Unless your a hermit, or terminally snarky, you’ve run into one of these people. You know who I’m taking about. They’ve got the kid in band raising money for new uniforms. An underfunded library program in need of books or an art class that has no supplies. Perhaps it’s for an animal rescue program. A church program to feed the poor or a multi-million dollar mega-church’s need to be grander than the other multi-million dollar mega church.
Regardless, they take advantage of your friendship, or the proximity of your desk, to sell you something that 9 times out of 10 you would never otherwise buy. The items are varied. Popcorn. Candybars. Cookies. Sometimes brand name goods but usually no-name products stamped with buzz words like ‘gourmet’ or ‘premium’. Organized corporate ‘charity’ campaigns that make you feel like your giving when in fact most of the money goes to the company providing the food products.
Where M works, the credit card company that shall not be named, she gets hit up on nearly a monthly basis to buy something for one fund raiser or another. Occasionally the stuff gets eaten, often it gets forgotten and tossed when the expiration is noted to be over a year ago. A while back one of those items, a tub of white chocolate macadamia nut cookie dough, found it’s way into our freezer. There it may very well have sat until this weekend when a craving for cookies hit our household.
Out of the freezer and into the fridge. Once thawed (ok, according to M – once it had gone from brick to semi-hardened plaster) onto a cookie sheet and into the oven. Finn and I sat in the kitchen, waiting something sweet and tasty. The wait on the cooling rack was too much to bear and Finn and I dug into the piping hot cookies. Fully cooked but soft and gooey these tasted…. strange. Finn and I started a second cookie. I finished – he didn’t. The aftertaste was nearly chemical in nature. Not what you expect when eating cookies. A few minutes of pondering and the cookie nearly came back up on me. Finn crawled into my lap and held on tight.
‘Sick’, he said.
‘Are you feeling sick?’, I asked.
‘No. Sick cookie’, he replied.
It was time for an inspection of this tub of ‘cookie’ dough and it’s ingredients. Some really nasty oils – palm and cottonseed – and…. nothing that you would find in a normal persons kitchen, all chemicals. Reading the label it informed me that you could leave this dough out at room temperature for 21 days. WTF!? What cookie dough is shelf stable for 21 days? And what horrible things might happen on the 22nd? Beyond that it was good in the fridge for 6 months and up to a year in the freezer. A nice aside told me that it could also be thawed and refrozen. Your basic ‘night of the living cookie dough’…. Ugh, the ‘gourmet’ cookie dough went into the trash and the remaining cookies fed the poor birds in the yard.
Sick cookie indeed.