COOKIES

I came to the very disturbing realization today that no one in Argentina has had proper cookies.

The lack of cookies in this country is not new to us; about a month in Kelly went crazed one weekend and practically salivated in front of the counter at Tea Connection, the extremely Americanized cafe nearby which is the only place known to sell cookies here. But whether it be lack of money or short attention span, we passed on those cookies, but the craving has been reinstated thanks to a sudden crush of holiday specials being shown on TV, from Full House to Family Guy. Why? I don't know. But a Lifetime holiday special starring Tate Donovan and Anne Heche seems like a good enough reason to celebrate an early Christmas with some Santa-shaped sugar cookies.

Today I started teaching a new student. Relevant update: I now teach through Wall Street Institute, where I sit for several hours in a row and have a new small group every hour, and through 2 other institutes that pimp (for lack of a better word) me out to their business clients, and those students I have more regularly and get paid twice as much for. We got to talking about holidays, as Argentines seem to take the first day of Spring as a legit vacation day, and we covered various other holidays and their traditions (New Years, oddly, is not about bubbly to them), and any such conversation with me naturally comes down to the food.

And this is where I realized that these people have lived their entire existence without cookies. Cookies to them are breakfast biscuits or, at best, oreos. They also have something called alfajores here, which are like extra floury cookies with dulce de leche in the middle. They are nothing compared to homemade batches of Christmas cookies and snickerdoodles. Peanut butter cookies were beyond their mental grasps.

If anyone has a good recipe for Christmas cookies that we could use, that would be awesome, as I promised many a porteño today that I would bring them some. Preferably ones with few ingredients. That I can eyeball the measurements for. Or are in metric.