Enjoying Your New Cookie Jar in Three Steps.

STEP ONE: Get Marley to help you mix batter for the irresistible Thick and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies from The New Best Recipe (page 777). She will try to stick her finger in the bowl every chance she gets. She will actually lick flour off of her finger while you prepare the dry ingredients, and when you finally give her the beaters to lick, she will do so with her eyes closed in rapture. It's the same face she makes when she eats chocolate.

STEP TWO: After baking the cookies (made with sliced almonds since you are oddly, somehow, out of walnuts), load them into the cookie jar that Kate and Liz got you for your birthday. It's a pretty big cookie jar, and even twenty enormous cookies do not fill it.

STEP THREE: Admire the cookie jar on the counter. After spending an hour at The Container Store this morning just to see whether you could find something as beautiful and air-tight, but maybe a little bit smaller, you stuck with the 1.26 gallon Bell Jar. (You also ran your fingers lovingly, actually lovingly, over some brightly colored document boxes, and purchased the 99-cent pill box that you gave to Rudy so that she could pop open and click closed the days-of-the-week flaps to her heart's content. It quieted her squawking so that you could enjoy things like the document boxes in relative peace.) It looks good.