My mom taught me how to cook food when I was a young boy. We cooked countless meals together. Later when I learned how to cook food for myself I learned to prepare meals for myself. I like to share food with others. Food is a blessing of life. I am blessed to have enough food to eat. I enjoy eating meals with other people. One of my favorite foods my mom taught me how to cook was chocolate chip cookies. I have many memories of preparing the batter on the kitchen counter by needing the dough and adding chocolate chips, eggs, baking powder, flower, sugar, vanilla and water into a mixing bowl and then onto the kitchen counter and dividing the dough into round balls and placing them with space in between each ball of cookie dough onto a greased metal baking tray. Then I’d press down on each ball making them flat and round. The next step in preparing the cookies was to preheat the oven until it was hot enough to bake the cookies on the baking tray. Cooking is a pleasure of mine and as a young boy I waited patiently while the chocolate chip cookies baked in the oven at home. The smell of sweet chocolate chip cookies was potent. The taste of fresh baked chocolate chip cookies I enjoy to this day. I prefer cookies when they are fresh out of the oven and have cooled down a little and still soft.
People love to eat dessert. Sweet foods are often prepared as dessert to enjoy after a meal. The meal is the main course and most filling. The dessert is usually a smaller portion of food and usually sweetened with sugar or fruit juice.
By the mid nineties I was used to cooking most meals for myself. At home I lived with my dad and he had hired a nanny who looked after me to some extent and prepared meals for us. My dad hired five nannies over the years to help look after me and prepare meals for us. I was 17 in 1995 and there was no longer a need for me to have a nanny. I knew how to cook for myself and was used to it. When I was 18 I enrolled in community college at FRCC. I had a job working in the kitchen mostly as a dishwasher in an Italian restaurant. I quit my job and focused on college. My dad gave me a car because I was a college student. It was a Mazda 626 LX sedan. In college I was preparing to study for an Associates Degree. I enrolled in prerequisite courses for a full year with a full time schedule of classes. There was a computer room in the Campus in Heatherwood where I created a Hotmail.com account for my email address. The internet was new to me. I had experience using computers at home as a young boy and in the computer room in elementary school. When I was going to college the internet was marketed as the next big thing. There was a lot of hype around it. At some point my dad gave me a computer. I remember some of the first times I logged on to the internet at home in my room. Realplayer was a big deal back then. Realplayer was a program on the internet where visitors to the internet could stream live video to their computer. I used a dial up modem connected to my computer to connect to the internet. The speed of the amount of data that could be sent to and from my computer was much slower than what it is today in 2025. Most of the videos I watched with Realplayer were prerecorded videos. Watching a live stream technology did not exist back then. The only live stream video was usually on television on occasional news reports.
My memories of what the internet was back then was a big deal. I had already been introduced to pornography in magazines and by the time I visited porn on the internet I knew that it has a powerful effect on the visitor. Outside of college and homework I was having a difficult time socially. I didn’t know what I wanted to major in for a career and after one year of college classes I stopped going to college. My dad took back the car because I was no longer a college student. I told myself and others I was a student of life. I went to work full time. I remember working at a Baja Cali Mexican restaurant where I learned how to cook on a line. It was not fast food and it was not a fancy restaurant where a waiter took customers orders at their table and served their meals at their table. At the restaurant people would line up and place their orders with us cooks from a menu on the wall and pay for their food that was made to order at the cashier who was running the cash register. The restaurant had similarities to the Chipotle restaurant chain. Hand held cellphones were barely on the market and technology for pay to tap and google pay did not exist. Customers paid for their food with cash dollars or their credit card.
Technology has changed so much since I was 18 and registered with Microsoft for my Hotmail.com email address account. In my late teens the internet was very interesting to me so much that I wanted to become a website designer. My dad supported me and bought me educational software and text books for Adobe Golive, an HTML editor. I studied on my own mostly and learned many basic website design skills. I learned how to create web pages and ad text and graphics to them and how to lay out web pages so the visible information to the visitor was in order. I signed up for a web hosting account and registered a domain name and uploaded my first of many web pages with FTP to the host computer. From there I navigated with Internet Explorer web browser to my website domain name on the internet where I got to visit the first website I designed. It was a big deal to me. I was better at WYSIWYG what you see is what you get technology. Software engineering and coding was very difficult and I relied heavily on plug and play programs. I learned some HTML coding. I learned how to download premade widgets that would keep track of the amount of visitors my website received and add them to my web pages.
Cookies the technology was a big deal. I learned that cookies were back end code that collect data when a visitor visits a website. Technology cookies are used to collect many kinds of data about visitors at websites. I was able to install some premade cookies on the websites I designed that detailed what kind of web browser and computer the visitor to my websites was visiting from. Unlike chocolate chip cookies from an oven, I didn’t learn how to code my own technology cookies.
In food a cookie is a treat, a snack, sweet food, not the main course. The main course is the meal which is usually not sweet. Most of the energy in a meal is in the main course. For breakfast the main course meal is what sustains a person and gives them enough energy and nutrients for their mind and body to last them until their next meal which is often lunch. Dessert such as a cookie usually leaves a sweet taste in a persons mouth. It can cleanse the pallet from a savory meal. A glass of water does the same and leaves no aftertaste.
Much of how I learn is visual. I am blessed with eyesight. There are two kinds of cookies. The cookie you can see with your eyes and smell with your nose and touch with your hands and bring to your lips and taste on your tongue in your mouth and there are cookies that function in the background of websites that are not visible to website visitors on the internet. They are very different. There is nothing wrong with a cookie and be careful when choosing the source for a cookie.
Interest or not 