I'm a long-time member of the 'taste your dough/batter club', too, though I do admit to being a bit more hesitant about it when the papers are full of stories about egg recalls. My sister taught me how to bake (when I was 8 or 9) and she taught me to ALWAYS taste the bread dough, because your tongue will tell you more about how it is developing than your fingers or eyes can. And if I had tasted the dough on the worst loaf of bread I ever made, I probably wouldn't still be getting reminders about if from my wife, 15 years later. (The recipe calls for 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt and 1 1/2 tablespoons of sugar, I think I must have used salt for BOTH, because it was an inedible salty brick that I almost couldn't get out of the bread machine, and even the birds wouldn't eat that one!) Tasting the batter also goes back to when we were kids (6 of us) and the big treat was getting to lick the beaters and the bowl. I still cringe when my wife just dumps them in the sink when making a cake. My mother used to make a batch-and-a-half of her oatmeal crisps cookie recipe (posted in the baking circle), because the first half-batch always got eaten by us before it went into the oven. Out of this came a popular change to the recipe. As written and posted, it calls for a cup of chocolate chips, but as kids we liked the cookie dough so much that she often added a full cup of chocolate chips to the half-batch 'tasting' bowl and most of the time I still double-up on the chocolate chips when making them. As to forgetting ingredients, although I usually weight flour, I have a few recipes that call for it in cups, and I usually measure it in half-cups (because I make the smallest amount of mess that way.) I tap the side of the metal measuring cup once for the first half-cup after dumping it in the bowl, twice for the second half-cup, back to once for the third half-cup, etc. It's easy for me to remember the last sound I made, so that way I'm never a half-cup off. I can look at the bowl and be fairly confident as to whether I have 2 or 3 cups of flour in it, but differentiating 2 1/2 cups from either 2 or 3 cups is harder. Is my system perfect? Well, not quite. One time I used a third-cup measure instead of a half-cup, and it took me little while to figure why I had soup rather than dough What a nice memory device! I often start moving from one part of the test kitchen to the other, and forget what I was going for halfway to my destination. I finally learned to stay put and think about what I was doing before I moved, and I can usually recapture the original impetus. I love the way people create tools for themselves. Susan

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