After the blog moved to this location, 900-1000 unique visitors per day disappeared. I don’t mind as much as you’d think. It was like attending a party every day in a ballroom full of H.G. Wells characters and wondering if there was spinach between my teeth, but things change, you know? It was a total blast to fictionalize myself and everyone around me while I was single, miserable and uninspired. Once I lived with an actual human being who kept trying to talk to me while I was writing, blogging became a fight one word at a time. But you know what? I love a good fight – especially a food fight.
If you peek at the food sections of New York Times or the Huffington Post, you find them packed with the thoughts of foodies of above-average income and often odd concerns. Scan for yourself, you’ll get a certain funny feeling like you simply must and add this to your list and top ten wines beneath notice. You don’t need to be a trendmeister to see which way the aroma’s wafting. That kind of food writing may be socially useful – or not.
While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Sales of Cheese
Domino’s Pizza was hurting early last year. Domestic sales had fallen, and a survey of big pizza chain customers left the company tied for the worst tasting pies.
Then help arrived from an organization called Dairy Management. It teamed up with Domino’s to develop a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese, and proceeded to devise and pay for a $12 million marketing campaign.
Consumers devoured the cheesier pizza, and sales soared by double digits. “This partnership is clearly working,” Brandon Solano, the Domino’s vice president for brand innovation, said in a statement to The New York Times.
But as healthy as this pizza has been for Domino’s, one slice contains as much as two-thirds of a day’s maximum recommended amount of saturated fat, which has been linked to heart disease and is high in calories.
Tom Monaghan, Domino’s founder, financially supports Operation Rescue and built his own fundamentalist Catholic town in Florida. For me to spend money in a Domino’s Pizza, I would have to be on the verge of starvation in a town without a single culinarily capable entrepeneur and absolutely nothing else separating me, my flimsy morals and sauteing someone else’s house pets. I absolutely do not care if Domino’s sells its customers a hunk of watery casein and a Ritz and calls it “pizza” for all the sustenance their products offer. Let me offer some excellent advice: DON’T EAT THAT. Problem: solved!
Lately, I want homemade, substantial, really real food. Last week, I noticed 100% of the oatmeal cookies in the whole world were at other people’s houses; today, I decided to fix their wagons by making some kickass whole wheat oatmeal cookies.

What? Pete's grandmother bought china!
Tooling around the net, I found this promising recipe for
Easy Best Oatmeal – Raisin Cookies. I replaced the AP flour with whole wheat, added a teaspoon of ground ginger and an extra squirt of vanilla extract. Change the two sugars for one, and make that brown sugar. If you grind the nutmeg yourself, grind enough that you think you might hallucinate. Add a cup of dried cranberries to the raisins. If you’re feeling really capricious, toss in 3/4 cup pignoli nuts. Roll into balls slightly – just slightly – smaller than golf balls, unless you want larger cookies, in which case you should go crazy and roll them whatever insane size you wish. But don’t blame me if your Silpat cowers when you cross the kitchen threshold. Because you are crazy, Crazy Person!

Humble oatmeal cookies get the Lenox treatment.
Look, eat a cookie or don’t eat a cookie, but why not make it fantastically tasty and actually good for you? Let’s look again at the ingredients:
oatmeal
egg
raisins
whole wheat flour
cranberries
nuts
What’s not to love? These cookies are so good you’d eat them off a hair brush and so good for you you wouldn’t mind the extra floss. Okay, don’t eat that, but make these cookies for yourself and write me a letter that doesn’t include pretentious wine pairings.