Gotta Try It

Baking cookies has evolved from the recipe on the back of the chocolate chips package to refrigerated slice-and-bake dough to already-portioned cookie dough that you just “place and bake.” Now Pillsbury has introduced the next step: already-portioned cookie dough in bigger sizes.

        Pillsbury Big Deluxe Classics come in an 18-ounce package with 12 instead of 20 cookies. The idea is to appeal to adults with the larger size and new flavors, like white chunk macadamia nut, peanut butter chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin.

        These aren't going to stand in for cookie-shop cookies, like at the mall. They're still thin and bendy, but they have lots of chocolate chips and nuts and raisins. And apparently they have some new way to get the chips on the top of the cookie as well as embedded in the dough, so they look better.

        Because you bake them yourself, they are certainly superior to packaged cookies, but not as good as they kind you can mix up in 15 minutes.

        P.S. Pillsbury does not recommend eating the cookie dough raw. $2.99 per package.

        Required Reading

        Anyone who's been a restaurant server has said it: Everyone ought to be a waiter or waitress, even if for just a week. Because servers, a backbone of the economy, are taken for granted. But to get some idea of the view from “the other side of the tray,” read Hey, Waitress (University of California Press, $29.95) by Alison Owings . She interviewed women who wait on tables all over the country in various types of establishments and tells their varied stories.

        There are waitresses who took place in historic events, such as the Woolworth sit-in in Greensboro, S.C. There is a woman who waited tables until she was 95, another who sued La Cote Basque for gender discrimination. But mostly they're just the stories of hard-working women and their feelings about rude customers, tips and the pride they take in their job.

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