Number one, I absolutely love making chocolate chip cookies. I mean, it's fun. It's exciting. Beyond the fact that I love making them, I love eating them.
I eat cheese and salami and a lot of fried chicken. I eat a big bag of oatmeal-raisin cookies every night and I don't gain weight. I still look OK as long as I'm dressed.
Having big audiences when you're on a book tour is like Valhalla if you're a person who used to sell Girl Scout cookies on the side. Because you want to give the reading that will sell the most books.
I can't convince you to put the drink down if you're an alcoholic, you have to want to do that. I can't convince you to stop eating the cookies when you're a diabetic. You have to do that. And that takes responsibility.
There are some days where I'll eat 8,000 calories per day, on a day before a 12, 14, 18 hour swim. For a 61-year-old woman, that's a lot! And I try not to eat too much refined sugar - cookies, desserts, those sorts of things.
I use nothing but the best ingredients. My cookies are always baked fresh. I price cookies so that you cannot make them at home for any less. And I still give cookies away.
Smell is so powerful, you know. My grannies would both bake things like shortbreads and cookies. I think whenever I smell those kinds of things it really takes me back to my childhood.
My mother would organize huge parties for my elementary school classmates. To prepare, she would go back to the bakery in her old neighborhood of Inwood and get special shamrock cookies. Hawaiian Punch was served and we had shamrock napkins. It was a lot of fun.
I'm passionate about anything I align myself with. You want to talk about chocolate chip cookies? I'm not going to open a chocolate chip cookie store, but I will talk your ear off about it.
Think what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down on our blankets for a nap.
When people tell me they are going to go scrapbooking, I say, 'Why don't you make it yourself.' It's like chocolate-chip cookies. People buy the cookie-dough roll and slice it, and then they lay it on a cookie sheet. That's not making chocolate-chip cookies.