Snickerdoodles

Sunday, February 15, 2009 at 6:40am ·

(These are our most favorite camp cookies!)

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
2 3/4 cups sifted flour
2 tsp. cream of tartar
1 tsp. soda
1/4 tsp. Salt
1 cup shortening
Mixture for later
(2T. sugar & 2 tsp. cinnamon)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400°.
Cream shortening and sugar. Beat in eggs.
Sift flour with other dry ingredientsand add to mixture.
You may need to stir by hand as dough gets stiffer.
With your hands roll into balls smaller than a walnut.
Then gently roll each ball into
mixture of 2 T. sugar and 2 t. cinnamon.
Place about 2 inches apart on ungreased baking sheet.
They spread out a lot on cookie sheet.
Bake until lightly browned, but still soft.
You can't tell they're done with a toothpick.
Cookies puff up at first, then flatten out.
Bake in 400° oven for 8 to 10 minutes.
Remove quickly from cookie sheet
to cookie rack or they will stick to pan.

Makes about 5 dozen 2 inch cookies.

Chocolate Pumpkin Cookies

 Monday, February 16, 2009 at 5:52pm ·

Favorite and easiest camp recipe

Ingredients:
Chocolate cake mix
Can of pumpkin

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350◦.
Spray cookie sheet with Pam or other butter spray.
Pour cakemix into large mixing bowl.
Open can of pumpkin and blend slowly with cakemix.
Drop by teaspoon onto cookie sheet.
Bake about 10 minutes at 350◦
Remove after about 30 seconds to cookie rack to cool.
Cookies will be soft and delicious.

I also tried making them, adding one egg, 1 T. brown sugar,
and about 1 tsp. cinnamon & 1/4 tsp. ginger to pumpkin
before mixing in cakemix. I ate two dozen trying to decide
if I could tell the difference.

A Night of Insomnia

Actually it's preinsomnia because I haven't even been able to make an effort. I have this awful headache and I rarely ever have a headache. After doing so well eating proper foods and a little exercise out of frustration that I couldn't go to sleep I ate a couple of Popsicles. No doubt the aspartame stimulate the desire for my real favorites chocolate and/or peanuts. I justified some m&m's because I thought chocolate might alleviate this awful headache. By this point I was so off the diet that I also ate peanuts, justifying this because they have no cholesterol or salt and have lots of protein. I thought maybe I have a headache because I'm hungry.

The only thing that helped is I read Liz's blog so for about 30 minutes I was so engrossed in reading that I was distracted from the throbbing headache. As soon as I quit reading it was just ad bad as ever do off to the kitchen again, my own personal alchemy lab.

Bt this point I'm sure I must have a caffeine headache so I drink a little diet coke and come back and watch a bit of tv. The late rerun of the newshour on PBS is on. Again I'm distracted from myself as they talk about the news of the first day of the year. But then it occurs to me tv and especially news of terrorist attacks will not be a remedy for insomnia ory headache.

So I'm back toore research iny alchemy lab. How about Tylenol. I take two Tylenol then notice it's two years out-of-date. I give this very little thought because somewhere at some point iny life I read from a legitimate authority that the medicine may not be as strong but it doesn't go bad. Of course, I've heard all kinds of things to the contrary and that you should even throw out spices and fertilizer after the date on the package. At 4:00 in the morning I don't care. I take the only Tylenol in the house. (One should know better than to buy 2 bottles of 500 capsules from Sam' Club unless you are an emergency room.).

I return to bed knowing I'm not going to sleep so I turn tv back on, avoiding more news. I watch Martha Stewart. It's a rerun of her guest who started Twitter so he explains Twitter to her and the audience. For once I feel smarter than Martha Stewart; however, neither the Tylenol (which by the way is Sam's Club generic) nor Martha Stewart have helped my headache.

Finally I surrender to the inevitable. In that I have insomnia and a headache I make s pot of coffee and let the dog out. He'd been patient all night probably thinkin each time I got up it was to let him outside. So while the coffee brews he takes an outside break.

The sleep lab recommends no caffeine after about noon so I'll sleep well. I did that and now I am in the throws of a caffeine headache or a brain tumor.

