Gratitude Cookies

Any cookie recipe will do for gratitude cookies. The specific cookie depends on the intended recipient, right? This week I made two kinds for different purposes.

Making cookie gifts is one of the ways in which I express gratitude to staff at the clinic where I’ve received care for many years and I surprised the entire clinic this week with nine dozen Peanut Butter Butter cookies. (You read that right. Mine are a butter cookie flavored with peanut butter.) I wrapped individual servings of three cookies in waxed paper packets and put them in a cowboy-boot box lined with clean foil, carried in a plastic bag which could immediately be put in the recycling and with a card reminding the staff to use safe handling, as I’d done.

I opened the bag and each of the gals in the large reception area were first (and delighted) to reach into the box and grab a packet for themselves and, per my wish, to set aside a packet for my favorite of the front office staff who had the day off but would be working the next day. When the N.A. came to reception to collect me, I handed it to her with instructions to pop it into their kitchen area to share.

When my doctor knocked and walked into the exam room, she said, “You like me, don’t you? Bringing my favorite cookie. I don’t eat sweets much, but when I do, peanut butter cookies it is.” I didn’t know and admitted it, but I do like her. (She’s young, exotically beautiful like my daughter, kind and I couldn’t believe she was a doctor the first time that I saw her. Who wouldn’t like such a doctor?)

Of course I bake and share my daughter’s favorite cookies when she’s around and I’m very happy that she’s home from London and finished the quarantine period plus more. Today I made her favorite of my Jones line of soft, cakey, frosted and decorated cookies, the Rum Raisin Joneses*. It just so happens that she has an occasion tomorrow in which the presentation of a dozen of them will be all about her gratitude for a moment in time.

Gratitude cookies. They’re all about love. I love to make them. I love to give them. Others love to receive them.