The cornstarch, she is a mystery

Somebody gave me a jar of peanut butter recently and rather than just feeding it to the kids, I decided to make peanut butter cookies. I went online and found a recipe for "The Whole Jar of Peanut Butter" cookies, which sounded about right.

I haven't made them yet.

Alex heard about the impending cookies and said kind of wistfully that he likes oatmeal cookies, you know. So fine. It's Christmas. I'll make those too. Now it turns out that he also likes Mom's apple crisp. I'm still trying to convince him that Red Delicious apples aren't really the way to go with that, but it's an uphill battle because we have a bunch of them already--and got them for free--making it hard for him to understand why we might need to buy even more apples to make the crisp.

Anyway.

Yesterday we were at the store and did manage to come home with the key ingredient tying all of these various endeavors together: lots and lots of flour.

So today I'm home alone, having read all my favorite blogs, and figure it would be nice to go ahead and make one of the various planned confections. I got an oatmeal cookie recipe online (allrecipes.com will never fail you) and headed down to the kitchen.

This recipe happens to include ground cloves, which is not a normal part of our life, but which Alex bought yesterday on a whim, saying he wanted to put it in his coffee. Uh, whatever.

I printed out the recipe and got out the ingredients, but couldn't find the cloves. I knew I'd seen them someplace strange after we got home yesterday, but a search of the kitchen (all the way down to the bottom of the massive, impractical plastic bucket that serves as our pantry), Alex's office and even the bedroom turned up nothing. I had just dialed the last digit of Alex's cell phone number when I saw the flat little packet in the very spot it had been sitting yesterday when it first imprinted itself on my subconscious: under the coffee table in the living room.

Of course.

As for the title of this post, while not particularly relevant to the story here, it is about cooking and trying new recipes, and it will make Lisa laugh. So that makes it a good title.