Chocolate Chip Cookies: Not to disparage fine cookery as an art considering how seriously some people take it, one must suppose there are those seemingly born to eat far more than they need as a way of life. The epidemic of obesity plaguing America would seem to bear this out. And while I have dined in the finest restaurants San Francisco has to offer, such culinary artistry is for the better part lost on a man like me, a man of simple tastes.

I recall several times fishing Bull Run Creek years ago and frying the trout over an open fire on the blade of my machete. Not exactly haute cuisine, but it suited my idea of fine eating in that marvelously pristine part of our forest. However, when I was a boy living on the mining claim here in the Kern River Valley my grandmother did balk my grandfather’s and my considering the cooking of a great horned owl on one occasion.

There are many men who take cookery very seriously, a fact to which many great chefs give testimony. My youngest son Michael is visiting and his culinary skill is unsurpassed. I don’t recall eating so well in a very long while. If he manages to stay for any length of time I might actually gain some weight on my lean frame.

However, cooking has never been high on my list of priorities; just a necessary chore to be gotten out of the way as an alternative to starving. While attending undergraduate school, a roommate of mine was of the same persuasion. The menu one night was beans and cornbread, both of us raised to southern cuisine. I was in charge of the beans and it was this roommate that mixed the cornbread. We waited for the oven to do its job; and we waited, and waited. The stuff just didn’t seem to want to bake properly. Long past the appointed time when it should have been done, we removed it from the oven. It hadn’t risen, and what we faced was a pan of a substance that would have done good service as a yellow Frisbee. The material seemed to be vulcanized like rubber and had the same pliable, plastic consistency.

Now he and I were intelligent young men. It didn’t take us long to discover he had used baking soda rather than baking powder in his recipe. Well, we ate the beans and forewent the cornbread. But there was no denying the fact that, as men, we would have done well to have the proper guidance of a woman in our lives.

Notwithstanding the great chefs, Nero Wolf, and the Barbecue addiction of men, women seem to take such culinary tasks more seriously than men with the exceptions like my son Michael, and under their direction the kitchen doesn’t usually become a research laboratory. And I doubt any self-respecting woman would find herself cleaning hominy off the walls and ceiling of her kitchen; the result of circumstances to which we men fall victim at one time or another. In this instance, while heating a can of hominy on the stove in a pan of water I was interrupted by a phone call and forgot to punch the necessary hole in the can. It exploded like a bomb. But I imagine many a bachelor could tell of similar accidents.

I wish to make a confession, confirming some suspicions of a few readers. Yes, like Faulkner and some others I do write under the influence of drugs. My drugs of choice are caffeine and nicotine. Glad to get that off my chest. But while sitting and musing it occurred to me as per some comments I have received over the years concerning my writing that I do, indeed, write for a readership a notch above those to whom Bartok is a form of speech heard in gin mills or grog shops rather than the composer. And I do prefer to reminisce and write about the old days compared to what constitutes life in America today.

An old flying buddy of mine, a retired fighter pilot, and I were having coffee at the airport swapping hanger stories. He related an exchange of views he had just had with his wife. Seems my buddy loved an old car of his, a Continental convertible he kept on blocks in their garage. Eventually his good wife decided he ought to get rid of the thing to make room for her car. Over a period of time, according to my buddy, this took on the form of nagging. “Just last night she said to me ‘Why on earth do you have to keep that old thing anyway? What is this with you about old things?’” He replied, “Sweetheart, you had better be grateful I like old things.” A word to the wise.

I know I am becoming somewhat preoccupied when I go into the bathroom and pick up my razor to brush my teeth. Didn't work of course; but it did remind me of once trying to put the broom in my refrigerator. I have a lot of fun referring to my bachelor way of life. While there are many books about this fascinating subject on the market, there may be room for another. I believe I can make a contribution to the body of knowledge.

For example, a visitor to my little cottage in the country might notice the collection of buttons I have on the bookshelf behind my workstation. Simple explanation: I often lose a button on a sweater, coat or shirt and keep them all in a neat pile where sometime after the Rapture or Millennium, whichever occurs first, I might actually get around to sewing them back on. In the meantime, I know exactly where they are. Such things remind me of an old comic where the punch line was always: Bachelors are a sorry lot!

Once in a while I mention something of my culinary achievements since even single men living alone occasionally have to eat. I'm not really into food as my wiry frame evidences; but I do, on rare occasions clean off the cobwebs, evict the spiders and fire up my stove. I have a very good reason for mentioning cooking; I find a lot of humor in it. Also, as an admitted ploy, my bachelor approach to the subject elicits a lot of sympathy from the ladies. I know they feel sorry for me and I can use all the sympathy I can get. I have visions of some lovely lady reading something I have written about my cooking and thinking “That poor man; there must be something I can do to help him?” There is.

No, modesty forbids. But aside from cooking, I'm a fairly normal man in some respects and even Batman was constrained to tell Kim Basinger, “There is something else that you have that I want.” And we all know Batman wasn't talking about Kim's attributes in the kitchen. And, speaking of cooking, I wonder if any of you other single men have had the experience of trying to make chocolate chip cookies?

