A dozen reasons to go “Hmmm…”

The stove timer went off just as I had thrust my hands in the sudsy dishwater. Of course. After a quick dry-off I donned oven mitts and pulled a sheet of fragrant chocolate chip cookies out of the oven. It was a cold day outside with big lazy snowflakes making sky-circles before coming to rest on the ground. I thought a plate of warm gooey cookies would be an ideal “thank you” to give a woman who offered to tell me her story—on her day off no less—but I wasn’t sure how many to bring along. So many people are on diets these days, or have food allergy issues, that it has become increasingly tricky to offer homemade baked goods as gifts. As I was dividing the batch between containers I realized I wasn’t getting as many cookies from a single bowl of dough as I had in the past. Even though I was using the same ingredients, and making the cookies about the same size—big (Ladies, size matters in cookies too)—I was getting three or four fewer cookies per batch. Okay, I do indulge in a bit of cookie-dough pilfering, but not three cookies worth, I swear! The missing dough was a mystery. I began to run down the ingredient list to double-check on quantities. Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m not a measuring kind of woman. I bake like I do most things in life…sorta kinda wing it with good intentions…but I’ve been making these cookies for so long that I know what I know. What I discovered was interesting. Back in the day, chocolate chips usually came in a 12 oz. bag. When I looked at the bag of Nestle’s Dark Chocolate chips it now says 10 oz. Ahhhh. So the bag looks like it is the same size, but the contents have, shall we say, been deflated. Then I began to wonder about the eggs. Extra large eggs used to be extra large, and I’d often find double yolks. No more. Even though I buy the cage-free grain-fed we pet the chickens every night before they go to bed eggs, they too are smaller than in the past. It feels like the public is being duped a bit by food manufacturers. Prices have gone up, but we think they’ve gone up on the same product. Nuh uh. They’ve gone way up on less product, but we don’t realize it in our take things for granted busy lives. The cookies still taste delicious, but from now on I’ll have to bake them with extra love to make up for the smaller quantity. Or eat less dough. Nah. More love it is.