Every year around this time of year, I try to share with you readers something that is silly or goofy or amazing or unusual for my yearly April Fools Day joke. I think you will enjoy this one. It is for real, too!

Rhonda Bolner of Columbus , Indiana, and her husband, Bob, were on vacation and found themselves in Charleston, South Carolina. A ship is docked there in the harbor and makes for a very interesting stop for tourists. It is the 888 foot long USS Yorktown and has become a floating Naval museum.

Rhonda was taken with the ships bakery. Three or four bakers would work in this small space baking bread, pies, cakes, doughnuts and much more. Baking for 3500 people is no easy task as you can imagine. Just the gathering of the ingredients would be a job in and of itself. To prove the point, a copy of a recipe for a great favorite (and one that was often made would be my guess,) is this one for chocolate chip cookies. I would not relish being a baker on that ship! Besides making this recipe, they had to also do the bread and dinner rolls for the next day as well. Imagine! I was curious as to how many cookies per sailor this would make so got out my trusty calculator (my math is always dismally incorrect!) and found it to be 2.86 cookies per sailor on the USS Yorktown. Are you thinking what I am?

Well, here are the required ingredients in case you would ever need to make a LOT of chocolate chip cookies! I heartily thank Rhonda for sharing this bit of information with M.E.


112 lb. chocolate chips
165 lb. flour
500 eggs
100 lb. white sugar
87 lb. shortening
75 lb. brown sugar
12 lb. butter
3 lb. salt
3 C.vanilla
1 Qt. water
1.5 lb. soda