Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Mother of the Year?

Okay, I totally get the Mother of the Year award. All you other bitches, back off, because I win.

This afternoon, L and I are making Christmas cookies. Side note: I love sugar cookies with icing. I think they're my favorites. I don't make them very often because, frankly, they're a pain in the ass. You have to make the dough, chill the dough, roll the dough, use the cookie cutters, roll out the dough again, ice the suckers, and then you feel like puking because you ate your weight in dough scraps. Another side note: The other day I was bitching and squawking about how all the Christmas decorations and baking and cards and general messiness of the holidays is a big fat drag (using language much more appropriate for a seven year-old, and much less cynical) and L asks me, So then, what's your favorite holiday? Um, Christmas.

Anyway, so we're baking cookies today, and Leila was already dreading the hour that the dough has to chill in the fridge, because that hour may as well be a decade when you're seven, and I said No problem, I have some leftover dough in the fridge, we'll use that while we wait for the new stuff to chill. So we make the new dough and I wrap it up, and get the old dough out, and it dawns on me that this dough is really old. I look at the recipe and it says "store wrapped dough in the refrigerator for two days or in the freezer for one month." The last time we made cookies was... Halloween. This dough has been in the refrigerator for two months, and it has raw egg in it. This isn't the part where I win Mother of the Year, this is just the part where I'm a lame housewife who falsely believes that the refrigerator is capable of doing magic tricks. The part where I win The Big One, is when Leila, in denial about the wait for the new dough, says Why don't I taste it, to be sure its bad? And I go... Okay!

I let her eat a piece of two month old refrigerated cookie dough, and she just about ripped her tongue out. I thanked her for taking one for the team. What kind of person does this to a child? I console myself with the fact that she had already licked the beater and the bowl, and is on her way to an icing and sprinkle induced fit where her eyeballs will turn into psychedelic swirls like in cartoons. Right now she's in her room playing the roll of the kid practicing piano AND the mom, saying Great job, honey! I guess that's what I sound like when I praise her skills while really reading about Jon Gosselin on TMZ. Is this better or worse than catching her playing with a broken beer bottle at the park when she was four? Hard to say.

You know what else? I went to the effing super market five times last week, which is five more times that I'd like, so this week I decided I'm not going. We will eat what is already in this house, we will ration, we will subsist on two month-old cookie dough, but I am not setting foot in a grocery store. Maybe Friday I'll have to, but that's it. I got so desperate, I ate leftover nasty casserole that had been in the fridge for a few days. It was still okay, and it didn't kill me, obviously, but it was risky.

I think the dough is done chilling now, and we can get this show on the road. I have to steel myself for lip biting that must be done while L is making the cookie cutter shapes on the rolled-out dough too far apart. I'm breathing. In. Out.


1 comment:

Lara Starr said...

I have a GREAT recipe for sugar cookies and you don't have to chill the dough! Want it?