The dog comes back in from the freezing cold after I bribe him with a cookie, and I take my coffee with me to bed. So I take a moment to write my research results on insomnia and headaches while I drink my coffee. As for outcome of caffeine on headache and insomnia, the headache is better but maybe that's because I'm distracted by writing instead of drinking the coffee.

My Brunswick Stew

Monday, December 7, 2009 at 3:05pm ·

I used some of my frozen pork from Thanksgiving. I cooked it a bit longer adding water. Instead of adding beef, I added a can of black beans. After a bit I thought I'd add a 1/2 t. of Italian spices from McCormick grinder.

I'm developing this idea as I go so I add a couple of t. chili powder. Then it occurs to me to add a can of Red Gold diced tomatoes into the mixture that is still cooking slowly.

All of a sudden I have the bright idea to look for a recipe for Brunswick Stew. I don't have any beef, and I've already added chili powder and beans that aren't in the recipe.

I am fearless so I add worshireshire sauce (what I have in the bottle which is about 1T. Then I add a scant T. of brown sugar and of apple cider vinegar, only because I don't have white vinegar. So we're coming along to the end and I add a can of creamed corn and let it cook another 30 minutes.

All done except for a cup of soup to taste. Man, this is the best Brunswick Stew I've ever eaten. Beats them all. The beans are a good substitute for beef and more pork. Guess I'll call it New Brunswick Stew.

The only thing that might even come close to tasting as good as my variation of Brunswick Stew is the potato soup I made on Saturday or the chicken soup I made the previous week

Guess I should open a soup kitchen.

Email, the Novel

Where have I been for two months? It seems if I'm teaching I don't write. If I'm writing, I'm doing nothing else. Lately most of my writing energy has been in the form of emails. I guess even Faulkner and Proust would have written emails if they'd been around The first novel was an epistolary, Clarissa. I guess that means I could write a novel of emails between two or three people. I could even use a popular medium such as facebook to write a novel. No doubt Coleridge might have written some of his famous poems as Twitter tweets instead of in the popular gothic genre of the day. That said, does that mean I should post my emails and call it the revised epistolary novel?

The Legend of the White Buffalo Woman

http://www.merceronline.com/Native/native05.htm

This is legend of the white buffalo woman. Interesting story.

Writing for the Day

Nothing. Something. I have no idea. What happened to "automatic writing"? Wasn't that Poe who did that or was it Coleridge? Time is passing. Nothing is coming to me. The muse has drifted away into the clouds today. Maybe I need another cup of coffee or maybe I should write in my yellow legal pad with a sharpened pencil. No thoughts. Blank mind.

Oh, maybe I'm in a yoga trance or doing some sort of transcendental meditation. I could be lazy. Slothfulness is a disability of writers from time to time. This could be possible in that I went back to bed this morning and woke up at noon when a friend called to tell me he changed his phone number again so some woman wouldn't be able to call him any more. I told him he could just forward his calls to my house and I'd tell her I was his wife. He said he didn't want to do that. With this timely phone call, I decided another cup of coffee might help. So since then I have now brushed the dog again. It is becoming my latest obsession. Soon my wheaten terrier will be bald I'm afraid from all the grooming. I checked my bank account, my e-mail, Facebook and Twitter. I don't think these things count as productive activities when you get up at noon and have only groomed the dog. I'm not sure writing counts as productive either when you have no earthly idea what to write about.

Oh I did post a writer friends comment about health care on my Facebook page as he suggested doing if I agreed with his comment. It was something to the effect that no one should go without insurance because they didn't have money and no one should die because they didn't have health insurance. Now that's something to write about, but it's probably already been said in the 1000 page proposal of the President. I guess I could personalize it by telling them how my mother couldn't get insurance because of previous illness and then had cancer that we paid for out-of-pocket back in the sixties. I could tell about the time I couldn't get health insurance because I had been in therapy with a psychologist. I was rather shocked in that I had been married to a therapist, and I thought therapy was right up there with eating, sleeping and breathing, something necessary to life enhancement like spirituality or medical care for physical illness.

I guess I'm in too much of a rambling mood today to write. This would be a good page in Alice James collection of letters I'm reading as they are always rambling.She was the chronically ill sister of William and Henry James and often talked about her own death. So now to the real work of the day, I will wash clothes, sweep the floors, and dust the furniture and shop for groceries. But first maybe I'll have lunch, more coffee and go to Curves to exercise.