Growing up a fat kid offers one insight. For example, it is a rule that while shopping for jeans in any department store in the United States, if your mother politely inquires about husky sizes (it is a real thing), the salesperson will thereafter refer to you by a nickname — King being the most prevalent, although Chief is very popular in the Midwest. Another thing you learn besides how to properly wear a white T-shirt to the pool and how to avoid changing in the locker room, is the fundamental fact that no matter how many detentions you serve or how many times you get sent to the principal’s office there will always, reliably, be one person in the school who will tenderly look past all of your indignities: the lunch lady.
Long before there is romantic love for the former fat kid, there is replete love: an ambivalent adoration for a quasi-mother figure that’s exercised through the edible, and is also slightly Oedipal. It is, indeed, the indelible and delectable relationship between the fat kid and his lunch lady. An admiration that is conveyed not with bouquets of flowers or handwritten poems but through Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes and fruit cocktail along with a subsequently — and swiftly — empty tray. It is dinner not by candlelight, but rather lunch by fluorescent light. The culmination encompassed by the careful manipulation of a plastic tray: goulash on Monday, tacos on Tuesday, sloppy Joe’s on Wednesday and … by Friday, I’m in love.
For me, the object of this gluttonous affection was one Mrs. Myers, my lunch lady from second to sixth grade. Ooh, she had a way of making tuna casserole that would make your stomach rumble and your salivary glands quiver. So much so was my adoration unwavering that in fourth and fifth grade I went the entire school years without ever bringing cold lunch (infidelity in a brown paper bag). This show of steadfastness was rewarded at least once a month by the glorious and often pleasantly unexpected addition of Mrs. Myers’s remarkable Monster Cookies to the lunch menu. Such grand displays of culinary and motherly ingenuity were these that they would regularly cause a tear drop to roll softly down the cheek of this fat kid (or was that a bead of sweat). They were a gift meant to be shared generously and one that I will give now in the confines of this column. So here it is, Mrs. Myers’s own recipe that she kindly granted to my mother upon my graduation from grade school. It is the true fat kid’s cookie and along with it, I include a cookie recipe of my own borne out of an older, slightly more discerning palette that was once nurtured by love served with plastic gloves and ice cream scoops.
Mrs. Myers’s Monster Cookies
3 eggs
1 1/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup (1stick) butter, room temperature
1 1/4 cup peanut butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tablespoon corn syrup
4 1/2 cups oatmeal (not instant)
1 cup chocolate chips
1 cup peanut M&Ms
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix together eggs, sugars, baking soda, butter, peanut butter, vanilla and corn syrup. Beat well. Stir in oatmeal, chocolate chips and M&Ms. Drop by spoonful onto lightly greased cookie sheet, (or one with parchment paper or Silpat). Bake at 350 degrees for about 12 minutes. Let cool on baking sheet for 5 minutes or so then transfer to a wire rack or other cool surface.
Coconut-Apricot Cookies
1 1/4 cup oatmeal (not instant, preferably rolled oats)
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup (1stick) butter, room temperature
1/2 cup brown sugar (preferably light-brown)
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
3/4 cup roughly chopped dried apricots
3/4 cup flaked coconut
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a medium bowl, combine oats, flour, baking powder and salt; set aside. Beat together (preferably using an electric mixer) butter and sugars until creamy and smooth; beat in egg and vanilla extract. Slowly mix in oat/flour mixture and mix until just combined. Stir in apricots and coconut. Roll healthy spoonfuls of dough into balls (12 or so) and place on baking sheet about three inches apart. Using your fingers, flatten balls until even thickness is about 3/4 of an inch. Bake cookies until edges begin to brown, 25-30 minutes. Let cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes or so, then transfer to a wire rack or other cool surface.