Now most people can sympathize with the need for a chocolate chip cookie. And I don't mean those things in bags at the supermarket filled with objects that make hockey pucks and poker chips seem pliable and tasty by comparison. No, when the craving for a genuine chocolate chip cookie comes upon you, you are ready to do anything short of holding up a bakery to get one. The real addict, I suppose, wouldn't even be prevented by this expedient.

So here I was; faced with the need for the real thing, a chocolate chip cookie fix that could only be satisfied with the genuine article. Being an adventurous and inventive sort I decided to give it a try. But not having all the exact ingredients like chocolate chips, I improvised. A little hard working around the chocolate chips, but hacking up a couple of Hershey Bars and tossing in a few Hershey Kisses with a dusting of Carnation Chocolate Drink seemed to be satisfactory. There were also a few green M&Ms, the gift of a lady friend with a sense of humor. I tossed them in as well. Like the small chunks of Hershey bars and the Kisses they might make the batter a tad lumpy, I thought, but would probably soften satisfactorily during the baking process.

I'm used to reading directions and have never joined those pitiful creatures that, after the disaster and all else has failed, read the directions. So I staved off a potential catastrophe by noticing that the recipe I had scrounged off a bag of candy called for Whole-Wheat flour. What's wrong with the white flour, which I had on hand I wondered? What have these people got against white flour? Are they prejudiced? What real difference could it make to use white instead of brown flour? Wouldn't the cookies just come out a lighter complexion?

Oh, well, I went to the store and got some of that peculiar brown flour; but the recipe called for oatmeal as well as flour. I had oatmeal but I didn't want oatmeal cookies, I wanted chocolate chip cookies! What was this concoction that called for oatmeal in chocolate chip cookies? To heck with that; I knew what I wanted and I forewent the oatmeal and simply increased the amount of flour accordingly.

Butter. I was out of butter; and I wasn't about to make another trip to the grocery store this month. Ah, but I had margarine. Just add salt and presto: Okie butter, right? But the recipe called for salt. How much more should I add to compensate the substitution of my salted margarine for butter? Oh, well, about another smidgen, a technical cooking term I had picked up from one of the truly great chefs, my great-grandmother. I utterly disdained the raisins and walnuts the recipe said I could add. Wonder they didn't say to add dandelions in my now thoroughly suspect recipe.

Another conundrum; why did I have to mix the dry ingredients separately from the eggs and butter (margarine)? Why get two different bowls messy? I'm beginning to believe that like religion cooking has its mysteries, which remain such in order to intimidate those who are not members of the priesthood. But I am not a superstitious person and I am not going to be daunted by such attempts of charlatans who are trying to bamboozle me with mumbo jumbo and incantations, mystic symbols like lb., oz., cp., tsp. and tbsp. Instead, I mix the whole shebang together in one bowl and start stirring the tar out of the mess. Sometime into this procedure, I look inquiringly at my blender. No, on second thought I have had my share of disasters with that infernal machine.

Preheat oven? Whatever for? What a waste of gas. Cookie trays— I don't have cookie trays. Why in the world would any self-respecting bachelor have cookie trays? I go out to my shed. It is well supplied with materials and tools for doing the usual maintenance and repairs on house and car. Ah, hah! I find some sheet aluminum from a job that required cutting and fitting for replacing some steel sheeting on the roof that had rusted out. With a couple of pieces approximating the size my oven could handle I had that problem licked.

Deposit the cookie mixture on the trays in the amount of a tbsp. for each cookie. Thought they had me there but I knew what the mystic symbol Tbsp., stood for. However, this heathen and bigoted list of instructions, symbols and incantations now said that I had to grease the trays before depositing the globs of batter! These idiots say I have to grease the trays before baking! Now I've greased many a car. But grease for cookies? What kind of grease; bacon, wheel-bearing, axle? Nah, I really knew they meant something like Pam or Crisco. I'd read about the old Crisco parties in the past.

But I didn’t have the recommended grease for the pan and not nearly enough margarine left for the job. How about WD40 or LPS I wondered? I had those. I even had some bacon grease I saved in can on the stove just in case I wanted to have scrambled eggs and no bacon handy (I had not resorted to a largely vegetarian diet at the time). No sweat. I'm a good metallurgist having been a tool and die maker. Cookies were not going to stick to aluminum. Besides, I suspected the WD might leave some aftertaste and I wasn't partial to bacon-flavored chocolate chip cookies either though they might not be too bad. No, I wasn't about to risk that after my gargantuan efforts up to this point.

A final problem; how close should the dollops of batter be in order to avoid having a single cookie measuring 16 by 16 inches? Being a man used to using precision measuring instruments like micrometers and verniers, I guessed. Cooking time? Another obstacle. The now hated recipe said 8 to 10 minutes. I checked at 8 minutes. Not done. I checked at 10 minutes. Not done. At fifteen minutes they were done. Now if you are a normal person of normal curiosity, you are probably wondering how the cookies turned out. Great; apart from the 36 the recipe said would result came out to be closer to 96. I had to suppose that somewhere along the line during this Herculean effort at making chocolate chip cookies I probably made some sort of miscalculation.