Cookies. With or without sticks.

Two kinds of chocolate and a wee bit of peanut butter. Pretzels optional. © Ryan Schierling

In my now "vintage" 1970s recipe box there is a faded card that is spattered from decades of use, and the careful lines of my early teenage script are a barely-legible watercolor of blue ink. This is the mother recipe for innumerable batches of cookies I've baked in my lifetime. We all have a recipe or two like this tucked away somewhere – one from which a thousand improvisations are sprung. 

I was a lucky kid to help in the kitchen from a very early age, but somewhere around the age of eleven, baking cookies became a legitimate activity to stave off summer boredom. After hours of riding our ten-speeds on dirt roads through the middle of barley fields or walking the railroad tracks to the little general store with its weathered board and batten siding and shake porch that looked like something straight out of a spaghetti western, my friend Tammy and I would often choose to pass an afternoon baking cookies.