“How do you make the criss-cross pattern on a peanut butter cookie?”

Most in the room were able to answer… it’s a result  of using a fork to “smash” the dough before baking. Then someone asked a question that stumped  us all:

“Why do peanut butter cookies always have the criss-cross marks?”

And that… I couldn’t answer. One person offered up the explanation that maybe it was a warning for people who have a food allergy to peanuts. I thought about it and suggested that maybe it made the cookie look like a peanut shell. So I came home to do some research to find that …everyone else doesn’t seem to know either.

The only other reasons I saw were that maybe it helped the dough stick together or that you often mix the dough with a fork, so using a fork to prepare the cookie seems likely. Yet, no one could point to a definitive answer. How about that? Even Google was stumped.

Either way, this cookie is kind of an anomaly. This pattern seems to reach past geographic and cultural lines. How did those little marks come to be associated with the peanut butter cookie? The world may never know. In that case, I’m gonna go with my theory. Resembling a peanut seems logical enough for me.

Just wanted to share. Take care!

In the spirit of one marvel in the sky, I thought I’d take a stab at explaining another misnomer. You know… kind of like calling the icy bits that fell last night ‘snow.’

I always believed the story I had read (who knows on what site) so many years ago that it’s raining cats and dog’s originated as a result of old thatch style roofs. Here’s an idea:

I’ll describe their houses a little. You’ve heard of thatch roofs, well that’s all they were. Thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. They were the only place for the little animals to get warm. So all the pets; dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, bugs, all lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery so sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Thus the saying, “it’s raining cats and dogs.”

Which was quickly debunked:

This is nonsense of course. It hardly needs debunking but, lest there be any doubt, let’s do that anyway. In order to believe this tale we would have to accept that dogs lived in thatched roofs, which, of course, they didn’t. Even accepting that bizarre idea, for dogs to have slipped off when it rained they would have needed to be sitting on the outside of the thatch – hardly the place an animal would head for as shelter in bad weather.

But, as I went to research some links for this post I found other accounts. A few sites break down a mythological explanation, yet most seem to point to this as the most likely explanation:

The much more probable source of ‘raining cats and dogs’ is … in the filthy streets of 17th/18th century England, heavy rain would occasionally carry along dead animals and other debris. The animals didn’t fall from the sky, but the sight of dead cats and dogs floating by in storms could well have caused the coining of this colourful phrase. Jonathan Swift described such an event in his satirical poem ‘A Description of a City Shower‘, first published in the 1710 collection of the Tatler magazine… describing water-borne animal corpses, Swift was referring to an occurrence that his readers would have been well familiar with.

So… now I don’t love this story so much and probably won’t offer this up as a ‘tidbit’ I know the meaning of.

Washed up dead cats and dogs = not a fun story.

Just wanted to share and thanks for reading. Sorry if I made you sad. Here’s a fun kitty to make it all better:

more animals

Okay, that one was topical. But this one is funnier:

more animals

When he was introduced as a New Iberia, LA native (the hometown of Tabasco) I was of course reminded of something completely unrelated — nutra-rats.

Nutra-rats (also known as nutria or coypu) were introduced to the area of Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisana with the help of the McIlenney family of Tabasco fame. The story goes that some Louisiana farmers, including the McIlhenny family, raised Nutria for their fur; a cheap alternative to mink or other furs for coats. After Nutria proved unprofitable the farmers released them into the wild.  Without natural predators here in the states (save alligators, but they don’t do enough damage) their population exploded and they now live in many states in the US.

My fiance even pointed out that he had seen a documentary where there are large groups of people that go out to these affected area and shoot every ‘nutra-rat’ in sight.  That should be some pretty funny footage if you can find it.

From the girl who knows stuff no one should, thanks for reading.

So when thinking about a subject matter I could consistently write about for a blog, I realized there was no need to choose one. Instead, I’ll share factoids, stats, and other random things that happened to get stored in my brain. Who knows? You might learn something of use to you, or just be entertained for a while.

Enjoy!