What makes the Engine of Creation Run? Not Physics but Ecstatics Makes the Engine Run:

Let Deep Roots Grow:
If you do not MINGLE you will Cease to Progress:
Seek Not to Fathom the World and its Delicate Particle Logic:
You cannot Understand, You can only Destroy,
You do not Advance, You only Trample.
Poor blind children, abandoned on the earth,
Groping terrified, misguided over
Fields of Slaughter, over bodies of the Slain:
HOBBLE YOURSELVES!
There is No Zion Save Where You Are!

--Angel, Angels in America: Perestroika, Tony Kushner

It was so beautiful to spend the weekend of the Rapture writing a lecture about Angels in America. That whole scene about how God left after the 1909 earthquake: it's just perfect. The Great Work Begins, my dears. It's such a treat to read aloud to yourself on a Saturday afternoon, to have a play fold you under its wing like that.

It's funny because in posting about the simple things that really do it for me-- literature, butter-- I forget that sometimes I do cook things with steps and that this is a cooking blog and maybe I should give you all some recipes to try. Do you want to make some pretty good cookies? These are nice cookies: what they lack in my ecstacy over sunflower seed butter or olive oil (hot&heavy baking loves), they have in old fashioned chewy goodness. There is nothing particularly sexy or interesting about these cookies, but I will say that sometimes old school kind-of-boring buttery cookies are just a very good idea. John Barricelli-- Martha's right hand man and Norwalk local (holla!)-- notes that these cookies are a good addition to a lunchbox, which I think sums up their friendly-but-not-wholesome-but-not-decadent-either appeal.

"Nice" cookies
from the Sono Bakery Cookbook

+2 cups flour
+1 t baking soda
+2 sticks butter at room temp
+1 1/2 cups sugar (1 cup granulated and 1/2 cup brown, although I ran out of brown sugar so whatever)
+1 t salt (or a little more. Mine weren't salty enough. Did I forget the salt? I might have forgotten the salt)
+2 eggs at room temp
+1 1/2 T vanilla
+12 oz chocolate chips, I chopped a bar into small chunks (er, Sonia chopped a bar into small chunks, thanks) and I liked the mixture of big & little pieces of chocolate. Maybe do that.
+1 cup shredded coconut
+1 cup rolled oats

--Preheat the oven to 350.
--Beat the butter and sugar and salt for a few minutes and "make sure it tastes ok"-- ahhh this is my favorite part of making cookies for real. Also the oats in this dough are awesome for making sure you don't just sit and eat the whole thing of dough, do uncooked oats give other people a stomach ache? Is that a thing?
--Beat in the eggs and vanilla. Now the dry ingredients, make sure the flour is kind of fake-sifty and the baking soda doesn't hide in gnarly clumps. Now fold in the chocolate and coconut and oats all gentlelike.
--Make these cookies big-- like a full quarter cup each. Bake 15-18 minutes, they will still be soft in the center and that's a good thing. As Martha would say. Or the guy that developed her recipes would say. Or I would say as I bring not one but five of these cookies in my lunchbox.......based on a true story.