YAAY! School is out for the summer. I’m finished at Oasis, and my over-stimulated kids will be home from school in about 30 minutes to party! party! and leave crumbs everywhere. I spent the morning picking up their dossiers and sending homemade chocolate chip cookies on pretty plates as teacher’s gifts.
According to Ilsa, I’m “famous” at the school for my cookies. I have to say the French love chocolate chip cookies. Every time I have made them, people have raved. I imagine it being like when Americans first discovered pommes frites, aka French fries, or possibly pain perdu, aka French toast. My recipe is too simple to bother posting—it’s just the Betty Crocker version from the late 80s cookbook, plus 1 t. vanilla which that recipe inexplicably leaves out, plus I use real butter and European baking chocolate cut into chunks, since I can’t get chips. (Darn!) Elliot likes to make them too and give them to his teachers, and apparently we have become known at the school. When the kids bring them for snack, they are mobbed in the playground. Finally, my 15 minutes have arrived.
If you give one of my children a cookie, s/he’s going to leave crumbs, and those crumbs will attract bugs. But that’s okay; I can deal with bugs.

How long have you been in Africa? Take this easy quiz to find out.

You open a new bag of flour, and discover it is crawling with little bugs. Do you:
a. Shriek and run away, and make someone else dispose of it?
b. Wrap it up in a new plastic bag and take it to the OUTSIDE trash can?
c. Sift the bugs out and use it.

Note: this quiz does not test preparedness for Africa, or predisposition to living here. It only rates how long you have actually been here. (Gwen (http://borneochica.blogspot.com/) doesn’t count; she grew up in Indonesia) And while this may make sure that none of you visit me, none of you are visiting me anyway.
You’ve probably already guessed that this happened to me when I went to make the cookies.
Sometime during our first 6 months in Africa, I found bugs crawling through our rice, and I did a combination a. and b. And now, 6 years later? It was c, all the way. I just sifted it. Because I knew that bugs are gross but not harmful, and also that I had to make the cookies and the big shops were closed, and the small local shops would have even worse flour (mouse turds, anyone?). So I sifted away and we’re all fine.
The cookies are great, too.

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