Madness and Cookies

So I'm taking an international economics class and this week I'm working on critiquing an article about produce tracking technology. It's actually pretty interesting. Canada and the States are working together on something called the Produce Tracking Initiative (PTI), which essentially is a barcode that lets the government (and consumers) track food to the farm at which it's produced. The big debate about it, though, is that the US is trying to make participation in this program mandatory, at the producers' cost, and it's got some family farm folk up in arms. Reading about this, I never really realized how bad the food standards were in the USA. I guess only like 7000 of the 150000 (less than 5%!!!!)food processing facilities are actually inspected each year, and there have been an increasing number of cases of food poisoning. The most recent scare I heard about was salmonella in peanut butter, but I was even reading about findings of E. Coli in COOKIE DOUGH!!!

Anyway, all the research this week is starting to get to me, and I must be crazy, because after reading about the cookie dough, I started to crave chocolate chip cookies! haha! So that is what my blog this week is going to be about, but don't worry, these cookies are completely homemade and E. Coli-free! (never thought I'd say that sentence before!)

So here goes:

Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies/The Life and Times of Monsieur Biscuit - because I couldn't do homework anymore, and I'm slightly irrational (I almost drew a face on him. You were spared.)


Ingredients:


2 1/4 cups flour
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup softened butter
2 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1 rsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
300g semi-sweet chocolate chips


Directions:


1. Preheat oven at 375.
2. Mix butter, eggs, sugars, and vanilla until the mixture is light and fluffy.
3. Incorporate the salt, baking soda, and flour by hand.
4. Once the consistency is dough-like, mix in the chocolate chips.
5. Scoop heaping teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets and bake for about 12 mins per batch.



...I'll let you decide what happened to the rest of that little guy... hehe