Ode to my "Bah"

My Great Grandma, a.k.a. "Bah," (pronounced like what a sheep would say – you know, "Baaaa." I don't know, ask my mom. She tried to say Grandma and it came out "Bah." Think that's weird? Grandpa came out "Daddal." Your guess is as good as mine.) loved chocolate covered orange rinds. I can still hear her saying it now in her West Virginia drawl, "But I don't want none of that 'light' chocolate. Only dark chocolate." The last time I saw my Bah was on her 95th birthday when the whole family went back east to surprise her. I bought her a bag of dark chocolate covered orange rinds from a fancy chocolate shop in Los Gatos. I handed her the bag and told her what it was. She was sharp as a tack until the day she died but her eyesight had seen better days. She took the bag from my hand and promptly put it in the top drawer of the side table to her left and said, "I'm gonna put them right in here so I have them all to myself. Because I am not going to share them with no one!" And I hope she didn't.

While my mom was growing up, Bah was her best bud and she spent countless weekends at her apartment. She grew up adopting many of Bah's habits and behaviors, especially food preferences. Bah had a blood pressure issue so she ate nearly no salt. So, neither did Mom. It was not until just recently that Mom even started incorporating salt into her diet and growing up we would wait for Mom’s famous “too salty” cough as she would take her first bite of a meal while eating out. My mom also prefers dark chocolate much like Bah, and you would be hard pressed to find her eating any of that “light” stuff. However, the addition of orange, or any kind of fruit for that matter is where my mother draws the line. In her opinion, which she makes very apparent by a snarled nose and look of disgust when fruit and chocolate are even mentioned in the same sentence, is why would anyone ruin perfectly good chocolate with all that pesky fruit?

I don’t understand it. This coming from a woman who actually started to like sugar on her tomatoes because she copied her Grandmother who substituted it for salt. But dip a raspberry in chocolate? DISGUSTING!

Which brings me to tonight. I am home by myself this evening and my son is sleeping soundly upstairs. Since this sleeping on his own thing is relatively new for me, I have to find something to do with my time otherwise I will check on him every 10 minutes. Literally. I do it so much I wonder why I don’t just lay on the floor by his crib but then I think to myself, “Now Heather, that would be insane.” So I started rifling through the cupboard looking for something to bake and I came across a bag of dried cherries that I think I was planning on adding to homemade trail mix. But why would I want to do that when I could add them to cookies?? So with the handful of cherries, a half a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips and the little gem I found hiding in the back of my cupboard, Hershey’s “Special Dark” Cocoa Powder, I made these:



Based on the color of dough alone, I knew they were going to be rich and delicious and I owe it all to the dark chocolate cocoa. The light stuff just wouldn’t have cut it. And I am sure if my mom knew I put cherries in them she would make some kind of gagging sound and wonder how I could have added “landmines” to what had the potential to be the perfect cookie. And to that I say, well, maybe I just want to put them right here in this drawer to my left and keep them all to myself. Not share them with no one!