Gingersnaps
3/4 C. butter
2 C. flour
1 C. sugar plus about 1/3 C. in a small bowl for coating
1 egg
2 tsp. soda
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 C. molasses
1 tsp. ginger
Preheat the oven to 350F. Combine the dry ingredients. Cream together the butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs and molasses. Combine the wet with the dry, kneading the dough a little by hand if needed to blend everything together into a uniform ball of dough. Break off walnut-sized lumps of dough and roll them into small balls. Roll each dough ball in the extra sugar and place about 1 inch apart on cookie sheets. Bake at 350F for 12 minutes, or until the dough has set and puffed slightly. Remove from the oven and let cool. They are really done, I promise. They will fall a little bit after you take them out, but that's normal-- if you leave them in the oven too long they will scorch and also be too hard.
_________
Never tell a 13-year-old that 1=0. Okay, let's begin at the beginning. Why would you never tell a 13-year-old that 1=0? Because that person could be my mother.
It was the late '60s. My mom was in high school. Because she was bright, she was a little bit younger than the other kids. She was in all the advanced classes. One of the advanced classes was a science class (if she told me which one, I've forgotten). In that science class, the teacher informed his class, as a piece of triviality, that anyone could shut down the most complicated computer by programming it with the information that 1=0. Interesting, my mother thought. I wonder if that's really true. And she filed that one away.
Flash forward to the very special field trip that some of the better students were taken on. It was to one of the universities that had one of the newest computers in their research department. My mother was on that field trip. The computer took up a whole room. (Remember, it was the late sixties.) The grad students there were very excited to have these high school students to show around and tell all about their new exciting big fancy computer. And then they made their fatal mistake. They told those high school students that, for a short while, they could play around with it. I mean, what could go wrong? They weren't factoring in my mother. All the time since that fateful science class my mother had been hoping to test her teacher's statement. And so she did, neatly and correctly entering it into the computer.
The grad students couldn't figure out what went wrong-- one moment there were a bunch of kids barely out of puberty playing with ENIAC Jr or whatever it was called, and then it suddenly shut off and wouldn't turn back on. Because my mother acted like she had no idea what had happened. Sadly, the field trip ended early.
3/4 C. butter
2 C. flour
1 C. sugar plus about 1/3 C. in a small bowl for coating
1 egg
2 tsp. soda
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 C. molasses
1 tsp. ginger
Preheat the oven to 350F. Combine the dry ingredients. Cream together the butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs and molasses. Combine the wet with the dry, kneading the dough a little by hand if needed to blend everything together into a uniform ball of dough. Break off walnut-sized lumps of dough and roll them into small balls. Roll each dough ball in the extra sugar and place about 1 inch apart on cookie sheets. Bake at 350F for 12 minutes, or until the dough has set and puffed slightly. Remove from the oven and let cool. They are really done, I promise. They will fall a little bit after you take them out, but that's normal-- if you leave them in the oven too long they will scorch and also be too hard.
_________
Never tell a 13-year-old that 1=0. Okay, let's begin at the beginning. Why would you never tell a 13-year-old that 1=0? Because that person could be my mother.
It was the late '60s. My mom was in high school. Because she was bright, she was a little bit younger than the other kids. She was in all the advanced classes. One of the advanced classes was a science class (if she told me which one, I've forgotten). In that science class, the teacher informed his class, as a piece of triviality, that anyone could shut down the most complicated computer by programming it with the information that 1=0. Interesting, my mother thought. I wonder if that's really true. And she filed that one away.
Flash forward to the very special field trip that some of the better students were taken on. It was to one of the universities that had one of the newest computers in their research department. My mother was on that field trip. The computer took up a whole room. (Remember, it was the late sixties.) The grad students there were very excited to have these high school students to show around and tell all about their new exciting big fancy computer. And then they made their fatal mistake. They told those high school students that, for a short while, they could play around with it. I mean, what could go wrong? They weren't factoring in my mother. All the time since that fateful science class my mother had been hoping to test her teacher's statement. And so she did, neatly and correctly entering it into the computer.
The grad students couldn't figure out what went wrong-- one moment there were a bunch of kids barely out of puberty playing with ENIAC Jr or whatever it was called, and then it suddenly shut off and wouldn't turn back on. Because my mother acted like she had no idea what had happened. Sadly, the field trip ended early.
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