Neiman Marcus at the COOP

As I mentioned earlier, one of my favorite times in my life was the summer I lived at the coop and spent my nights biking to Barton Springs, swimming, and biking back. Its hard to say if the Barton Springs trek is what made that summer so great, or if it was the coffee machine and the endless supply of cookies.

A cooperative is something where people share the costs and benefits. I am a strong believer in coops, because spending time with other people is really what makes us happy. A co-op in New York is an apartment. But the housing coop where I lived was more like a really great dorm. We didn't pay rent, but dues that were as high as rent, and we had meetings where we determined how to spend those dues. There was a main office that was paid by the dues and those "employees" did a very good job of acting like the adults or parents to the coopers.

The Coop had something like 22 meals served a week, and members cooked and cleaned. In the summer time many of the students went home, so, in order for everything to run, the number of hours of "labor" each member had to provide was increased 50%. This was really high, under the assumption that most people would leave for the summer and those who stayed would be unreliable because it was summer. When I was there more people stayed and so we had a glut of labor.

This resulted in the position of the Cookie Monster, yum, yum. My sister was the cookie monster and she was great at it. One of the first things she did was to print out the recipe for Neiman Marcus $250 cookies. They are the best.

The name is the product of an urban legend. A River Oaks wife was at Neiman Marcus and her arms were full of the day's booty from the Galleria. She stopped by the NM bakery for a bit of sustenance to make it home. What she found was the most delicious cookie she had ever tasted. She immediately asked for the recipe and they told her costed two fifty. (Keep in mind this was over twenty years ago. So prices have inflated. Also, I would love to say that she pulled out her black AmEx, but sadly, those didn't exist yet). She pulled out her DinnersClub (maybe :)) and said, "Charge it!"

When she got her bill a month later she saw that they had charged her Two Hundred Fifty Dollars, not Two Dollars and Fifty Cents. She was enraged and when they didn't refund her money, or at least give her store credit, she did what any well positioned Texan lady would do, she went viral. She gave copies of the recipe to everyone she knew and told them to pass it on.

Now, I'm not sure that this really did harm to NM. The recipe is somewhat labor intensive, and my guess is that, initially, all it did was really tax the domestic help of Houston and create a demand for the already baked cookies at the NM bakery. But by the time the recipe made it to my mother in Westbury I'm sure there were women who would never would have dreamed of buying a cookie at NM (because they never went into NM, baking away.

It is an amazing cookie and Peggy made quite a few as Cookie Monster. What made them even better was that we also replaced the coffee machine with a far superior method of caffeine dispersion. On the way out was one of those big industrial drip machines that drips into a thermos, like they have at most coffeshops. The problem with it was that you had to actually make the coffee, and then you had to make an entire thermos full. All that coffee would surely be consumed, but then you never knew how long it would take When you wanted some you never know how long that coffee had been sitting there, so it was always a good idea to just make a new "pot." This system was replaced with a coffee "subscription" and a new machine, a weird set up that included a box of liquid "coffee concentrate" that was reconstituted with hot water. The effect was that all you had to do for a cup of coffee was walk up and put your mug in the slot and press a button. It was the number one coffee of Europe and we had our machine set to the strongest cup o' joe of any place in Austin. We had never been so buzzed in our lives, and these were serious drug abusers that we are talking about here.

Lately, I've been drinking a lot of brewed coffee and really missing those cookies. The problem is that if you live with 50 people and there are 112 cookies, and you have all been biking and swimming in really cold water, 112 cookies is a fun cookie party. If you are staying with your parents who are at work all day, 112 cookies is one step away from either being Cathy Bates in Fried Green Tomatoes or a pass to Weight Watchers, or both.

So for one of my feats this summer, I will collect enough people to have a fun cookie party. Or, I will make a batch and then take them to swim lessons, which is always a fun, cookie party. (Watch out for the nuts!)

I will warn you, NM is well aware of the cookies' infamy and the recipe on the NM website may be the less labor intensive cookie that they now serve, but it is not the $250 cookie recipe.

This is the real recipe. Get some friends together, go swimming (which you will want to do after baking cookies in the oven in the middle of summer) and chow down.

Neiman Marcus Cookie Recipe

(Recipe may be halved):
2 cups butter
4 cups flour
2 tsp. soda
2 cups sugar
5 cups blended oatmeal**
24 oz. chocolate chips
2 cups brown sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 8 oz. Hershey Bar (grated)
4 eggs
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. vanilla
3 cups chopped nuts (your choice)

** Measure oatmeal and blend in a blender to a fine powder. Cream the butter and both sugars. Add eggs and vanilla; mix together with flour, oatmeal, salt, baking powder, and soda. Add chocolate chips, Hershey Bar and nuts. Roll into balls and place two inches apart on a cookie sheet.

Bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. Makes 112 cookies.