Cookie dough ain't just for dumped, weepy chicks anymore

Ordinarily, the Fancy Pants dining room table is chock full of goodies after Purim. Israeli chocolates, unidentifiable candies, and hamentaschen of all levels of quality.

Most of this is thorough unimpressive to me. I 'm not a big dessert or snack person. What I like, I love, but if it's not in that narrow category, I can do without.

So imagine my shock and glee when I open up one of the bags...and therein lay a small plastic container of chocolate chip cookie dough. Not unnecessarily roasted, not surrounded by superfluous vanilla ice cream, just straight up dough, in a cup. The only improvement would have been if it had come in a cone, like the aforementioned iced cream, or like ground meats should be.

I'll explain: I believe the overheating of food into some sort of crispy or chewy new food is a surrender to convention, and a waste of precious time and fossil fuels. Steak tartare, sushi, dough of any kind - these are my basic food groups. I was raised to chase my roast beef down and pin it to my plate before I was able to eat it, because it was still screaming for help. I was raised to mock those who fretted about uncooked meats and eggs, to wonder what it is an oven was for other than storing dishes.

I spent months eating brownie batter - it's even my favorite ice cream. My favorite dessert? Chocolate pie, which is not cooked at all but refrigerated, raw eggs notwithstanding. Second favorite? Wife's mundels, which aren't double-baked like mundel bread. They're not even fully single-baked. The official term is NFC - Not Fully Cooked. Baked just long enough for the chocolate chips to get all gooey and melty.

If you mention nuts or fruit, you can get up and walk away.

There's a new standard for shalach manos. Take your tiny liquor bottles, your whimsical and poorly-structured Purim poems, your fresh-baked whatsnot. Just give me some flour, some raw eggs, some sugar, some vanilla, and mush it up and shove it under my door.

For those of you who bake your own fortune cookies, or send entire meals (spaghetti, anyone?), you're in a nutty class all by yourselves. But you know what would really put you over the top? Some challah dough in a single-serving tupperware. You'd have my undying gratitude.

What did WE send, you ask? Did we go all out, and craft some clever package neatly wrapped and zanily captioned? No, because the Fancy Pants are fancy, but we are also quite lazy. So no food for anyone. Sorry. Maybe if more of you provided some raw stuff, we'd be more inclined to return the favor.

And don't come with that "raw vegetable" crap. That would result in obnoxious retribution of a completely immature nature. So save yourself some time and aggravation, and give us a box of cake mix, a couple of eggs, and some oil, and get out of our way.

Oh, in case you were curious, Child was James Bond.

OJ is a killer - of teeth

This is what I don't understand about healthy food. Evidently, sometimes it's healthy, and sometimes not. Orange juice, for example. Drink it in the morning, noon, afternoon, evening, dusk, tea-time, brunch, morning snack, afternoon snack, pre-nap munchy time - all good. Drink it at night, however... and the evil OJ molecules start wailing away on your tooth enamel like an ex-wife and her new boyfriend. According to "science," vitamin C turns, werewolf style, into an acid-like substance, somehow related to citric acid.

Whatever. No one can take away my orange-y goodness.

Also, here are my top five foods I use to perform mold experiments in my fridge. Kids, take note - each of these products can be used for at least a B on a science fair project.

5) Apples. In a plastic bag they make a nice juicy slurry chock-full of bacteria.

4) Potatoes. They shrink, grow new potatoes, and somehow transmogrify into yams. Magic!

3) Salad. Whether it's the mix of vegetables, dressing and croutons, or maybe the fact that it tends to get lost in the back behind the english muffins and the glorious, glorious orange juice.

2) Bread. You'd think, with its protective shell of yeast organisms and whatnot, that it would survive the frozen tundra of my GE. But then it's forgotten, and the greenies get it, some white spots, and then the apple-y slush.

1) Milk. This is a no-brainer. It has almost no shelf life, and it's white, which is somehow more fragile. Also, it's got all that goddamn lactose, which makes holy hell in my large intestine, so it becomes some sort of divine retribution of epic proportions. Also, it gets chunky.