Once upon a time, a beautiful maiden-slash-lodge-owner named Ruth Wakefield made a dire mistake.  While preparing some cookies for her guests at the Toll House Inn, she ran out of baking chocolate.  All in a tizzy, Ms. Wakefield chopped and dropped a gift from Mr. Andrew Nestle of the Nestle Chocolate Company, a semi-sweet chocolate bar.  Unfortunately for her beloved Butter Drop Do cookies, the chocolate did not melt and disperse evenly.  Fortunately for lovers of chocolate chip cookies everywhere, the broken chocolate morsels softened in the dough and a new cookie was born.  Thanks, Ms. Wakefield!  Your blunder has spread love, joy and sometimes Salmonella across the nation, and other countries wish they were as cool as us for thinking of it first.

I’m going to let you in on a (not-so-secret) secret: people like cookies. It should also go without saying that people don’t like cookie dough; they LOVE cookie dough.  In fact, one might argue that half (or more than half) of the reason for making cookies is so one can eat the raw dough.  That’s a thing, right?  Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?  [Read more →]

Good news for all you romantics out there! The New York Times is hosting its second Modern Love college essay contest, which means it wants to give you $1000 big ones for your take on what the four-letter-word means to our generation. The editor of the column had this to say about the last contest, in 2008:

When the contest deadline passed seven weeks later, more than 1,200 essays had arrived, from 365 schools in 46 states and Puerto Rico. In perhaps typical collegiate fashion, nearly 700 poured in on the last day, 400 over the final hour. [Read more →]

From the New York Times:

ON a spring morning in 2002, Michael Kerry Matthews, a history major and an aspiring filmmaker, watched as a beautiful young woman walked across a cafeteria at Brown University and put two pieces of bread in the toaster on her way to the omelet line. Mr. Matthews felt an overwhelmingly urgency to act.

“They rarely had this kind of good sourdough bread,” he said. “There wasn’t any left. So I guess I kind of took her toast.”

The woman was Sarah Staveley-O’Carroll, a junior history student. She had spotted Mr. Matthews, a freshman, who was “so cute.” But, handsome or not, he was a toast thief. …

This recipe begins with Sarah Staveley-O’Carroll ’03, Michael Matthews ’05, and a slice of sourdough bread from the Ratty.

Add a dash of old-school tactics, including “crashing parties that one knew the other was attending, signing up for a class or switching into a study section that one heard the other was in.”

Mix in one Hardball host, a stint in Rwanda, an aggressive mountain gorilla, and one French Huguenot minister and you get a classic NYT Vows piece.

Can we all say just say “aww”?