Yesterday at the natural food store in Flagstaff, AZ, Aurora and I came upon Spirulina "cookies," mostly green, containing no flour or eggs or diary, they were square, squishy, refrigerated, wrapped in cellophane -- we didn't have the guts to try them (not at $2.99 per).

With stress on the momentary rise here because Aurora's parents had to prepare to attend a pot-luck mystery party (set in the 1980s financial crisis), I decided a half batch was in order. Again I was deeply satisfied by the reliability of the recipe. Unfortunately, Aurora's parents left before the cookies were ready and we ate them all (except for a token two out of eighteen) before they returned home.

While they were out and I was preparing tomato sauce and pasta, I received a phone call from David and Stewart, still on the road, staying at a boarding school where a friend works in the administration. They wanted to know a bread recipe, which we couldn't remember either, and the talk quickly turned to cookies and previous posts here in particular. David agrees with me, although I think his opinion is a little more vehement, that we've lost sight of our original intentions by focussing on the salty chocolate oat cookies. Stewart disagrees, he is doing soul-searching by continuing to experiment, he said, melting dark chocolate instead of using cocoa powder and substituting cocoa nibs for chips -- by a cosmic coincidence the nibs, given to him by his aunt, come from Theo Chocolate in Seattle, which I visited during my stay in the rainy city, before which I had never heard of nibs. He says, we are spreading the gospel on the two coasts, the finer points of which we will have to continue to debate over the Christmas holiday when the three of us will be in Boston. Stewart will be working at Clear Flour Bakery in Brookline and I hope we will be able to steal some time on the equipment to search our souls on a grander scale.