Chocolate Chip Cookies

For as long as I can remember, chocolate chip is the only flavor of cookies my Mom will regularly bake.  If you just ask for cookies, you're getting chocolate chip.  If you want another flavor, you better specify...more than once, or it will be overlooked.  I'm not sure why these are her favorite-she never seems to eat them, but they were always in the cookie jar growing up.

My favorite thing about making the cookies, was sitting on the stool spinning the bowl.  Now, the bowl never actually needed spun, it did that automatically, but my sister and I seemed to be in perpetual argument about who got the coveted stool seat to spin.  My Mom always traded us out so we got equal turns, but it was always a competition.  While spinning, we also got to help add ingredients.  My favorite was the brown sugar because I got to pack it into the measuring cup as hard as I could and then hear the soft "thump" as it hit the bottom of the mixing bowl.  Second favorite was the obvious ingredient, the chocolate chips.  Subconsciously I'm pretty sure the goal was always eat more chocolate chips than we actually poured into the bowl while my sister and I each took turns attempting to stir the thick batter, which usually ended with us flinging dough and chocolate chips all over the counter before Mother finally took over.

After all the mixing had been done, we watched Mom put all the formed cookies on to the baking sheet (while attempting to sneak dough out of the bowl when she wasn't looking).  As the first pans baked in the oven, the smell of the cookies wafted through the house, usually bringing my Dad up from downstairs.  We would all gather in the kitchen and impatiently await the hot sheets with gooey cookies to be pulled out of the oven by Mom.  Amidst scolds, we would try to eat cookies straight off the sheet, which inevitably caused screams due to being too hot, and more scolds from Mom and laughs from Dad.

As I grew up, I began making the cookies instead of my Mom.  While there was no small child helping spin the bowl, I still ate too many chocolate chips before they made it in the batter and would steal spoon fulls while preparing the cookie sheets.  The smell of them baking also continued to bring my Dad up from downstairs and my Mom from wherever in the house she was.

As I continue my adult life and start (somewhat unwillingly) to think about my future beyond college, I hope that someday I will have little children of my own to fight over the coveted stool spot and spin the bowl, creating similar memories of love and comfort that these cookies did for me.