Wow! It's been months and months since I've posted. I'm only posting now out of shame, my son has started blogging and he'll shortly have more posts than me.
I am besieged by computer difficulties, apparently this computer that I researched and believed in 2 years ago is actually a discount computer with a shoddy motherboard. The story of fixing my computer is a story that is playing out on several different layers in my life right now. Fix the computer for $200 (+)?? or buy another one for $2000. Fix the seven year old stove for $100 or buy a new one for $1000 (+). Fix the old Volvo for $1000(++) or buy a new car (new to me anyway) for $10,000.
So we're going with fix it because I can't stand to accumulate another computer. After viewing "The Story of Stuff," I've grown to consider my various electronic gadgets as filthy, but necessary, somehow to modern life. Or postmodern life, whatever it is the sort of life we're leading these days. Very busy life.
How to balance the stress of this life? COOKIES!

The last batch of cookies I made was a tremendous success. Peanut Butter Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies. I love chocolate and peanut butter! Sometimes I eat spoonfuls of peanut butter with chocolate chips! I mean just one spoonful, or maybe two.
I got this recipe off the epicurious site, it was created by a Dr. Jose A Bowen. They are delicious and I made very few adjustments to the recipe.

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon sea salt (Celtic Sea Salt is the best option -- grind it yourself or use fineground)
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, softened
1 3/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
3/4 cup natural, unsweetened peanut butter
2 large eggs
1 1/2 cup organic dark chocolate chips
In a food processor or blender, pulse 1 cup oats until ground fine. In a large bowl stir together ground oats, remaining 1/2 cup whole oats, flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
In another large bowl with an electric mixer beat together butter and sugars until light and fluffy and beat in vanilla and peanut butter. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition, and gradually beat in flour mixture. Add chocolate chips.

Preheat oven to 350°F.
Form rounded tablespoons of dough into balls and arrange about 2 inches apart on ungreased baking sheets. Flatten balls slightly.Bake cookies in batches in middle of oven 15 minutes, or until just pale golden. Cool cookies on baking sheet 5 minutes and transfer to racks to cool completely.

I've been feeling funky this week, the grind of school is starting to bear down after the brief relief of the Holiday break. After tomorrow, 12 more weeks; or, as my fellow nursing students informed me in clinical today, 100 days. 100 days including weekends and breaks.
I've been mostly uninspired and yesterday I made something that was so unsavory, I decided we should go out to eat! And my husband cooked dinner tonite, Catfish Tacos, which have become a family favorite. Or at least, a parents' favorite.

Jim makes these but I'll tell you what he does.
Sauté 1/2 onion and 1/2 bell pepper in olive oil with chili powder. When onions are clear, push to the side and add 2 catfish filets, skin side up. After 4 minutes, turn, sprinkle with chili powder and salt, cover and sauté 4 more minutes, until done.
Our tacos are so great because of the extras: refried black beans, grated carrots, shredded spinach, salsa, sharp cheese. And also we use soft tortillas from la tortilla factory which have the taste only fresh ground corn flour will produce. Delicious!

But enough about dinner, let's do dessert:



Since college (the first college, right out of high school), I've had a thing about muffins. Indeed, in one kitchen that I worked, muffins were a philosophy. One fellow cook described how the tops should be like clouds. I don't remember muffins of my childhood, but after the cloud muffin philosophy, I pursued the perfect muffin. It doesn't take much to satisfy me. I remember in Boulder, CO, I had a blueberry muffin made with some cornmeal that was just the right taste at just the right moment. I remember "discovering" banana chocolate chip muffins in Aspen, and going back again and again as long as there was money to buy one. And in Ithaca, NY, a bakery dedicated to muffins! Maybe in the future, I could tour the country for muffin experiences. Those plastic wrapped things at coffee shops do not count as muffins. They are like muffin-shaped pound cakes. Real muffins are not made from a mix bought from sysco. Real muffins have to be made by hand by someone who knows not to overmix after the flour has been added.
I've developed a few muffin rules of my own, and they don't include clouds. Because I use whole wheat pastry flour, my muffins tend to be a little more dense and simply don't achieve cloud-like status. However, my muffins do achieve a perfect (to me) balance between sweet and hearty-- both sustaining and frivilous in a bite. Pumpkin chocolate chip muffins are my son's favorite here is the recipe I used tonite which will need to be fiddled with to become perfect.

