No Bones About It

I was at home this weekend, frantically catching up on the half of Season 2 of Mad Men that I'd missed the first time around before the Season 3 premiere, and I thought "you know what would be awesome on a nice hot day like this one? Baking. Especially in my tiny apartment. Yes, this is totally a good and sane idea."

But for the particular baking experiment I had in mind, I needed some very specialized help. Fortunately, this weekend, I had a very special house guest who was willing to lend a hand. Or four.

It's George! George normally lives with FreckledK, but I had him on loan for a few days while she was out of town. He was a delightfully well mannered guest, and a terrific help around the kitchen.

Hey, George! You want to make some Sandra Lee dog cookies from the June/July issue of Semi-Homemade Magazine?

George looks skeptical. With all he's heard about Sandra Lee, can you blame him?

Never the less, he eventually consented to help out. So we dug out the recipe for Sandra Lee's "Bone-nanza Bones," and prepared our mise en place.

As you can see, you'll need whole wheat flour, milk, an egg, Heinz Home Style Gravy, and a jar of Gerber's turkey, rice, and vegetable baby food. Oh, and water.

So first you preheat your oven to 350. Then you'll separate the egg, and start sorting out your jarred ingredients.

Let's talk about the jarred ingredients. First of all, Heinz gravy is pretty foul, and I'm kind of embarrassed about the fact that I vaguely remember eating it at some point in my life.

But the baby food? Oh my god. Not to be the single person who judges your parenting choices, but really? Really? You feed this crap to your children?

Even George questions that decision.

So you put the baby food, the gravy, the egg white, and 1/4 cup of water into a bowl.

Mmmm. . . .look at the delicious levels of separation where the gravy and the baby food won't combine because they're both made from things not found in nature.

And then you stir and you stir until the ingredients come together in a delightful mixture. . .

. . .a mixture which totally looks nothing like something I would've thrown up in the bushes outside the Kappa Sig house in 1995. Nothing at all.

To this delightful situation, you'll want to slowly add two cups of whole wheat flour. I had to add a little more water at this point to get it to combine.

And in the meantime, you mix the egg yolk with a tablespoon of milk.

Putting the egg mixture to the side, you flour up a surface and roll the dough out to about 1/2 inch thickness.

You're then supposed to cut it into bones using a bone shaped cookie cutter. However, I don't have a bone shaped cookie cutter. This is probably somehow related to the fact that I don't have a dog.

I do, however, have a set of 100 different cookie cutters, so I let George pick some appropriate shapes.


He went with the turkey shape, because the cookies are made from turkey flavored baby food, and the cat shape, to appeal to his sense of whimsy.

So we cut out the cookies, and brushed the tops with the egg yolk/milk mixture. We then popped them into the oven. George supervised.

He then guarded the oven patiently for 35 minutes while the cookies baked.

He still looks pretty skeptical.

Once the cookies had reached their desired shade of golden-brown-ish doneness, we pulled them out of the oven and allowed them to cool completely.

George was actually very patient during the waiting process. The dogs in my family would've been in the kitchen constantly, trying to steal the cookies, but George sat with me quietly in the living room and listened to me as I fumed about how much I just hate Betty Draper.

Finally, the cookies were cooled. We wandered back into the kitchen, and I pulled one of the little cat cookies off of the cookie sheet, told George to sit, and dropped it into his waiting maw. . .

. . . and like that, it was gone.

So here's the bad news: George really, really liked the Sandra Lee cookies.


Now, I don't know if that's because he was doing some emotional eating because he was anxious about being out of his normal environment and separated from FreckledK, or if he just doesn't have a very well developed palate. But he was scarfing those bastards like there was no tomorrow.

Here's the other bad news: as much as George loved the cookies, the cookies. . . didn't exactly agree with him.

They gave him what can only be described as toxic gas. This is what he looked like after smelling his own farts:
So I think we can call this another Sandra Lee failure. Because no matter how much you love it, nothing that makes a stench like that come out of your ass can possibly be good, right?