Chocolate Chip Cookies

A few years ago, at a particularly painful period marked by multiple terror attacks in Israel (the year following the fateful events of 9/11), my children and I and a few dear friends put our heads together to come up with the best possible community fund-raiser project that would benefit the terror victims. The emerging idea was to do something fun. Something that could be an antidote to the prevailing somber mood, and would bring people of all ages and all walks of life together. There was no hesitation: Make a million cookies and sell them online, was the unanimous answer. As soon as the idea took shape, we all got cracking. I asked the administrator of the JCC Manhattan if she would let us bake in their kitchen, and I always remember her answer with a chuckle: “The Million Cookie Project! I don't know what I was smoking when I agreed to this, but I know it will be lots of fun.” It took us a couple months to put everything in place: A giant mixer, mountains of ingredients, the perfect design for the cookie boxes, staffers in charge of scheduling the volunteer baking shifts, trucks for transport. The most wonderful–and wonderfully chaotic–summer followed, with buses full of camp children pouring into the kitchen for the morning shift, then other kids coming for the afternoon shift, followed by the dizzyingly cosmopolitan, multilingual and multi-denominational evening crowds: these included TV and newspaper crews, celebrities, aspiring actors, illustrators, story tellers. “We're baking cookies to raise a lot of dough!” read one headline.

“Your cookies are weapons of mass destruction!” said one volunteer. “You mean weapons of mass construction” replied another, pointing to her ample hips. Little Tzipporah, now a beautiful young lady, refused to go to day camp, preferring to spend her mornings with me and other big people, and sat precariously perched on a high stool, straining to apply the hot seal on the little blue cookie boxes before she dropped them into cartons. We all baked, schmoozed, packaged, sealed, transported, filled orders and loaded trucks till we dropped. And dropped we finally did, at the end of that summer, with a little over a million chocolate chip cookies baked and sold, and all proceeds sent to Israel. This is why I am forever known as the cookie lady.

Just this year, a health site (www.HealthCastle.com) approached me to ask permission to use my chocolate chip cookie recipe, which would face off against a couple hundred other recipes: The goal was to try all recipes in a test kitchen over the course of three months, and determine which recipe tasted best within the most wholesome guidelines: Mine won!