Gluten-free blues got you down? Get in the kitchen and get baking. Here are 10 reasons to love GF chocolate chip cookies -- and really, all chocolate chip cookies in general.
1. The only "real" chocolate chip cookies, the ones made from Nestlé Toll House chips using the recipe on the back of the bag, are really pretty easy to make, especially if you go all rebel and skip that part about mixing the dry ingredients together first. Hell, just go for it.
2. You don't have to be a major cook to have most of the ingredients (eggs, butter, sugar) on hand, and you'll be OK as long as you remember to get the brown sugar when you buy the chocolate chips, because you know the bag you have at home is a rock-hard mess. And now there's the Cup4Cup gluten-free flour mix that you can get at Williams-Sonoma, so you don't have to strain your brain to measure your own cornstarch, white rice flour, brown rice flour, milk powder, tapioca flour, potato starch and xanthum gum to get just the right mix.
See also: Desert Roots Kitchen Makes Desktop Gluten-Free Lunch Survivable
3. You don't even have to wait to bake the cookies to get your sugar-rush on, getting one or two licks off the beaters, even though -- I know, I know -- there are raw eggs in the batter. Remember, you're a rebel.
4. You just laugh at the instruction, "Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely." Ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha. You only use the pot holder long enough to throw the cookie sheet onto the counter before you're juggling a molten blob back and forth in your hands, breaking it apart and shoving it in your mouth, chocolate dribbling down your chin.
5. You feel virtuous when, after you've eaten five or six straight from the hot cookie sheet, you put the rest in a big baggie in the freezer so you won't eat them all night long, and then you discover they're even better right out of the freezer, and you think you might need to call Toll House to relate this new discovery so they can add it to the package, right after the laughable, "Cool for 2 minutes" phrase. And you remind yourself that, when you call, you'll tell them to increase the flour ratio slightly so they come out more cakey than gooey and that pecans are better than walnuts, and they probably should note that on the back of the package, too.
6. You realize you've come up with a new weight-loss method because you've eaten so many cookies that you're not even hungry for dinner, and you know that they're loaded with nutrients because they have natural ingredients like sugar and butter and nuts and stuff, which really are all organic, even if they're not labeled that way in the grocery store, and what the hell do they know anyway.
7. You think you'll be Lady Bountiful and take a bunch of these amazing creations to the office to share, but then you decide, screw them, I'm eating all these myself, and you feel better about yourself because you're realizing you're the most important person in your life and you're really learning to love yourself.
8. You remember all the times you did share chocolate chip cookies, like when you wrapped them in tissue paper and mailed them to the Saudi desert for your mother's 60th birthday when she was serving as a nurse in a Mobile Army Support Hospital during the war, or when you put some in a big Tupperware container for your son to share with his dorm pals during finals for his first semester at college, which was way better than the junk they tried to sell you to have delivered during finals, even laying on the guilt trip with quotes from student who didn't get the mass-market care packages about how their parents must have forgotten them.
9. You remember standing on a step stool in your grandmother's Kansas kitchen, an apron tied up under your armpits so you don't step on it, stirring cookie ingredients together with a big wooden spoon in a bowl set on the freezer filled with corn and green beans from the garden, your grandmother making approving noises over your shoulder, her wavy white hair glowing in the light from the window.
10. You get a sense of generational continuity from this sacred ceremony, this traditional recipe passed down from grandmother, to mother, to daughter, to son, a recipe made in kitchens from Brooklyn to Seattle to Austin to Boise, that surpasses the fact that you can't eat wheat anymore, and makes you realize that you're still part of the big old spinning world and, really, it's all going to be OK.
