Stained Glass Cookies

Saturday: the bake sale. I will be selling chocolate cake and painted cookies. You use evaporated milk with food coloring as the 'paint' and they look like stained glass cookies. If stained glass became edible.

I have never participated in a bake sale before. I'm pretty excited. Except for the fact that I'm kind've a germophobe. Think about it. You are eating food that complete strangers cooked. They could lick the bowl. They could lick their fingers. They could, in fact, lick the bowl with their licked fingers. "Ew! Gross!" (The Truman Show) This does not even begin to cover the other things that could be in their kitchen. Dirt. Hair. Cockroaches.

It's only because I've lived in NYC that I know the depths of disgust-i-ness that a kitchen can sink to. I have two 'all-time most disgusting kitchens' that I either 1) ate food from or 2) helped to clean. Incidentally, both were in Staten Island (though this should, in no way, be read as an indictment against Staten Island's generally clean reputation).

The runner-up was a home filled with garbage. Literally filled with garbage. This lady never threw anything away. Not coupons. Not receipts. Not bubble-gum wrappers or empty bottles. Weird. We would clean it all up (after she requested we sort it) and then, the very next week, we would return to find out she had pulled it all back out. Her kitchen was filled with maggots, cockroaches, and dirty dishes. She cooked food for us too. I once ate fried rice (actually not bad) watching cockroaches crawl around our plates and, yes, a small one come FROM our plates. I am amazed that I survived NYC intact.

The number one kitchen also had cockroaches everywhere. Thousands of them. Millions of them. Whole family clans which had longstanding feuds with other cockroach clans. They were in the fridge (better air-conditioning I suppose), in the cupboards between plates, in the pan of long-term grease sitting on the back burner of the stove. They were even on the ceiling where they cleverly sky-bombed down on top of us as we tried to clean. I swear I saw some of them with little parachute packs and black ski-masks. When cockroaches go commando. (I think there was a movie about this once.)

We survived. And after several years of intense therapy I no longer involuntarily shudder when I see cockroaches in ninja-wear. Perhaps I should offer them cookies. I'll see what the therapist thinks. ;)