The Flavors of Life.... Grandma's Chocolate Chip Anisette Biscotti

Late last night I began my holiday baking with my favorite recipe.  As I added the ingredients, one by one, I started thinking about how individually, the items have a distinct personality...but added together... they produce a heavenly cookie that is soft and sweet out of the oven and fills the house with the delicious smell of chocolate and a touch of anisette mixed with pure Mexican vanilla.

Let's talk ingredients:

 Flour is simply white and bland, completely tasteless without the other parts of the recipe.  Think of the people you know in your life who are flat line and boring with the personalities of....maybe a fish!

Butter is greasy and has a texture that makes you want to avoid it in large quantities.  Hmmm...there are plenty of people we want to avoid in our lives!

Eggs hold everything together in the recipe.  There is always a person in every family that is the voice of reason and keeps everyone on the straight and narrow.  Perhaps it is the person who is excellent in an emergency and handles are the "situations."

Sugar is sweet and tasty and pure....at least to this writer who has a really bad sweet tooth!  Do you know some people who are so sugary sweet you feel like you'll get a cavity when you talk to them?  Maybe you know a wonderfully genuine sweet person who would not hurt a flea!

Anisette is an acquired taste that can seem bitter to some people.  Bitterness is easy to detect in people because it spills from them like Mt. Vesuvius.

Nuts....well that's a funny one.  Nuts give the cookie crunch and flavor, but in life some of the the "nutty" people around us can range from silly to off-the-wall cuckoo!

When we add the flavors together we have a very interesting cookie...or if we add all the character traits of the people in our circle....it becomes a very curious world replete with characters that are the" fabric of our lives." How tangled are the webs of our fabric?  Another choice...good or bad, right or wrong...but always interesting and fodder for the written word!