The first thing I ever learned to cook or bake was this really excellent family recipe for a unique kind of cookie. The recipe is fairly simple, and I’ve been making them semi regularly for around fifteen years now, so by this point much of the process is muscle memory for me.
I make these cookies for both Thanksgiving and Christmas every year, both of which are hosted at my parents’ house. A major ingredient of this recipe is oats. Neither of my parents eat carbs, so these two holidays are the only times the oats in their pantry are used.
In the recipe, the oats are added to a mixture of other ingredients that must be heated on the stove while being mixed, and is therefore quite hot.
Last Thanksgiving I was making these cookies as usual, and I got to the part of the recipe where the oats are added. Like I mentioned, it’s basically muscle memory for me at this point, so I did this step without looking at either the oats or the contents of the pot after I added the oats. The next step involves adding a couple more ingredients. I measured out these ingredients and went over to the pot the add them as well, but before I did this by chance I finally actually looked into the pot.
It was Grain Weevil Pompeii in there. They attempted to flee from the heat of the cookie dough magma below them in such unison that at first I thought their movement was some kind of chemical reaction instead of hundreds of individual organisms. It was truly terrible. I’m so sorry Grain Weevil Pompeii.
