Happy New Year!
Here are three seemingly unrelated facts:
1. My mom died young. Cancer.
2. Hydrox sandwich cookies are a poor substitute for Oreos.
3. NewWifey(tm)’s wonky heart valve was caused by a childhood disease.
Now here’s how they’re all tied together:
My mother was not a smoker, but she worked for years in an office where every other person was. Her oncologist told us her cancer probably resulted from decades of exposure to second hand smoke.
Her death was excruciating to watch. It started as cancer of the salivary glands, so first her tongue and lower jaw were removed. But a year later rogue cells popped up again, so out came her upper jaw (hard palate). Then a few months later they took off her nose, and with it her trachea. From then on she both fed and breathed through tubes attached to machines.
Of course you can’t exactly walk around when you’re tethered to drip bags and air pumps, so for the next half decade the living room recliner was her home and prison. Her final years were marked by unrelenting misery. Ghost pains in her non-existent tongue and jaw, bed sores, radiation burns, feeding tube infections, dizziness from the diamorphine drip. Death, when it came, was a long hoped for mercy.
As a result I have harbored a neon white hatred of tobacco companies ever since, as well as a simmering grudge against smokers. I don’t go to venues where smoking is allowed, I can’t watch movies where the characters smoke, and crucially for this story, I won’t buy products that are owned by, affiliated with, or conduct tie-ins with, tobacco companies.
Which is where Hydrox cookies come in.
I love Oreos. I could, and often did, eat an entire family pack at one sitting. That combination of crumbly dark cocoa wafers enveloping a layer of creamy white sweetened lard probably accounted for 60 percent of my calories when I was in college (the other 40 being pizza).
But then Nabisco, the company that makes Oreos, was purchased by RJ Reynolds Tobacco. The new company, RJR Nabisco, remained in place until RJR sold off Nabisco some years later. However until that happened I didn’t buy any Nabisco products at all, including my beloved Oreos.
NewWifey(tm), I’m happy to say, shares both my mania for Oreos and my abhorrence of inhaled combustibles. So when she came home and saw me emptying our pantry of all Nabisco products after the merge, she didn’t say a word. Chips Ahoy, Ritz crackers, Fig Newtons, Nilla Wafers, and those precious Oreos, all went sailing into the bin. (The Nilla Wafers were particularly hard on her, being as they are a main component of classic southern Banana Pudding, which she was practically weaned on.)
At first it wasn’t bad going without Oreos. But by the 4th hour we were climbing the walls. Oreo, Oreo, wherefore art thou, Oreo! They were in the bin, that’s wherefore. And they weren’t coming back.
But it turned out that other, less tobacco owned companies, were making Oreo-esque cookies.
Enter Hydrox. Hydrox cookies looked like Oreos, smelled vaguely like Oreos, and in our desperation we convinced ourselves that they even tasted like Oreos. At least at first. But after a while we had to admit they were not Oreos. Nothing was. It was a tough decision, but we ended up eschewing cream filled cookies altogether. Better to go without than be bitterly disappointed.
Even after RJ Reynolds sold off Nabisco we avoided Oreos, although now because we had moved on to other, less calorie laden snacks (ie: I was becoming a lardass).
Which brings us to….
NewWifey(tm)’s childhood disease.
My last couple of blog posts have mostly centered around NewWifey(tm)’s open heart surgery. In case you missed it, here’s the recap: my wife is now part cow. She had a blocked coronary artery valve, so they cut her open and installed a new valve generously (if unwillingly) donated by some anonymous Hereford. Her subsequent recovery has been going spectacularly well, with no setbacks other than having to push back our planned move to France because of the flurry of hospital bills we’re now buried under (shout out to my fellow Americans who compassionately decided to vote down universal health care!).
One thing about this bothered me for a while, though. NewWifey(tm) did not, to my uneducated eye, seem to have any of the risk markers associated with heart disease. She doesn’t smoke (heart disease is actually the most common disease associated with smoking, not cancer), she’s still fuckable (ie: not overweight), we eat freshly prepared meals from whole foods 99% of the time, we live in a rural area with fresh air and greenery abounding, and she has only one cat. Really, the only danger to her heart for the last quarter century has been her marriage to a perpetual 14 year old. So how did she develop a potentially fatal heart issue at such a relatively young age?
The answer, when we asked her cardiologist, turned out to be the rheumatic fever she got when she was a toddler. It seems the inflammation from that can cause a slow but inexorable thickening of heart valves, leading to one having to become part cow later in life. Mystery solved!
