Adventures in Cookie Baking

Recently I have found that I simply cannot stop thinking about chocolate chip cookies.

Perhaps The New York Times is to blame, or perhaps it is homesickness for something quintessentially American and comforting, but once the idea surfaced, I couldn't get rid of it without baking!

Fortunately, Catherine, having lived here for eight months already, had flour, vanilla extract, baking soda, salt, and sugar so all I had to buy were eggs, chocolate chips, and butter.

Except, there are no chocolate chips in Nairobi.

So I channeled my inner Ruth Wakefield and started chopping up chocolate bars.

Catherine’s apartment came furnished, so I poked around and found a mixing bowl, but soon discovered there were no measuring cups of any kind. This is problematic as I'm very loyal to Toll House's cookie recipe. Here's the revised recipe:

• 1.25 cups* flour
• .5 teaspoon** baking soda
• .5 teaspoon salt
• approximately 20-25% of the tub of margarine/butter substitute I bought
• sugar to a bit below the line in the "working glass"
• brown sugar to a bit above the line in the "working glass"
• .5 teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 1 egg
• 3 dark chocolate bars

Perfect. Mix all the ingredients more or less according to the Toll House instructions, except instead of electic beaters use a big spoon.

Just leaving baking and eating! Except that our kitchen also seems to lack:

• cookie sheets (the broiling pan that lives in the oven will do)
• any sort of calibration for the oven
• spatula (ornate metal salad tong/grabber thingies might work)

Eventually, after a few batches with burned bottoms or completely undercooked centers, I managed to produce some respectable cookies ... and were a big hit among my friends and colleagues.

Unfortunately, a few days later while moving around in the kitchen I hear a hissing noise. I checked the refrigerator to make sure that the door was firmly shut, poked around the oven, but couldn't find the the source of the sound. I was in a hurry, so left without investigating further.

That night, I could still hear the noise, and upon pulling the stove away from the wall saw that the hose connecting the gas source to the stove was leaking. And it smelled! I wasn't too concerned about safety ... I mean gas dissipates quickly in air, right? And our kitchen window was open ... But I was at least a little concerned, and quite concerned about the wastefulness of the gas leak.

Time to channel my inner MacGyver to fix the gas leak with the materials available in a furnished Kenyan apartment: one band aid from Catherine's 5 year-old first aid kit, two hand sized plastic bags from the green grocer. I thought about gum and duct tape, but a) did not have any, b) was worried about making a mess.

The band aid was a miserable failure (of course), but squeezing all of the air out of the plastic bags, wrapping them tightly around the hose, and then double knotting them worked surprisingly well!

I don't know if my cookie baking caused the leak (I certainly hope not) but I'm grateful that my cookie-baking adventure did not end in real disaster. And that our landlord came and fixed the gas leak.

*1 cup = the volume in Catherine's drinking glasses, which look like Crate & Barrell "Working Glasses," the 21 ounce size.

** 1 teaspoon = the size of a very small spoon in Catherine's drawer