4 eggs
1 1/4 cup muscavado sugar
1 1/2 cups grapeseed oil (this was just too much, muffins were a tad greasy)
15 oz can organic pumpkin puree
3 cups whole wheat pastry flour
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp dried ginger
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp b. soda
1 tsp sea salt
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips

preheat oven to 375°. line muffin tins with 24 papers, or butter them.
Beat eggs, add sugar and beat again, making sure to dissolve any lumps. Add oil and pumpkin puree and beat until well combined.
In another bowl, whisk together flour, spices, and b. powder, b.soda and sea salt. Add wet to dry, stirring together with a spoon or spatula, stir in chocolate chips. Fill muffin cups 3/4 full. Bake about 20 minutes, until firm beneath your finger. Remove from oven and let cool in muffin tins to finish baking.

When I was in college, (the first time) I took a speech class (in which I finished with a B+ because the teacher took off points for my southern accent). One fellow student gave a speech on "self-talk." Throughout the rest of my life, I've recalled parts of this speech. First of all, although I pride myself on being "bright" and insightful, at the time, I thought the speaker was talking about how when you're in the shower and you actually talk to yourself. I now realize she was talking about the dialogue in our head and the power that it has.

I now am a firm believer in this power, but I keep forgetting to use it. I often get caught up in the stress of getting through the week. And then negative thought patterns begin to circulate. Throughout this fall, my family has been on and off sick with awful cold viruses that take forever to go away. I have tried to use positive thinking but it's been more like bargaining thinking or trying-not-to-be-negative thinking. "I can't get sick right now. I can't get sick right now." or "I'm not sick, it's not going to happen, I'm not sick, that's just a sore throat from drainage." or "I'm going to well tomorrow." then "Why is this happening to me? I'm so sick, I can't breathe."

This year, I am making an effort to remember to affirm the many positive parts and possibilities of my life.

I'm keeping Dr. Wayne Dyer's book The Power of Intention nearby, because of how quickly my positive thinking turns into trying-not-to-be-negative thinking. He says, p. 225, "Work in a collaborative effort with your Source to create a sense of your own healing. Put all of your focused energy on knowing that you can be healed of physical or emotional disruptions to your perfect health. Connect to a loving, kind, receptive-to-healing energy, which is the field that intended you here. [you have to read the a bit of the intro chaps to get a sense of some of his terminology] Be willing to accept the fact that you're a part of the healing energy of all of life. The same force that heals a cut on your hand and grows the new skin to repair it permanently is both in your hand and in the universe as well. You are it, it is you; there's no separation. Be conscious of staying in contact with this healing energy, because it's impossible to separate from it except in your ego-diminished thoughts."

He goes on to to give other steps to optimizing the capacity to heal which include sharing healing energy and cherishing silence and being in a state of gratitude. All those things I know I should do but I forget.

In other news, last night, we had the best Thai coconut soup. I'm not sure why it turned out so great, I make it often, but here's about what I did.

