My kingdom for a cookie

We had been settled in for a few weeks and it was time to get serious about food. I thought it would be nice to return some of the hospitality we'd been given since we arrived - so it would be nice to serve tea and cookies to guests. And what kind of cookies come immediately to mind to a midwestern American? Chocolate chip cookies of course! Every mother makes chocolate chip cookies - people in America when they're trying to sell a house will bake chocolate chip cookies just before prospective buyers come to look - just to make it smell like home.

I had already determined that the local shops didn't carry chocolate chips. So we went to the much larger store in Ullapool. No chocolate chips. We went over the mountains to Inverness - a fairly good sized city. Nope. No luck. What? How can one live without chocolate chip cookies? In fact, how do mothers survive without baking cookies at all - which is what I finally discovered was the case there. You could buy "biscuits" in packages in the stores - but that's not the same. They also had no unsweetened chocolate - milk and semi-sweet but no unsweetened. So my favorite recipe for devils food cake was impossible since there was no Crisco either (at that time an indispensible baking staple for me). I could see I'd have to ask for a care package to be sent from home.

I was crying the cookie deprivation blues.