It's day 4 of my cookie bake-a-thon...my glycemic index runneth over.

How long has it been since you opened a jar of molasses and took a big whiff?  Well, that's too long.  I find it very easy to forget what molasses smells like, even if it's only been a few days since I've smelled it.  I just had to go get the jar again and take a big pull so I could remind you: it smells like a blend of dark-roast coffee and soy sauce.  That doesn't sound like a good idea for cookies.  But molasses in ginger cookies?  It's necessary, in a big way.

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It's been about 5 years since I was lucky enough to dig into a slice of my pal Diana's drool-worthy apple cake, and when I tasted this today....oh, man.  There was much more going on than I even remembered.  Appleness, like juicy red and dangling from the tree.  Pecans.  Cinnamon--a proper, generous amount of it.  But what really flipped me out was that I'd totally forgotten about the caramel glaze.  When Diana sent her recipe a couple of weeks ago, it just said "glaze"--nothing about the caramel nature of it, nothing about the science project that it truly is (although an easy one; I have tips!).  By glancing at the ingredients (sugar, butter, buttermilk, soda), you'd have to be a pretty frequent baker or candy-meister to say, "Oh yeah--that's caramel." I thought it was going to be a light, translucent, pouring glaze like my mom used to use on lemon jello cake.  I was totally wrong.  Eating this cake is like eating a caramel apple that somebody thoughtfully dosed with cinnamon and pecans, but it's a lot less messy and goes great with coffee.  It's inspiring.

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[sweet potato grits and deviled chicken thighs]

My name is Jennifer, and I am a cookbook junkie.  Recently our library underwent a complete cleaning, reorganization, and shelf-ification, and a few discoveries were made: Paul and I have duplicate copies of many things.  We don't have much in the science genre.  And I have approximately 250 cookbooks.  Cookbook collecting is definitely a habit for me, and reflects my evolution as a cook.  Consider the first cookbook I ever bought, The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, in 1991.  I had my first apartment at O.U., and though I wasn't a vegetarian, I was deathly afraid of poisoning myself by preparing meat improperly; thus began a long period of collecting vegetarian books.  Or my long-lived low-fat obsession, punctuated every Christmas with the latest Cooking Light yearbook. Thankfully, Cooking Light has lessened its low-fat strictures somewhat and is more about well-balanced eating, so I still follow it.  And in recent years, my focus has been Louisiana and Southern cooking, resulting in enough volumes to fill an entire shelf.  The latest purchase, Basic to Brilliant, Y'all, by Virginia Willis, is a great collection of Southern-based recipes with solid cooking techniques built in to each recipe (Willis is classically trained).  It joins the ranks of my favorite cookbooks that actually teach you how to change the recipes into something else, which is equivalent, in my mind, to a private cooking lesson (How To Cook Without a Book, The Art of Simple Food, and In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite are similar books).

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I come from a long line of German women who feel compelled to produce baked goods pretty much nonstop from October to January.  I'm not even fudging this fact a bit. I refer to the phenomenon as "extreme baking," or the condition during which our collective kitchens are completely dusted with flour and sugar, all of our tupperware containers have been filled with sweets and handed over to neighbors, and our feet ache from standing over too many mixing bowls, yet we continue to bake without ceasing.  I suffer from the condition, and I don't even have a sweet tooth.

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