If you took my Personal Essay writing workshop a few Saturday mornings ago at the Dalton Creative Arts Guild, then you know one perk of having me as an instructor is that I bring chewy chocolate merengue cookies. I have the recipe stored in my Paprika app, where I also store hundreds of recipes for things I have no intention of ever making.

I make these cookies because I do not like baking and I do not like baking for the same reason I would not like prison: Rules. Rules make me want to go to the closest library and scream obscenities. But chewy chocolate merengues have very few rules: Mix together powdered sugar, egg whites, cocoa, and chocolate chips, then bake. It takes longer to type out their name than to throw them together.

I set about making the cookies on the Friday night before my Saturday morning workshop. It was late, and I was already tired when I realized I did not have any egg whites. Making merengue cookies without egg whites is like driving a car without tires, or installing a congress without a moral backbone. Things might seem exciting for a while, but you’re probably heading for a wreck.  

Luckily, I did have ChatGPT, which said that the gold standard substitute for egg whites is aquafaba—aka chick pea liquid. In fact, aquafaba is as close to egg whites as you can get without an actual chicken being involved.

Lacking something as basic as egg whites while having something as seemingly obscure as aquafaba is like possessing Chanel’s entire haute couture collection but not owning underwear. No one can figure out your priorities.

After I mixed together the powdered sugar, cocoa and aquafaba, I realized I also did not have chocolate chips. This—discovering deep into the process of cooking that you do not have what you need—is why chefs came up with the concept of mis en place. Mis en place means you have bought, prepped, and measured all the ingredients you will need for your dish ahead of time, so that the cooking process can unfold in an orderly manner and without stress or calamity. People who are not chefs simply call this paying attention, or, alternatively, giving a damn.

By the time I discovered I did not have enough chocolate chips to make the cookies for which aquafaba, that slimy apologist, had already been subbed in, I was ten minutes in and losing patience fast. I felt that, having solved the egg white problem, I should not have to also solve a chocolate chip problem, and so I decided to just use the handful I had and hope for the best. I sprinkled them into the batter, spooned twelve right-sized mounds onto a cookie sheet, and slid it  into the oven.

Twelve minutes later what I pulled out was not a delicate collection of chewy chocolate merengue cookies, but a hardened riverbed of brown, sugary chick pea suspension.  

“Oh no!” I exclaimed, setting the pan on the counter. “The cookies are ruined!”

My husband, who was dozing two rooms away with the TV blasting, somehow heard the word “cookies” and zoomed into the kitchen. Undaunted, he broke off a corner of the hard, flat goo and chewed thoughtfully. I watched his face like he was a rare species of mammal ingesting something that might cause him to spontaneously ignite.

He did not ignite. We rebranded the sugary nightmare “chocolate bark” and I took it to my workshop the next day, where I used it as a teaching tool. I told my students that I had set out to make one thing, but because of decisions I made along the way, it became another. I likened this to writing the personal essay, whereby in writing true stories from our life, we must make decisions about what details to include and what to leave out. And we have to allow the final product to reveal itself, even (and especially) if it turns out not to look or sound the way we thought it would (or wanted it to). Suddenly, the bark was not a kitchen mishap but a literary metaphor.

The next night, in the middle of making chicken soup, I discovered that I did not have any chicken. I was hungry and uninterested in metaphors, and my absent mindedness was beginning to annoy me. Maybe, I thought, it was Carl Jung’s “trickster archetype” coming to call, eager to inject a little chaos into my life, and remind me (as if I needed a reminder) that I resist overly rigid demands (again, recipes and prison, and while I’m at it, may I add full time jobs and traffic lights).

Or maybe I am what’s called a “gist processer” rather than a “verbatim processer.” Gist processors, as you might expect, get the gist of whatever they want to do and then set off to do it without an actual plan. It’s why I can scan a long, detailed recipe and walk away with “protein, fat, herbs, acid” but no measurements and no orderly process, and end up with dishes that are decent, if impossible to replicate. Meanwhile, verbatim processors read the same recipe and then create the dish to perfection. Thousands of times, if they want. But seriously, how is that even fun?

All in all, it seems to me that how a dish gets put together doesn’t matter, as long as something gets made and nobody dies. And along the way, if metaphors get born and students get taught, that’s icing on the cake.

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Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist, and of Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. She is the Literary Arts Program Coordinator for the Dalton Creative Arts Guild. More at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected] and follow her on Facebook at Dana Shavin Writes.