Cookies for Grandpa

My Grandfather is an amazing man. In his life, amongst other things, he has been an eighth grade teacher Honduras, an FBI agent in Venezuela and the Philippines, and a trade unionist in all of Central America- all of this after having been born into a conservative family from Iowa that had never left the United States! I can't count the number of women -of all ages and walks of life- who have told me that they want to take him home. “Get in line!”, I tell them. After all (at eighty-one!) he just married for a second time, after a life-long happy marriage with my Grandmother. You have to be a real bitter soul not to like Grandpa- he is always breath of fresh air.

He also was recently diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma.

This has really been a blow to my family. Grandpa has never been seriously ill, and apart from an overdose of tapioca medicine as a child, he's never had to endure any strenuous medical procedure. Now all of a sudden, he has to learn how to live with cancer.

I came to El Paso for the summer, after finishing my freshman year at SMU. Since then I've been sharing in hospital visit time with my mother, my step-dad John, and Clemencia, my Grandfather's lucky wife. I never realized how exhausting hospital time can be for the family members. It is boring and painful. During my visits, one thing that has stood out to me is my Grandfather's dissatisfaction with hospital food. Grandpa never- never- complains about anything, especially not in this fashion. After two days of watching him “tackle his food” with grimaces and comments like “That has got to be one of the most unfortunate culinary experiences I have ever had!,” I decided to ask him if there was any food from the outside world that I could bring him. He said he wanted cookies. This was a perfect moment to resume my cooking crusade. After being released from the hospital this morning, Grandpa and I went to the grocery store and got the necessary ingredients to cook Tassajara's Chocolate Chunk Cookies.

Challenge number one: Clemencia, in the traditional Latin American way, only had brown sugar in Panela form: a solid block that's too hard to cut through. I asked Grandpa for help, and he decided that he should grab a grater and grate the block of sugar into a powder that I could work with. After a few strokes at it, he stopped and said “Whew! This is going to be an... interesting project.”

“Isn't there any easier way to go about that?”, I asked.

“Not with a Panela there's not.”

So we kept at it, me chopping pecans while Grandpa grated sugar. It was both a noisy and quiet experience. I took it upon myself to follow Tassajara's advice of not speaking while cooking. After a few more goes at it, Grandpa was able to give me the ¾ of a cup of brown sugar that I needed, even with a little to spare. Next came creaming the sugar with a stick of butter. Salted? Unsalted? The recipe didn't specify. I just went with regular salted butter. The egg I used caught my attention- a bleached white shell. That is not what eggs really look like! I was a little troubled, as I was expecting the naturally spotty, skin coloured shells that I grew up with. But in it went. With regard to the cooking time, it is possible that El Paso's extremely dry heat impacted it slightly. I added an extra couple of minutes to the cooking time stated in the recipe. As for the chocolate, the recipe specifically calls for 70% bittersweet chocolate, but the Albertson's I went to had either 100% cocoa, 62% or less. 62% is what I ended up using. It's probably a little sweeter than the authors intended, but it still worked fine.

All the while, I worked in silence. Grandpa left to the pharmacy, and I had the house to myself. It gave me space to appreciate the light coming in from the garden and falling on the water in the sink; the beauty of the ingredients and the flour dusted kitchen counter; my gratitude to be cooking again in a real kitchen after a year of dorm life. I thought about how much I wanted these to be good so I could give my Grandfather a break from awful food. I am a person who is usually loud and talkative, who listens to a lot of music and bursts into song with the slightest provocation. But in this silence I felt serene. This whole silent meditation thing works after all!

Yes- the author's comment that real chocolate bars or slabs cut by hand are better than chocolate chips is absolutely correct! The hand-cut, irregularly shaped chocolate gave the cookies much more character and flavour. The dough was creamy, and was complimented very well by the gooey chocolate and crunchy pecans. At first I thought there wouldn't be enough dough, but as is usual every time I cook from a U.S. cookbook, I ended up with many more cookies than I expected. The recipe said it made about 2 dozen cookies. I had 3 dozen.

Grandpa got home from picking up an antibiotic prescription just as I was putting the last of the cookies on a platter. He was tired from a long week of hospital treatments and doctor's appointments. He was ready to take a nap. He isn't a very effusive person, so when he tried a cookie, he wasn't very enthusiastic. “It's good,” he said, “They have a very nice consistency.” But there was chocolate left on his lips instead of dry, bland hospital food. That made me smile. When a loved one has cancer, it's hard to really know what to do. But you don't have to be a miracle worker to do good. A day of your time and a plate of cookies is enough to make things a little better.