A cookie a day keeps the cooties at bay...

I confess to having a lifelong affection for Archway classic oatmeal cookies. Yes, I know… I shouldn’t be eating cookies and most especially I shouldn’t be eating storebought cardboard cookies from a package, as I call them. I have always prided myself on cooking and baking from scratch. But there’s something about those darned cookies that appeals to me. Don’t tell anyone, okay? I had one of those cookies just a little bit ago. The Rock brought them home to me as a gift the last time he went to the supermarket. Wasn’t that sweet? Of course it was probably to assuage his guilt for picking up potato chips and stuff for his stash. We each have a stash of junkfood that we hide away and have done so since the kiddos were little and now the habit remains.

The Rock is fond of potato chips, pretzels, cheese doodles, tortilla chips, nuts, etc. My affinity is for gum drops (spicy) and jelly beans, dried fruit, ginger gummy bears from Sweet Energy, hard candies and of course we both succumb to chocolate in some form or another. Oh and red licorice! I don’t know why we call it red licorice since there’s actually no licorice involved but I have a strawberry Twizzlers addiction from you-know-where… Ah gads I love those things. I know better than to buy them because I will continue munching on them long after I’m sick from eating too many of them.

Another thing we have a great fondness for are Edy’s frozen fruit popsicles. The Rock prefers lime and my poison is tangerine. Yum! Whenever we decide to watch a movie I always ask him if this movie comes with a popsicle? The answer invariably is “yes” but once in awhile we find ourselves out of them and suffer appropriately (if there is such a thing as appropriate suffering). Everyone has their own vices and ours are simple in nature and not very high up on the sin meter.

Anyway, tonight for some reason, as I sat masticating my oatmeal cookie I found myself looking at it and wondering what those brown things were that were interwoven with the other ingredients. They were moist, brown, amorphous and unidentifiable. They weren’t chips or raisins or anything with a structure that I could tell. My mind ran away with me for a minute while I envisioned bug-parts or something gross like that, although they tasted just fine. But then for all I know bug-parts might taste just fine. Some people eat bugs by choice. Eeeeeuuuuwwww, gross!!

I dug the box out of my cupboard again and scanned the list of ingredients and right there in tiny little letters, along with all the other ingredients (many of them unsavory sounding) was “bugs.” Just kidding, just kidding…it said…“raisin paste.” Raisin paste! What the goldurned heck is raisin paste?! Why on earth would anyone smoosh raisins up into a paste and insert it in a cookie? What’s wrong with using plain old regular raisins? Of course I probably wouldn’t like these phony but delicious cookies nearly as much if they had raisins in them, not that I have anything against raisins per se but they do tend to distract since I’d rather not have them in my cookies and I’d have to eat them first to get them out of the way as much as possible so I could enjoy the rest of the snack. All right, maybe I do have something against raisins after all.

Raisin paste! I still can’t get over that. So how do they get this raisin paste into the recipe then? Do they add it in little lumps and stir it in or what? And why? They don’t give the raisins billing in the description. They don’t say Archway classic oatmeal with raisin cookies. They don’t mention them at all except far down on the list of ingredients on the side of the package so why put them in there to begin with? I can just imagine some executives sitting around a board room discussing whether to put raisins in their cookies and finally getting into an imbroglio over whether to do so or not. The compromise, I’m guessing, is to pulverize those little buggers into a paste and add them surreptitiously. But why? Yeah, that’s what I’m asking too…

I had a friend once who really believed in health foods and herbal preparations and she told me about some wondrous mixture that she used on her family’s cuts, scrapes and afflictions. She called it “people paste.” She was quite serious about it and couldn’t understand why I laughed so hard and so long. People paste! I guess it was her earnestness or perhaps it was late and I was overtired but whatever it was, it tickled me into an incoherent condition. She went on and on touting the virtues of this “people paste.” I couldn’t stop imagining little people being ground up into a paste to be used as an exotic poultice on cuts, or having various pieces of wounded people glued back together again with this miracle mucilage. She did mention using it on her husband after he cut himself with the chain saw. It was made with goldenseal (I think) and I don’t remember what else but she claimed it worked miracles when put on copiously bleeding cuts and amputations, etc. Okay, she didn’t actually claim it would work on amputations but with such a track record as she recited, why not amputations?

Do you suppose raisin paste has some miraculous designation? Maybe it helps to hold the intestines together after ingesting too much fiber rich food? Maybe they had an overstock of moldy old raisins lying around in a warehouse somewhere which they needed to ditch somewhere? Maybe it was to fool unsuspecting cookie eaters so they wouldn’t realize they were eating healthfood? After all, most of the raisin eaters I know are health nuts and though I shouldn’t say it, they often look a lot like raisins themselves. Maybe it was to save the nosher’s life.

I once knew a little boy named Phillip who had 2 older sisters and every single time I ran into Phillip he was toting a little box of raisins and obviously relishing his gummy little snack. I questioned Phillip one day about his raisin eating habit and he told me, with all the gravity that little boys can muster, that he ate them to protect himself from cooties. Cooties, I asked? What about cooties? They’re from girls he told me. Girls have cooties and if you eat enough raisins they will protect you. What is it about the raisins that’s so effective in cootie control I asked him? He didn’t know so we brainstormed a bit and decided that it was proably the wrinkles in the raisins. Well, how about prunes, I asked? Prunes are bigger and have more wrinkles than almost anything. He didn’t buy it. He was all for sticking with the tried and true method. For his next birthday I bought him a huge box of raisins and I put a label on it which said that it was the jumbo size for cootie control…guaranteed 100% effective in preventing cooties caught from girls. He thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

I wonder whatever happened to little Phillip? Maybe he grew up and ended up becoming the head guy in charge of making raisin paste and including it in cookies. If so, then he really ought to speak to the advertising department. Just think how many lives he could save if people knew this important fact…