Cookie

This blog is for those of you who regularly buy The Tub.

You know the one: monstrous and bright yellow. Lurking seductively in the Commons Shop fridges. Your best friend in any crisis. Full to the brim with Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate-Chip Cookie Dough.

Obviously you eat The Tub’s contents raw, because baking premade cookie dough is dessert murder. If you scoop that stuff onto a baking sheet, you know what you end up with? Crispy, soulless shells.

We all have that well-meaning parent, aunt, hypochondriac second cousin or scared-of-their-shadow roommate who has warned us not to eat cookie dough because the raw eggs will kill us. There’s even an eggless cookie dough craze going around the Internet. Meanwhile, those of us who have eaten about a cubic ton of the stuff since we were tots are sitting here thinking:

One Slate author calculated that she has eaten 360 uncooked eggs through raw desserts in her lifetime without incident. I did some digging and found out that the latest cookie dough salmonella incident, in which a woman actually did die, had nothing whatsoever to do with eggs. She and 80 other folks fell victim to contaminated flour. So unless you’re gluten free, there is no rigging this tasty, tasty game of Russian roulette. Which is probably why college students worldwide have given a collective shrug and said, “Salmonella be damned.”

But I’m gonna hedge my bets and say that one of you guys is that hypochondriac second cousin. If so, there are a couple good ways to stay 100 percent safe and still eat well during a cookie dough binge. The key will be prying some cookie dough out of your friends’ greedy hands. As you know, this will be practically impossible. You will need leverage. You will need to suggest chocolate chip cookie ice cream bowls.

If you’re really good, you’ll suggest filling these with a cookie-dough-related ice cream, like The Dairy’s cake batter flavor. Anything Ben & Jerry’s is also a safe bet. Or, because chocolate chip cookie dough is the most addictive raw option, you can eliminate that temptation entirely and whip up a sugar cookie, vegan cookie or peanut butter cookie recipe instead, and build your cookie bowls out of that.

If all else fails, just buy a package of Oreos for Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookies. We’ve all seen the recipe on Pinterest and craved them. Be a hero — use the cookie dough for those, and end, for the moment, salmonella’s (questionably serious) threat to your loved ones’ health.