Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies

While grocery shopping the other day, I passed up buying our semi-regular pre-packaged packages of chocolate chip and oreo-type cookies.

I've been trying to make more things homemade, like my Grannies did before there was (were?) pre-packaged cookies, or extra money to buy them, using basic staple ingredients I typically have in my pantry anyway.
So as I stood there in the cookie aisle I thought: I have flour, sugar, butter, vanilla, chocolate chips at home...why am I buying it all again and paying for someone else to bake it for me?

Later I searched for chocolate chip cookie recipes, found a likely one and whipped up a batch.

As I pulled the hot, delicious smelling cookies from the oven, I remembered.....

They were edible, for a little while, but not very good.

.....I can't bake cookies.

I don't know why, I just never have been any good at cookie making.

I'm not a very good cook, admittedly, but I've always liked to bake and make sweets and desserts, but cookies have always been trouble for me.
I even manage to mess up cookie mixes from a box or envelope.

I recalled it's why I don't bake cookies at Christmas, or why when I see/hear/read about Cookie exchange parties I feel envious, but, No.

BUT! I'm going to try again. And again, and as many times as I have to, to figure out what the problem is.

Because, sweet tea and biscuits.

I had never made a pitcher of sweet tea until after I got married (the first time, when I was 17 years old), and the first time I tried to make it, it was bad.
I learned to make sweet tea pretty quickly after that, but it was another probably 20 years before I learned to make biscuits - like my Grannie & J's Mom/Granny made them.

I made Bisquick biscuits sometimes, but mostly I bought canned, or occasionally frozen biscuits, but they weren't Grannie's/Mom's biscuits.  We'd have to visit Grannie, or my Mom or J's Mom if we wanted biscuits.
Eventually Grannie passed away, my Mom moved away, we stopped having dinner much with J's Mom, and now she's passed away.

So it's a good thing I was so determined to learn to make them, or we'd never have them again.

I need to teach my boys to make biscuits. They like my biscuits very much, but what happens when I'm not around or able to make them for them anymore?
Daughters-in law?

I have one of those. She says, "I can't."
I tell her, "I couldn't either...."
I messed up menia batches of biscuits before I could make good ones.
"Put more gravy on it, it'll soften it up." LOL
(Gravy is another one that takes some practice, and I still sometimes make it too thick or runny.)
But you just can't give up.*

Well, I had given up on making cookies. But no more.
I'm going to learn to bake some good cookies, by golly.

(*Whether it's biscuits, cookies, painting, learning a new language, playing a musical instrument or whatever, things take work. Some things take some people more work than others. You just have to keep working and trying and don't give up. It may take a lot of tries, or a lot of time, but eventually you will succeed if you just don't give up.)

(My kids give up on things so easy. It kills me. I need to succeed at something I want to do. I may lose interest after that, but I'll be danged if I let something get the better of me.)

(Well, most of the time. I wish I could do construction work. I might could, but I have a weird fear of hurting my hands. Even wearing gloves, I've had hand injuries. Injuries to my hands feel...traumatic to me. Traumatizes me. Along the lines of, having an arm or leg cut off or something horrible like that. I don't know. It's a dumb thing, but I can't seem to help it. I try to tell myself, "Get over it" and tackle a project, but find myself unable to do the work because I'm being so careful not to hurt my hands.)
(J likes to trace the veins on the backs of my hands and tease me about how good they are for sticking IV's into, and it literally makes me nauseous to think about.)