Kids and Cookies

I saw the cutest kid yesterday. He was running around, all upset because he had managed to get separated from his mother and he was crying (surprisingly his mother and friends did not at all seem concerned by the separation). Being the nice, caring vet students we are, we approached him quietly and cautiously, and managed to capture him and get him back to his herd safely. Yes, I was talking about a goat : D. Silly little guy (or girl, we didn't check) managed to squeeze himself through a hole in the fence and thus found himself in a small parking lot (he wasn't in any danger though) and separated from the others. Amusingly enough, none of the others seemed to really care about his panic. Maybe he's done it before?

Onto the cookies. Since the grocery store has managed to run out of cookies, I decided that my roomie and I needed to make cookies. This also served to help us use up some of our massive quantities of brown sugar, flower, oats, and chocolate chips. Since neither of us had a good recipe handy, we turned to the internet and found us a good looking chocolate chip-oatmeal cookie recipe. There was only one teeny flaw with this recipe (that we didn't realize until much later)-it called for no salt. Now apparently there are people who like and prefer their cookies without a few granules of salt, but I am not one of them. We baked them and tasted them, and just couldn't quite figure out what was wrong. I thought at first they just didn't taste sweet enough, but eventually thinking about my yummy sweet and salty snacks for the evening led me to realize that the cookies were lacking salt. Sure enough, sprinkling a couple of grains onto one and tasting it instantly made them taste like normal cookies. Go figure. So now I know salt really is an important part of the recipe (for me). Kind of like the time I had a roommate that made pancakes from scratch but had no milk and thus looked for a recipe that did not include a specified amount of milk to add. Means it must be negligible, right? Wrong! Also, if you don't have milk for your pancakes (or any recipe for that matter), don't then substitute oil. Strongest tasting pancakes I've ever had!