The good news about that is, NewWifey(tm) doesn’t have to modify her lifestyle much if at all in order to stay heart healthy. Other than that one bad valve, the rest of her heart is in great shape. The doctor said that whatever she was doing and eating before the operation had been good for her, so she should just keep doing that.
You know what that means of course.
OREOS!
The day I carted her back to DangerHouse from the hospital I asked if there was anything she’d like to eat. I didn’t even get to finish the question when she jumped in with, “Oreos!”
So I went to the store and bought the biggest pack of Oreos on the shelf. The package looked just like I remembered it, with that irresistible image of an overstuffed cookie joyfully splashing into a pool of milk on the front. In fact here it is, a photo I took of the very package that I carried to the checkout register that day:
My god, that brought back memories. I grabbed a second package for myself, knowing full well that I couldn’t be trusted not to eat all of NewWifey(tm)’s before she’d had even one.
Back home I immediately propped NewWifey(tm) up in her recliner and triumphantly pulled those bags of cookie nirvana out of the sack. She practically squealed with anticipation.
“Squeal! Squeal!” she squealed. “GIMME!!”
I tore open the package, grabbed the first chocolatey wafer I saw, and….
Wait, what? I saw the chocolate biscuits, but where was the creamy filling practically exploding out from between them like it showed on the package? I figured I must have gotten a defective cookie, an anomaly that somehow escaped the steely eye of the Quality Control supervisor at the Nabisco factory.
I grabbed another.
Same thing. No visible filling. Then another. And another. They were all the same: an empty void where cream should have been. Without a profusion of sweet, creamy filling, this was just a sad expanse of dry, crumbly biscuit layers guaranteed to dissolve into mush within seconds of milk dunkage.
Ok, yes, you can see from the photo that there had to be something in between the layers holding them apart. And that something was indeed the creamy sweet lard filling that Oreos always featured. But look how much they now deign to give you:
Just enough to hold the thing together, and nothing more!
Let me remind you again of what the package promised would be your cookie experience upon opening the bag:
Oh, Oreos. Fie, I say. For shame!
Although my disappointment was great, even almost soul destroying, my greatest concern was actually for NewWifey(tm). Would the shock of a near empty Oreo be too much for someone just days out from open heart surgery? Would I have to explain to the coroner at the inquest that her heart failure was caused by a lack of sweetened lard in her dessert choice??
I couldn’t risk it. Making some pretext that I’d forgotten to put milk in her cup (you can’t have Oreos without milk, as the package still, at least, correctly shows) I hustled back to the kitchen where, out of sight, I used all my chef skills to carefully twist open EVERY FUCKING OREO IN THE PACK and scrape the paltry innards out of them. Then, using a pastry bag and an offset spatula, I piped and shaped a CORRECT amount of filling onto individual chocolate discs and pressed a second one down onto it until it looked like the package image.
I probably had 40 naked discs left over when all was said and done that I had to toss, but it was worth it. I carried the now appropriately stuffed cookies out to NewWifey(tm), apologized for the delay, and watched as she jammed the first one into her face after dunking. She moaned with delight, and crucially, did not suffer heart failure from a shock of disappointment. For all my years of professional cooking in some of the swankiest restaurants around, this was perhaps my greatest culinary achievement.
However I did wonder how Nabisco, once a paragon of cookie manufacturing, came to now perpetuate such a cruel hoax on the cookie eating public. How did their package promise the Oreo of old, but then dash those hopes with a product resembling nothing of the sort? I had to know.
The answer turned out to be on the package itself. There, tucked into a far corner of the back side, in very small font, are found the words “product of
Anyway, the upshot is that DangerHouse is once again an Oreo Free Zone. Don’t get me wrong, I love my wife. But spending two hours a day piping cream onto crumbly chocolate discs just so that she doesn’t have to suffer the indignities of Hydrox is enough to give ME a heart attack. It ain’t happening, pal.
So there you have it. My mom died of cancer brought on by other people smoking, which propelled me to eschew Oreo cookies for years in favor of inferior Hydrox cookies, until NewWifey(tm) had open heart surgery and asked for Oreo cookies during her recovery. But the new Oreos suck ass, and NewWifey(tm)’s frankly not worth the time and effort it takes for me to restore them to their former glory.
Until she’s well enough to start having sex again, that is. So we’ll see. I’m not throwing my piping bag out just yet. Wish us luck…
And be proud of me that I kept my New Year’s resolution not to resort to the hackneyed “that’s the way the cookie crumbles” joke in this entry. It’s probably the only resolution I haven’t already broken, including my resolution to stop mooing at my increasingly annoyed half-cow wife.
Hope you all have a great 2026 ahead! And if it already sucks, well, that’s the way the coo-
Never mind.
Ciao!
Dangerspouse 