Half-baked or burned out?

Reading an actual newspaper may be considered timeworn, but it has its timely rewards. It’s solitary and quiet in a world of noisy hyperbole. Plus, there’s no flickering screen, no tedious scrolling, and never an irritating personality reading a teleprompter to save its life.

The newspaper here features a column called Taste of the Town, which helps readers locate favorite foods. In my experience, food columns help locate recipes, either a best or bygone version, or sometimes a secret restaurant formulation. In Las Vegas, readers cut to the chase and simply search for grocery store products. Is laziness baked into the food habits here? Heat-bombarded Las Vegans can be forgiven for not wanting to fire up the oven. But, it takes initiative to submit a request to a newspaper. With similar effort, a shopper could survey the grocery aisle and take a chance on one of the available options. This week the column announced “the search for molasses cookies is over”! A sleuthy reader stepped up to submit the suggestion of trying the Archway iced version, found at a local chain called Vons. Further adding: “as good as my homemade ones, and they taste freshbaked if warmed in the oven at 275 degrees for 5 minutes.”. Another newshound suggested trying “Walgreens”. What? All of this is dreary and dumb.

The Las Vegas food column readers are grasping at crumbs. Mediocre molasses cookies cannot be the answer to anything, people. Perhaps the brutal desert heat has scorched the dessert standards of the locals. Can Las Vegas truly be a place where a homemade cookie is no better than a lackluster store-bought version? It’s a line in the sand that, by me, shall not be crossed. Hear me now, Las Vegas: All cookies, especially home-baked vs store-bought, are not created equal! I have not yet begun to fight.