Make Cookies of your Enemies

...and there were cookies, cookies, cookies! My determination to bring my bit of Christmas cheer to this land has gone from dream to reality.
Today, there were cookies. And, oh, such cookies there were: chocolate-coconut cream cheese pinwheels, cappuccino crinkles, gingerbread, sugar. Yuki, Yvonne, and Rachel came over at 5pm to participate in a veritable orgy of cookie baking joy with me. By 9.30, Yvonne was sick from too much cookie dough and Yuki's hands could no longer close properly due to her over-zealous work with the Cake Mate squeeze tips. You can see more of our fabulous creations to the left.

What will become of these cookies? Well, some of us hope to spread holiday cheer to the 98% of our co-workers who have contracted the flu simultaneously. We also hope, perhaps, to buy friends or good-will at our places of employment tomorrow morning. We shall prance in, bearing trays of delicious treats to lay at the feet of our kochos, kyotos, and fellow sensei. A cookie can say 1,000 words, as the saying goes. "I'm sorry, I don't speak your language and you don't speak mine... lets be friends anyway. Have a cookie. Douzo." Or perhaps, "I'm sorry I'm paid just as much as you are, yet do 1/10 the work. Complain to your Board of Education about it, but in the mean time, love me. Have a cookie." Things like that. Other people plan on eating these cookies themselves. Still others plan on giving them to their husbands. You can muddle out amongst yourselves who is going to do which.

Speaking of cookies. You may be wondering where the title of this entry came from. I will meander that way forthwith. While sipping some coffee and surfing the internet today (on the subject of the Japanese + cookies), I came upon some startling and intriguing information. The article began so:

"As part of an ongoing battle against invading swarms of giant jellyfish in local waters, some residents of Fukui prefecture have developed a method for converting the jellyfish into powder, which is used to make souvenir cookies...the result is a cookie with a superbly textured sweetness nicely complemented by the bitter, salty flavor of jellyfish."

So! I think. The naicha have stooped to such under-the-belt tactics as powdering their enemies and making cookies of them. I shake my head to myself and slurp my coffee. Typical Japanese. They'll make omiyage out of anything. These jellyfish, btw, can grow up to 6ft wide and weigh 450lbs. Imagine how many cookies you could get out of just one.

Heh! I immediately slip into a daydream, in which I am Tom Cruise. Beneath the cherry tree, or possibly in a small picturesque shrine, I ask the samurai warrior, How you do you plan to fight off the evil invading forces who come to desecrate your village's ancient ways? He morphs into Harold Perrineau as Marcutio and shouts, We shall make cookies of them! And then a 450lb giant jellyfish seizes him in its tentacles and eats him. This is funny for a few seconds (funny enough to make me snort some coffee up my nose anyway... hey, at work anything can be entertaining), til I remember that whatever movie line I'd made that pun off of actually wasnt said by Marcutio, and... yeah, not actually from that movie. Huh.

Gingerbread or jellyfish... despite our cultural differences, it warms my heart to know that both the Japanese and Joyce are happily making cookies this holiday season.