<Sigh> For want of a nail, right?

rambling, whiny background first. Skip a couple of paragraphs if you
wish... <g> Really, this is more of a whine than anything else, to be
perfectly honest.

Tomorrow is the staff cookie exchange. My idea, sort of. You all know
how they work -- everyone brings x-dozen (in this case, 4 dozen)
cookies, then we all put them out on a big table and select a variety
until we all go home for 4 dozen assorted, homemade cookies.

Long weekend -- went to the grocery store last night to get the things I
needed. Fred Meyer's was completely and totally sold out of baker's
coconut. Not a bag on the shelf, not a bag in the back. Nothing.
Fine. Instead of making seven-layer cookies (easy, everyone likes them,
and a surprising number of folks have no idea how to make 'em), I'll
make raspberry chocolate bars. Scootch over to the frozen fruit section
and there's not a bag of frozen berries to be found. Not one. I knew I
had one bag in the freezer at home, and by this time my head is pounding
and I've got that 'feeling' of an impending migraine and it's late and
I've got work the next morning early with a PTA meeting afterwards,
which means that Monday (which is now today) would mean leaving the
house a bit before 7am and not getting home until almost 10pm.

But it's going to be okay, I figured out, because when I got home I did
some more scrounging and found not one but two bags of coconut, so I can
make the seven-layer cookies (which are significantly less
labor-intensive and dish-intensive than the raspberry chocolate bars.
Besides, the raspberry-chocolate bars are sort of a special treat for my
best friend's birthday (she's also a coworker) so I really didn't want
to make them for the exchange.

Fast forward. It's now almost 10. I'm finally home. The 2 inches of
snow that were predicted is closer to 9 inches in this part of town, so
driving home was -- interesting. Oven is heated and I've got the first
six layers in the pans (I'm doing a double batch). Reach into the
pantry and find...

One. One can of sweetened condensed milk. One. Not the three or four
or five cans I could have sworn I saw in there. One. Not enough for
four dozen cookies and the two batches I already have 6/7th done. And
none of the usual stand-by replacements available. So I start
scrounging. Not enough butter left to make anything else, cookie-wise,
and really not enough energy left even if I had enough butter left. not
even enough butter left to make the one batch of raspberry-chocolate
bars I'd originally planned to make because I used the butter in these
seven-layer cookies that are 6/7ths done.

So I go down the road to the convenience store about a mile away. The
closest grocery store is about 6 miles through unplowed and poorly
driven streets. There's no way I'm doing that. No SCMilk there. plenty
of cans of evaporated milk. So back home to look through the pantry
again.

What I do have is two large cans of cream of coconut. It's roughly the
same consistency as the sweetened condensed milk. So, here's the plan.
One batch with the real SCMilk, the other with an equal amount (perhaps
a bit less) of the cream of coconut just to see what will happen.
They've just gone into the oven -- we'll know in 15-20 minutes.

Today's lesson -- too many things to do during the season means that
*something's* got to give.

Alexis.