Yesterday, I made banana oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (their taste is worth every syllable of their name, trust me) for Miles and Jason...and Dad and Charlie, naturally. "The way to a man's heart..." and all that.

I promised Miles earlier in the week that I was going to make him cookies this weekend. With half of Sunday gone, he messaged, "Hey I'm gonna run for a bit...now you have an excuse to start cookies!!!" He makes subtlety an art form, no? Oh well...at least he's got that cute thing going for him.

So, my mom was napping on the couch, my father was somewhere doing something with an Aprilaire, my brother was at a friend's house (he still has a social life), and my husband, who was keeping me company online, decided to abandon me in hopes that I would make him cookies.

I was bored. Seriously bored. Women's Studies courses were required at my college. I wasn't about to run off to make cookies just because my husband told me to...come on! We've progressed further than that, ladies! So, off I went to pet the cat. Then I made cookies. *clears throat*

Ok, boys and girls. What's the first step in cookie making? Hmmm? What's that? Well, yes, a recipe is a good start, but we're actually following the neat freak's guide today.

The recipe is a darn good second step, though! This was my great-grandma Lothe's recipe. My father's mother's mother, if you're curious. My father's family is really into tradition, if you haven't figured it out yet. It's nice. I enjoy it.

Mmmm bananas. I have this friend. Her name is Sarah, and I met her on a health and fitness forum. When the Blueberry-Banana Cake of last Novemeber came into the spotlight, she sent me an email. She amuses me greatly. She wrote like 500 words on the spelling of the word "banana" before coming to the point of the email...which was to request the recipe for Blueberry-Banana Cake, naturally. I now think of her whenever I look at a banana. I'm sure she just loves that. She's the hot topic at the local produce section.

"Do you have any bananas?"
"By the apples. Say, have you heard of Sarah?"

Anyway, that had absolutely nothing to do with the cookies, but that's just how my brain [mal]functions.

She did the mash...She did the b'nana mash!

The family recipe is a little ambiguous. "Yields: LOTS" Lots!? What's that?? They're lucky it's listed in all caps as "lots" couldn't possibly hope to describe the cookies you can crank out of this recipe. I had to throw everything in a roasting pan and mix it with my hands. Re. Fine. Ment. I sectioned off part of the dough and refrigerated it for my brother—he prefers his cookies extra rare. Some might even call it raw.

I'm not a drop cookie fan. Not that I don't like the way they taste...they just seem so unscientific. It's the "dropping" process that ruins them for me. I reached for a melon baller. I don't get to use these things often as Miles doesn't like melons. He doesn't like cucumbers either, but he will eat pickles. Hmm....maybe he just requires his cantaloupe to have a dill weed bath first. The melon baller cookies had better shape than their unskilled "drop" ancestors—but still, I was not pleased.

I mused aloud, "If only we had an actual cookie scoop!"

Mom replied excitedly from the other room, "Oh! But we DO!"

I looked at my remaining dough and thought grouchily, "Now she tells me."

Clearly, the cookie scoop makes the superior cookie. It is the cookie-scoop-banana-oatmeal-chocolate-chip-cookies that Miles will receive. I shan't ruin his image of my perfection.

I packed up the rest of the cookies for my family and cleaned the kitchen. Dad came into the room timidly. "Can I have one of these cookies?" He gestured toward the stash. With my affirmation, he picked one up and said, "I can't decide if you're Martha Stewart or Julia Child, but I'm sure glad you're here!"

I chuckled. He took a bite of his cookie. "Oh!" came his delighted sigh. "Gramma's cookies!!!"

And, in that moment, it didn't matter that I've cut nearly all meat from my diet, that I prefer coffee instead of crude oil...all that mattered was that I made his "gramma's" cookies...and that they were good.