Grandma’s Cookie Advice

A year ago, I lost my grandmother, and she is one who touched my soul and taught me. Her love for education guided me toward teaching and moving along with my degrees.

She always proclaimed to be a plain-spoken woman, with simple needs and wants. One of her customs was to cut out those cliche advice columns and Reader's Digest pieces to tape to her office wall or carry in her wallet. After she died, we found so many of these timeworn, yellow clippings. I read them all, trying to see what she got out of them, why she kept them when they were just common sense. And, I think that's the point.

We all make our own meanings from what we observe and read, and the common sense appealed to her sense of keeping things simple and living in the now. My grandmother's goal, according to these clippings, was to seek personal happiness through her own devices and to be conscious of this quest every day and with every action and word directed toward others. My grandmother was a country school (one-room) teacher, a farm wife (farm work partner), a mother, a 4H leader, and a newspaper columnist.

I want to share one of my grandmother's clippings, which happens to be one written about her. I hope the simple logic shines through and that her experience and knowledge continue to help people. I also include my great-grandmother's sugar cookie recipe, passed down to me from my grandmother.

Another piece of advice comes from E. H. who says she has been cooking and baking about 60 years now. She’s 72.

“One thing I have found with my cookies is that the eggs were larger than usual, which adds extra liquid to the batter and causes the cookies to go flat. The only thing to do is add a little flour, two tablespoons at a time, until when you touch the dough with your fingers, it doesn’t stick.”

She has another excellent suggestion.

“I also bake a trial cookie, if I have any doubt. Much better than having a whole pan of spread, run-together cookies.”

Grandma Grell's Sugar Cookies
1 cup sugar
1 cup butter
1 egg
1/2 tsp soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp vanilla
about 3 cups flour (adjusted for the larger egg)

Oven Temp 350 degrees
Combine all ingredients. Shape into rolls, slice, and bake.
Or, form into balls and use a glass creamer (or other cut glass
item) to press a shape into the balls. Dip the creamer bottom
into sugar and press gently.

Vonnegut passes, No Timequake.

F.Y.I.--The Ph.D. is going well, for any who care to know. I'm teaching a fabulous class to assist pre-service teachers in overcoming stereotypes, assumptions, and bias in their classrooms. I get to teach them about social justice and open their eyes to see that there IS racism, discrimination and separate is STILL not equal. So, I've been busy, and I've missed opportunities to write about Gonzales, Wolfie, Imus, and some of the other people who tip my boat.

There is one guy I need to write a bit about, however, and that is Mr. Kurt Vonnegut. He tipped my book (in a positive way) back when I was an undergraduate. He is the inspiration for this blog and much of my English major thinking in the past decade. I'm not an English major anymore--moved to Education--but Vonnegut holds a place in my heart. His ability to be brash and honest, while still using a sense of logic, is what I admire.

He was, above all, a human. A Humanist. He drank (a lot), he hated his former son-in-law, and he lusted after women. He also wrote like a fiend and wrote to make a statement rather than to please an audience, yet he did care about people and what they do to themselves and to others. Unlike certain people who use language carelessly (i.e. Imus), Vonnegut carried a mastery of saying or writing his point with flare and innuendo, but not with malice or ignorance.

For the summer, amidst my other reading toward Ph.D. stuff, I intend to revisit my favorite Vonnegut books.

April 11, 2007, Vonnegut died. This is also my twin brothers' birthday. So it goes.

Love, Circe