Cats are not like Dogs

Some animals love to be pampered and loved and man-handled, and some do not.  Dogs are a favorite animal because they love to play around; they love walks, they love chasing balls, they love fetching sticks, they love wagging their tails, and they just love people in general.  Cats are a little different.  Cats have a more sultry way of living, they allow people to pet them,  and feed them, and clean up after them, but cats live more independent of people than most dogs.  —This is why you cannot put a cat on a leash and walk it around the block like you can a dog, at least this is the story of one such instance.

One bright summer day one of my brothers went outside and, to his delight, he found a stray cat.  Now, my family lives on a farm, we know how to treat animals, we know how to work with them—or at least we should.  He carefully coaxed the cat over and then began patting.  The next logical step in his mind was to try and tame it.  Why tying a cat to a metal chair on a cement sidewalk is going to tame it I'm not sure, but my brother was convinced that it would help.

What should have been Cookies

Although I like to pride myself on my fantastic cooking abilities, I have not always been an especially excellent cook—or baker for that matter. For the first twelve years of my life there were only a very select few things I knew how to cook.  I could make oatmeal (boil oats in water), scrambled eggs, toast, and pancakes (from scratch, thank you very much).  I would add cold cereal to the list, but I don't think that even counts as cooking.

The only thing I truly excelled at, or so I thought, was making cookies. I could follow a recipe fairly well and make almost any kind of cookie, but my specialty (yes, unoriginal, I know) was chocolate chip cookies.  I'd make double batches of them and have a huge bowl full of cookie dough.

I would also be very careful to taste my cookies at every stage of their development (which sometimes makes me wonder about myself).  I'd try the cookies when they consisted of sugar and brown sugar and butter (which should have been gross, but really only tasted sweet).  Yes, I tried them after I'd added the egg, the raw egg.  I tried them after I added the flour and baking soda, and then I tried A LOT of them after I added the chocolate chips.  I really didn't even need to eat cookies by the time I got around to putting the cookie dough on the sheet I'd had soooo many calories.

A Metal Spatula and a Microwave

Once upon a time there was a girl who worked for a catering company . . . yes, this girl was me

I worked in the Pastry Room and I would plate up lots of different desserts so that they looked delicious.  One of the desserts we made were called Cheesecake Lollypops, these lollypops of goodness consisted of crustless cheesecake that was siphoned into a chocolate shell and then dipped in dark chocolate.  They were very good.

I’d made these lollypops many times before an unfortunate occurrence happened.  One day I was going about my normal routine, which consisted of sticking lollypop sticks into the cheesecake balls and sticking them into the freezer to harden (otherwise the cheesecake would fall off of the sticks and become a gushy gooey mess in the chocolate when you tried to dip them.)  While the cheesecake froze the next step was to melt the chocolate.

Some high up professional cooks like to get very fancy and complicated and melt their chocolate over the stove, carefully placed in a bowl on top of another pot and melt their chocolate at low temperatures.  We microwaved ours.  Although I do not suggest this for all you aspiring cooks out there, the catering company bought very high quality chocolate so that we could use this rather unusual method of melting it.