Thai Coconut Chicken Soup
good for colds or for feeling gratitude

In a medium size pan, combine 1 1/2 cans coconut milk with 1 quart chicken stock (I make my own, we'll have to cover that in a later post). Add 2 tsp grated ginger (use a ginger grater or mince), 2 cloves garlic,minced; 1 tsp lime zest, minced and 12 stems rinsed cilantro, whole. Let simmer while you prepare the vegetables.
Prepare:
1 carrot, sliced into matchsticks
3/4 of a baby bok choi bunch or more or less, rinsed and sliced
2 stalks celery, sliced on the diagonal

Add 4 -5 shakes fish sauce, juice from 1 lime, 2 -3 tsp muscavado sugar (or more, to taste). We add thai red chili sauce to our soup bowls for heat, (the child will not eat "spicy" food) but you could add a hot pepper of some sort now if you like. Before you add anything, strain out the cilantro stems (a sieve is a good tool for that task, no need to pour the soup through, simply drag the sieve through the soup until you get all the stems)

Add carrots and celery, simmer 4 minutes.
Add 1 -2 cups chopped, already cooked chicken, simmer 2 minutes (Alternately, add shrimp when soup is complete and simmer 3 minutes more, or until shrimp is pink)
Add bok choi and cook until bok choi is well wilted.

Adjust seasonings and serve, topped with additional chopped cilantro.
PS this soup is incredible if you get galangal (which I can, I just am too lazy ((ha ha)) to go to the Asian grocery store. use galangal instead of ginger.
PSS that extra 1/2 can of coconut milk can be used in the soup, I didn't use it because I knew I would use it in my morning smoothies.

Really, I should be doing homework . . . and I will, just as soon as I . . . introduce myself and dork around with the the look and feel of my blog a little longer . . .

I'm a nursing student in my final semester of nursing school. Over the Holiday break, something strange happened. I've been a foodie for years, I've even taught cooking classes (I specialize is veggie-centered, but not necessarily vegetarian, meals), but nursing school had started to usurp my passion for food. If you've never been to nursing school, you might not know this, I certainly didn't: nursing school is intense. It's academically challenging, it's emotionally challenging, and then there are the vast quantities of regurgitation required, and that's the most challenging.

I guess because graduation is nearing, I'm starting to feel my life coming back to me (hopefully). Over the holidays, I started to be invigorated by baking. First I baked bread for others, then I baked bread for us, then I started a starter and made brownies. Then I had people over and made pizza (homemade dough using the starter) and brownies. Then I made a loaf of walnut bread with the starter (really good). Then I made brownie cookies and today I made oatmeal/raisin/chocolate chunk/pecan/coconut cookies.

I am inspired by the many food blogs I've read and I want to join in the fun, even though I have an assignment due tomorrow morning at 9:00 am.



Oatmeal Raisin Cookies with a lot of other stuff

The idea with these cookies is to pack a lot of wholesome ingredients into a cookie that I know my son will love (and me too). Blood sugar ups and downs age the body, so the idea is to enjoy a sweet treat without hopping on the blood sugar roller coaster. (Unless you are up late studying, in which case, just eat the chocolate bar that's called for in the recipe). Including nuts and coconut, using whole wheat pastry flour and oats, these are whole foods that will slow down the entry of sugar into the blood stream, thus preventing a sugar rush.

1 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 tsp celtic sea salt (fine ground)
1/2 tsp baking powder
freshly grated nutmeg
1 stick butter
8 tbsp virgin coconut oil or another stick of butter
3/4 cup molasses sugar
3/4 cup light brown muscavado sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
3 cups rolled oats
1 1/2 cup raisins, chopped
1/2 -3/4 toasted pecans or other nut
3 oz (one large bar) chopped dark chocolate (can use more if you like)

preheat oven to 350°

In a bowl combine flour, salt, baking powder and nutmeg with a whisk.

Using an electric mixer, beat together butter and coconut oil until combined, then add sugar. Beat well until fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, then vanilla.

Stir in all dry ingredients at once. Scoop cookies on to a cookie sheet, bake until firm in the middle (these are brown cookies, so it is hard to see if edges are brown. Touch the middle of the cookie, if it's just firm, they're done).

If you use a tablespoon to scoop medium sized cookies, you will get 30 plus cookies. Cookies do not spread much, so you can place them close together.
One sheet of cookies is done in about 18 minutes.