Hold the partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, please

Andy Rooney did a bit one Sunday night in which he rounded up all the ingredients in some store-bought chocolate chip cookies and tried to make them at home.  Of course the cookies turned out awful; you have to have a degree in chemical engineering to be a commercial baker any more, and Mom's homemade Toll House delights would never last long enough to be baked, shipped and shelved down at the Bag-Ur-Self.  

Rooney found it tough accumulating enough Unbleached Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate {Vitamin B1}, Riboflavin {Vitamin B2}, Folic Acid), Semisweet Chocolate Chips (Sugar, Chocolate, Cocoa Butter, Dextrose, Soy Lecithin), Sugar, Soybean Oil, Partially Hydrogenated Cottonseed Oil, High Fructose Corn Syrup, leavening (Baking Soda and/or Ammonium Phosphate), Salt, Whey (from Milk), Natural and Artificial Flavor and Caramel Color anyway.  These items come in 50-gallon tubs, anyway.  

Here is all you need to make the best chocolate chip cookies right in your own lovely home.  You probably have 1/2 of this stuff anyway in the pantry. Better make two batches; you never know when hungry people will drop by. Hint.

But - do you remember the big kerfuffle a few weeks back when it was revealed that Subway sub rolls contained  zodicarbonamide - and that substance is also found in yoga mats?  Oh the horrors!  

Well, put down your sub for a second and give the yoga a rest long enough to listen to this story on NPR.  It turns out that unless you eat about 27,000 subs per day, you don't really need to fret about the levels of zodicarbonamide you ingest.  Scientists who spend their entire workdays wearing white lab coats and peering into microscopes say they don't fret too much about tiny concentrations in bread being "toxicologically significant" and so now neither do !

However, if you really want to worry about something, ponder the fact that sodium caseinate is found in two substances found in most homes:  non-dairy creamer...and Elmer's glue.  Hmmmmm.