If you follow Betty Crocker's online recipe for "Exceptional Chocolate Chip Cookies", you wind up stirring the dough by hand. Now, I don't know if I'm just a weakling or what, but Betty Crocker must have forearms like Popeye, cause stirring cookie dough with a big wooden spoon has the same horsepower requirement as churning gravel. Stirring a cup and a half of butter sticks, in particular, was a treat. The butter still hangs out in little bits here and there, no matter how much you stir. Perhaps that is the desired effect of hand-mixing. Also, once you add the 4 cups of flour, you start wishing you had a bigger bowl. Flour everywhere. At least this gives the cook that haggard, dusted-with-flour oven slave look, guaranteed to elicit sympathy and gratitude from ones adoring family. If you don't have a family, no one is impressed. You just get white flour all over your black clothes and can't go outside because you look like an earthquake survivor.

The five or six cookies I actually baked turned out great. The rest, well uh, cookie dough is fun to eat. Maybe I'll bake those later.

I ran into Ben and Ed after a Pho dinner, they were walking out of Vivace following a little group of fashionable punks who were shouting Bon Jovi songs as they unsteadily wandered down Broadway. I guess if I were a modern young and pop-conscious punk, loudly proclaiming my ironic appreciation/ridicule of 80's icons would be on my list of things to do while in public hip places such as Broadway on Capitol Hill.

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