Eve. Fruit. You know. George Washington Carver may have saved agriculture in the south, but he sure ruined cookies at a potluck for those of us with good taste. I don’t suppose there’s a moral to my story today, but if there were one it would be “don’t ruin good cookies with peanut butter”. Follow the recipe above. It tastes like home on a Sunday night. When my daughter was little she misunderstood the a name. She called them “Snow Bakes” and it stuck. My hope is that many generations down the road, my lineage is still making these cookies, no matter what they call them. I hope from heaven I hear, “Mimi says only crazy people add peanut butter!”