Peanut Butter Cookies - A Chance Homecoming

Columbus Day - 13 October 2025

Chance Homecoming:

Christopher Columbus Cookies

Our beloved hound, Chance Beaumont Milligan, came home to us on Columbus Day Weekend 2016.  He was flown on Jet-A-Pet from the Ozarks into the Cargo Depot of the Sacramento International Airport.

I’ve always found that aviation venue to be a bit of a joke.

Way back in the 1980s, the “International” designation was affixed to this airfield in the flood plain because of flights to and from Mexico.  The Southern Border wasn’t very porous then.  There weren’t any domestic commuter flights with passengers from Any Nation South of the Border — to secret destinations within the Homeland.  Way back then, the U.S. taxpayer wasn’t footing the bill of covert drug and human trafficking, along with other untold horrors, that have begun to be told to the American Citizen.

On that halcyon Columbus Day, I arrived at the Sacramento airport, in the pouring rain, to pick up my beagle pup, who had traveled a very long way in a horrible-smelling dog carrier.

The paragraph from my October 2016 post, for the Pets, Real and Fiction section on this website, reads as follows:

We welcomed home Chance Beaumont Milligan on 14 October 2016, a rain-soaked Friday in northern California. Born on 2 July 2016, my Lucky Charm is quite a little guy!!

Yes, Chance was quite a little guy!  And that rain-soaked Friday was the start of non-stop rainstorms, showers, fog and oppressive humidity until the week before Christmas.  There’s nothing like the good old El Niño to end a drought!

Chancey Boy was a good sport about it.  He was a much happier soggy camper than was I.  He was, and is still is, bright inspiration for overcoming the dulls.

This year, unlike that momentous year of 2016, we’re saying “Christopher Columbus Day” again.  I therefore decided to make Peanut Butter Cookies to honor that Italian explorer of yore, and, to a lesser degree, to pay homage to Peanut, the Squirrel, about whose life and macabre fate I’ve yet to get the full story.  I’m not alone in the conundrum.

Growing up in Passaic County, New Jersey, I attended a public school where Christopher Columbus was feted, royally, especially by the overwhelming number of Italian children in my classes.  The other nationalities represented in kiddie-form, of which I took part, were Dutch and Irish.

My most beloved subject in the history/geography lessons taught in that grammar school was The Explorers Who Discovered the New World.  Any assignment of a book report or research paper on any explorer became, for me, a world in itself!:

Drawings, maps, a fancy construction-paper art cover for a narrative tale, handwritten on lined paper — of why the voyage happened, how the voyage went, and what it meant for the world.

I was besotted by the mere whiff of the sense of adventure that those sea explorers and navigators must have possessed.  I also tended to favor The Explorers with the most audacious and stylish headwear!

Starting with the Norseman Leif Erickson, or Leif the Lucky, I paid what must have been inordinate, and frightening, attention to the men who sailed those ships ‘round the world, in search of land masses, trade routes, gold, jewels, spice routes, the Northwest Passage, the Fountain of Youth!

My fascination extended to the polar explorers, who were topics in my sixth-grade class.  The stories of the expeditions — or races — to the North and South Poles filled me with wonderment and horror.  Life lessons came my way through learning of the macabre, yet not fully known, fate, of Hendrick “Henry” Hudson.  The word, mutiny, took on real meaning.

The celebrated Christopher Columbus, Italian navigator, astronomer and overall lucky fella, had a dilly of a time getting financing for his voyages.  He eventually sailed under the flag of Castille, financed by Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II.

His four sea voyages, started in 1492, when he sailed the ocean blue, and ended in 1504.  The New World that he discovered comprise the Caribbean Islands and Central and South America.  The colonization of the Americas would ensue, which is that start of how and why the United States are here today.

As maritime-star-struck as I was during my childhood, I nonetheless still recall my palpable sense of disappointment when, during a field trip for my Second-Grade Class to the Museum of Natural History in NYC, I saw the real-life replicas of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

SMALL!!!!

It’s almost unbelievable, how those intrepid souls, such as Columbus, sailed the briny deep with little more than maps, charts, magnetic compass, sandglass (hourglass), the quadrant, to a less reliable extent; and the astrolabe, an instrument that proved unreliable in stormy weather and worthless on the pitching deck of a ship.  Columbus looked to that vault of Heaven, to Polaris, that always fixed North Star, and to his abundant faith in the Almighty.

As I have observed the unpalatable portions of our morally bankrupt world, where Apps lead the way for the pitiful cowards of modernity to lazily figure out how to navigate from one geographic location to another, from one phase of life to another, from one girlfriend to the next pretext of a romance, I am more enthralled than ever by the Explorers of the Past.

They valiantly took risks that many a coddled modern wouldn’t be able to stomach contemplating, much less take, take on, and triumph over — without a cost/benefit ratio to calculate or a consultant to advise tactics and strategy to achieve the Success of Power, Fame, Fortune, The Ubiquitous Online Presence where Information = Knowledge, Wisdom, Omniscience, Complete Influence Over Others!

Life is such a vast and sacred unknown that the mere concept that a digital device will sort it all out for you, figure out the pitfalls you must avoid, and can be counted on to avoid mistake, error, and disaster:

It’s such a vulgar approach to living.

The cheapening of the human heart, soul, and mind begins with the crass belief that Information, and unimpeded access to that information, will get you through the day, or night.  There’s no time, temperament, inclination or tolerance for attempting faith in that Higher Power.  The obscene cowardice of our era has been built upon the cynical creed that you can capably confront this earthly existence through quantification, not through the sublime quality that is an unshakeable belief in something, and someone, other than yourself, way beyond and higher than yourself, i.e. The Ineffable.

Chance Beaumont Milligan lived a relatively short time on this planet.  He was, we would later learn, rescued by Dear Husband and myself.  I’ve treasured each day since he left us, in 2023, just as much as I treasured each day that he was, physically, here with us.  He was, and still is, my chance to move with firm faith in the future, into the future, after having been run roughshod by some bitter-pilled people along a trail that led me to Columbus Day 2016.

For this Columbus Day 2025, I present a tried-and-true recipe for Peanut Butter Cookies.  This formula is the result of several attempts to perfect the baking of a quintessential American cookie.  I originally made the treat with 1/2 butter and 1/2 Crisco, but that unhealthful version got revised over the course of several years to this final foray, a true exploration — into good eats!

Heat oven to 350 degrees F.

Ingredients:

12 tsp. butter (1-1/2 sticks)

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

2 eggs, at room temperature

1-1/4 cup peanut butter

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla

Handful of peanuts

In a stand mixer (or a large bowl, using a hand-mixer) cream together the butter and sugars until light and fluffy.  Add the eggs, one at a time, incorporating well after each addition.  Add the peanut butter, vanilla, and the handful of peanuts.  Mix well into a solid paste-like dough

In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, salt.  Add these dry ingredients, a small amount at a time, to the peanut-butter dough.  Blend well after each addition.

Form one-inch diameter balls and place on a parchment-lined baking sheet, two inches apart.  Using a fork, press the ball into a flattened form, using a criss-cross pattern on top of the cookie.

Bake until the cookies are golden brown/fully done, about 15 minutes.  Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes.  Then, with a spatula, move the cookies to a wire cooling rack.  Let them fully cool before serving, with a glass of milk.

Store in a cookie jar, canister or tin.

Bonne Chance !