I am in love. Serious love. The kind that inspires me to write blog posts and fantasize about my new love all hours of the day and night. Ahh...chocolate chip cookies. I hear you, you are thinking "Cookies? She's in love with chocolate chip cookies? What is the big deal?" Ah...let me explain. Hang in with me, it will all make more sense in a minute.
First you need to know I cannot eat any gluten. What's that? It's a protein found in wheat and other grains. That means no flour. No bread. No cake. No donuts. No cookies. Well...at least no bread, cake, donuts and cookies like I used to eat, back when I could have gluten. There are gluten free products on the market that use other flours (like potato, tapioca, rice and bean) to try to duplicate baked goods that have gluten. It takes about 5 minutes on a gluten free diet to figure out that they just aren't the same. The texture is often gritty and the taste isn't the same. The gluten free products are often really crumbly too. When I want a good cookie, a bite of crumbly sand is just not what I had in mind.
Recently Betty Crocker put out a new line of gluten free baked goods. You buy the mix and can make baked goods at home. I was a little skeptical but since they were offering a coupon for a free mix I decided to give it a try. (If you want a coupon for the free mix call General Mills at 1-800-446-1898 and select option #4 on the main menu.)
Now part of the fun of baking at home is licking the beaters. I tried this and was sorely disappointed. The dough was gritty and did not taste the way I remembered cookie dough. My heart sank but since the dough was mixed up and on a cookie sheet I slid it in the oven anyway. By the time I pulled the cookies out my expectations were pretty low. But being the optimist that I am I poured two glasses of milk, put some cookies on a plate and my friend and I both took bites of fresh-from-the-oven cookies. It was love at first bite. It must have been for my friend, who is also gluten free, because she looked at me and whispered conspiratorily, "Oh...our lives just got so much better!" Amazingly these cookies are good fresh from the oven and cold, another rarity for gluten free baking. And they taste like the Nestle Tollhouse cookies from my childhood. Ah, such bliss. Oh, and I haven't even told you the part I am the most excited about. I will actually get to bake cookies with my son. Cookies I can eat with him without getting sick and cookies he will want to eat too. I will be able to have those precious moments of baking with him as a child. I can't wait!
It's hard to know even where to begin in cleaning up a mess of this magnitude. So I opened his diaper. He stuck his hand in the poop and then tried to put it in his mouth. I cleaned off his hand. I took the diaper off and soon realized that I did not have enough wipes to get him cleaned up. So into the sink he went. Thankfully he cooperated and stood in the sink while I rinsed him off. But then what do you do with a slippery wet baby? I can't really hold him since my shirt's still all poopy, I can't put him on the changing table for the same reason.... So I dried him with paper towels and laid him on the floor to put a clean diaper on him. I took my shirt off and washed it in the sink and then put it back on. By then I had to call for backup and had to leave the restroom to ask for some Lysol wipes and plastic bag. It was a long afternoon.
