Ch-ch-ch-ch-chia!

    To my credit, I saw the fiasco coming at least a mile off. Frankly, I have no idea why it ever seemed like a good idea. My cookies are fantastic. Delicious. Couldn't be better. So of course, I went out and spent a gazillion dollars (well, 16) with the idea of making them so. Well it could still turn out that way.
    It's like this: when you give up gluten, you also give up the glue that holds baked goods together. Most people get around this by using xanthan gum. For no considered reason whatever, I just don't want to do this. (Can't pronounce xanthan? Maybe.) So I've been using one egg in my baked goods to hold stuff together to the extent that they need to be. As my baked goods are usually muffins, this extent isn't particularly great.
    Sometimes a bit of my batter goes astray on the muffin tin and gets burned up. Really, I'm not a total idiot; I appreciate that burned up stuff doesn't usually taste good. But this batter kind of tastes bad per se, apart from the burnedness. With my last batch I finally figured out what the bad taste was: the sulfur taste from eggs.
    So I looked up egg substitutes. The crazy people on the Internet (CPOTI) seemed to feel that chia seeds make a terrific substitute, especially if you're looking for a binder. They bind better than eggs; all you have to do is take one tablespoon of chia seeds and three of water, blend them together and there you are. If you own a blender, you may have already spotted the flaw in the plan. A quarter cup of stuff (they tell me this is equal to 4 tablespoons) won't actually reach the blades. So I put in another tablespoon full of seeds and three of water. Then I could puree and blend.
    I should have just divided the result in two and used half. Instead, I spooned out a quarter cup, which after all that pureeing was probably more than half. I forgot to mention that the other ostensible reason for using chia was that it isn't supposed to have any flavor. This may turn out to be true, but the scent was a bit minty. Not unpleasant anyway.
    So my spectacular, wonderful, perfect cookies have a new alien ingredient in them. We'll see if they turn out better or worse or not at all. Or if we'll all have little green plants growing on top of our heads.