I baked up some snicker-doodles today. I've made them many a time throughout the years, including at least four times in the last two months. So I just looked at the recipe for the ingredients, and ignored the procedural instructions.

Annoyingly, the recipe writers didn't include the salt in the list of ingredients. Instead, in the narrative, it says "Sift together flour, baking powder, cream of tartar, and ½ teaspoon salt." That's the only mention of salt.

As it wasn't in the ingredients list, I overlooked it. I mixed the dough, warmed the oven, got out a cookie sheet, and tasted the dough. "Hmmm," thought I. "Tastes funny." I took another sample. Still not right. I pondered it over for a few moments, until I realized that I'd not added any salt at all.

The total volume of the other ingredients was about eight cups, so a half teaspoon of salt comprises 1/768 of the ingredients by volume. But that missing 1/768 was clearly noticeable.

I didn't think I could just add salt and remix the batch, it wouldn't get distributed evenly. I could have doubled the recipe and added twice the salt to the second batch, then mixed the batches as thoroughly as possible, but that was a heck of a lot of work, and I'd have to go rooting around the basement to see if Dad had a big-enough mixing bowl somewhere for it to work. I decided to bake them up salt-less and see how it worked.

The answer is, not well. They are cookies, and they do taste sweet, but they just aren't delicious. I will probably eat them instead of throwing them away, but I'm not munching them down with the enthusiasm I normally show for fresh cookies.

A few minutes after the last of them was out of the oven, the phone rang. Dad's manager and his coworker with the neighboring office had decided to pay him a surprise visit after work. Unfortunately, they went to Dad's previous house; the new owner was apparently surprised indeed. They had to give up the surprise and called, asking for directions.

They soon arrived, and we all had a nice talk, commiserating over prior operations. The office neighbor had prostate cancer a few years ago and a hernia fixed just two months ago, so he had plenty of tales to relate. The manager had also had his share of medical issues, although nothing quite so dramatic. Dad mentioned that I had just baked cookies, so I brought out a plateful, somewhat reluctantly. They each took a cookie, ate it, pronounced it delicious, then avoided the other cookies like they were dipped in poison.

Then we talked games, after they noted the rather large collected thereof on Dad's shelves. (The large book collection was not as noteworthy, as I presume his has a similar hoard in his office.) I pulled out Set and Chrononauts, and our two guests took notes about them, as they both have game-fanatic children. Their kids are big on Settlers of Catan, which is enough to tell me that they have good taste.

While the socialization was fun, they were officially visiting to find out Dad's health status, apparently because some rumors were flying around the office. Word had been that Dad was at death's door, and they were pleased to see him on the mend.

It was a lovely visit, and they were clearly work friends of Dad. Still, I noted with some amusement that they were clearly under orders not to talk about actual work, but couldn't resist asking how to test a particular group of samples that had arrived at the lab. Dad said something on the order of "Well, if I was there, I'd use ring-on-ring with a strain gage," and they both nodded and visibly took a mental note.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:18 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 646 words, total size 4 kb.