I haven’t been eating a lick of salad lately, or even cooking  many meals at all. I’ve been eating a lot of scrambled eggs and toast and canned soup. I have been baking cookies a like a crazy person though.

I think it started because I was sad  I wasn’t able to have my traditional Christmas cookie party this year. My cookie party co-host of seven years, Nicole, moved to Richmond and I had just moved into a new apartment and it wasn’t party ready yet… But at the very last minute I made a few batches of cookies and invited a few people over because I needed some Christmas cheer:

I made Nutella Sandwich cookies (they weren’t that great), jam thumb-prints (which were voted the winners), World Peace Cookies (which were my favorites), and Lemon Meltaways (which were kind of weirdly sour but still pretty good).

Then, as a Christmas present to myself, I got a copy of the Gourmet Cookie Book. Over the last weeks I’ve been baking from it every weekend.  I started with the cover recipe, Aunt Sis’s Strawberry Tart Cookies. They were delicious. They tasted a lot like Pepperidge Farm Verona cookies, which I have always loved. They were such a success that I knew I needed to invite people over to eat them or else Rafael and I would have eaten all 8 dozen of them.

So we had people over for another mini cookie hang, and at the end of the night there were only this many left. Still I think I probably ate about 24 of them myself (no joke)…

Then I made the Gianduia Brownies from the Gourmet book. The intro to the recipe proclaims “These are the best brownies you will ever taste.”  They were not. They had a great texture, but were way too sweet and more hazelnut-y than chocolaty. I don’t even know if I would call them brownies. Two friends came over and we ate some of them because they were there and they were OK, but then I threw away the rest. They didn’t need to exist.

The book fell back into my good graces when I made the Mocha Cookies from it yesterday. They were more like the best brownies I’d ever eaten than the Gianduia brownies had been; soft, crackled on the top, and totally utterly chocolaty. Yum! Love these. Luckily we were going to a dinner party and I brought them with me, otherwise we would have eaten most of these ourselves and I might not remember them so fondly.

There are still a lot of recipes that I need to try so I have a feeling this won’t be the last Salad Eater Cookie Report…

In other (semi) cookie related news, one of my favorite things about our new apartment is the oven window. It’s so clear! I love to perch and watch things bake in it, which sounds boring as I type it but is very fun in practice.