Hope for Hair, Another Cookie Story

YES!!! M was just over for coffee (and cookies, of course) and she sweetly agreed to do ‘hair parties’, thanks be to God, Who cares even about the number of hairs on our head. I didn’t even have to use wasta - heh-heh, one of the JP bloggers is from her husband’s family Apparently, her foreign lady customers provide a high level of entertainment, and she was so moved by the comments of last post’s readers that we can breathe a sigh of relief. She couldn’t believe I blogged about it ( her daughter had to explain what blogging is) and politely declined a move to Egypt - sorry, Rasha!

I got yet another encouragement to keep writing about cookies yesterday from Rambling Hal. When Hala (and Summer, Moey, Red Rose, Emily, Rebecca and Momma Bean) speaks, Kinzi listens - and bakes! Although this will insure my banishment FOREVER from the realm of ‘Issue Bloggers’, there seems to be a felt need here, a niche to fill. I will choose to be content as a mere tab on the home page of the new JP, and resign myself to less traffic; no chance of aspiring to be a Natasha and Lina, sigh. No opportunity to be quoted on JO magazine’s superhighway section like the uber-bloggers of JP, QP , JB and itoot. And its all good…it’s VERY good for my most known identity to be a mom and a cookie baker, and wife and follower of Jesus Christ - not in that order.

The Cookie of the Week: Peanut Butter Chip Brownies. DELISH! Chips courtesy of Angel-Face, my dear dear friend of a decade sharing Jordan life as gal-pals. Even my husband couldn’t resist these brownies, and did not tempt me by leaving them uneaten in our hidden adult cookie place! BUT, if you are thinking of visiting to try them, asfi jiddan, as they are gone, gone gone.

Cookies always inspire in me a grateful heart, thankful for creativity of Almighty God, Who hears the heart musings of His daughter and arranges a chance for her to have the silly inquiries of her heart answered. One of which was The Perfect Field Trip; a dream come true for cookie lovers. Haven’t you ever wondered how packaged cookies are so uniformly shaped? How they make the chocolate dipped ones? How they bake SO many at once? Perhaps none of you wonder at such things, but I do: contemplating the machinations of cookie creation.

My wonderful sister-in-love Jane, is from a very small town in MidAmerica, USA. where they still say “Aye-rab” instead of Arab. The highest structure there is the grain elevator and the population may be 10% of Yaduda. I love the MidWest, the people are alot like they are in Jordan, friendly, easy-going, welcoming (but they don’t drive like Jordanians…they are SLOW as molasses/dibbs, stop at every stop sign - even every yield sign. But even that could be because of wasta as well as kindness…everyone is related to the sheriff. Even me!).

Amazingly, this little blink-and-ya miss-it town is home to the company that bakes some of America’s favorite cookies (except Oreos), some of which are even now available in Jordan! You may miss it visually, but the aroma of chocolate permeates the air even to the nearest interstate freeway - many times I have wanted to exit, follow my nose and see what’s cookin.

Praise God, our family got that chance this summer. Jane and I loaded up two vans with our myriad of children as we had passed security clearance (yea, total profiling is not limited to airports) to attend the first ever permitted TOUR. YES!!! A guided tour THROUGH the whole place to explore the mystery of mass-produced cookies.

Little Kinz reminded me of this one last night as we put her shower cap on “Mommy, this is what we had to wear when we visited the cookie place, right?”. Plus booties, too. We all looked pretty funny, the pre-teen boys died 1,000 deaths, but seeing the funny blue-haired grannys likewise attired made it easier.

The first stop was like something out of a Spy Kids movie, conveyor belts going everywhere, moving containers and boxes and labels and cookies at three levels in amazing precision. The employees looked like they came out of a movie, too: neat, pretty, pleasant, informative, obviously LOVED their jobs . Everyone moved in perfect sync and the boxes were loaded on the the bays with eleven semi-trucks ready to deliver them to snack-hungry people across America.

The next area was where they made oatmeal cookies. Oh, the aroma as we saw HUGE quantities of butter beat into massive mixers. The thing I wanted to see was how they cracked the eggs en-mass, but they used dehydrated eggs. Even better was the chocolate chip dough room, with containers the size of dumpsters on a conveyor belt flying overhead lining up to unload dough into the cookie-maker machine. This machine uses gravity to force the dough down round tubes, then a wire quickly cuts through the dough and they plop by the dozens onto the bigges, longest cookie sheets you have ever seen.

And it moves! It actually travels through a long oven as the cookies bake, then they partially cook on the sheet until they are gently dropped onto another conveyor belt that becomes a two story high circular ‘cookie-cooling-parking garage”. The rejects fall into a bin, in which we were invited to indulge ourselves. Shoo zaki!

We then walked through a huge warehouse, piled high with boxes of cookies with bilingual packaging for export. They explained that they bake for several different companies, and have to keep all the ingredients separate - like, five different kinds of chocolate chips! Sounded like an organizational nightmare to me.

Next was a peek at the 1,000 gallon vat of melted chocolate, which is pumped through pipes for the magic of cookie ENROBING!!! What a majestic word, ‘enrobing’…this is for cookies that are covered in chocolate. I always invisioned a dunking sort of process; but no, they are enrobed! It just means the molten chocolate is carefully poured over freshly baked cookies. Sadly, we did not get to see this process as they were in the middle of cleaning the machine after a run of cookies containing peanuts. Peanut allergies are so deadly that they do a MASSIVE, completely thorough cleaning of every bit of machinary that could come in contact with a speck of peanut.

Hala (the Rambling One, but I think Cafe and Taha Halas too) would have been delighted, and not just over the goodies, but over the IMMACULATE condition of this huge factory. Oh, a clean-freak’s dream…every pipe was reflecting an image, the boxes piled three stories high had not a spec of dust. There was not a crumb on the floor, not a splotch of chocolate on an apron. I do not know how this happens, as when I make cookies, clean-up takes longer than cooking. Maybe because there are no kids asking to ‘help’ in the process.

I hope you enjoyed this virtual tour with me. I wish I could give you a box of cookies to take home…to the amazement of the children, we were each given VERY generously filled bags of cookies. The thing that struck me most, though, was the integrity and trustworthiness of this company. They contract with the BIG cookie companies, who are all in competition for market share and consumer loyalty. This company holds the secrets to the other companies’ success, even new products, yet are trusted to hold complete confidence. I was impressed, and now can lie awake at night thinking about things of greater eternal value.