It’s Furious Balancing

Please excuse the shaky camera. These videos were taken with my iPod

I can finally truthfully say that I am on vacation.  The nature of my work means that Thanksgiving through Candlemas are incredibly busy — if not downright insane.   Taking large swathes of time off during those months is very, very foolish.  You wouldn’t think that there’s a busy season for estate planning and probate; I can assure you that there is.  This year, it started in October and it hasn’t ended yet.

In any event, I don’t need to darken the doorstep of The Firm until February 22nd.  Don’t get me wrong — I love my work, I love my boss and co-workers, and I even love some of my clients — but Lord I need a break.

I also need Alone Time.  Thinking back, outside of sick days, I haven’t been alone in the house for an extended period of time since Art Fair 2008.  Early 2009 was Knitters for Obama in Chicago.  Spring was Paris.  Art Fair 2009 we had new windows put in.  Thanksgiving was traveling to Texas.  I need the psychological buffer zone of having some time alone when I’m not coughing up a lung.

A lot of people don’t understand this.  The easiest way to explain it is that I need to recharge my batteries.  Even though I’m just puttering around the house, doing the taxes, and organizing the yarn stash, I need to do it by myself.  I’m frayed at the edges and if I don’t un-fray myself, things will get ugly.

So, I’ve got the aerosol cheese and Twinkies, several knitting projects, and a new (to me) computer game.  I’ve made another batch of those chocolate chip cookies.  I’m ready to rock, cats and kittens, and by “rock” I mean sitting quietly at home with the felines, knitting, reading, watching movies, and napping.

And people wonder how I sleep at night.

I don’t spend a lot of time in the kitchen; cooking and baking and such aren’t among my interests.  Teh Husband spends a lot of time perfecting his pies and enchiladas, but I prefer the eating to the creating.  My idea of cooking is thaw and reheat.

I am, however, a connoisseur of chocolate, and one of my Christmas presents this past year was David Lebovitz‘ The Great Book of Chocolate.

This is not just another cute collection of chocolate recipes, but a primer in all things chocolate.  How to buy it, how it’s made, how to cook and bake with chocolate, u.s.w. The recipes are just the icing on the cake.

I was itching to try something from it and settled upon these.

Blue Chip Chocolate Chip Cookies

• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar, firmly packed
• 8 Tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter (close to room temperature)
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
• 1 cup walnuts or pecans, toasted and chopped

—

1.  Preheat oven to 300°F (150° C).  Adjust oven rack to top 1/3 of oven.  Line 3 cookie sheets with parchment paper.

2.  Beat the sugars and the butter together until smooth.  Mix in the egg, vanilla, and baking soda.

3.  Stir the flour and salt together, then mix them into the batter.  Stir in chocolate chips and nuts.

4.  Scoop the cookie dough into 2 Tablespoon balls and place 8 balls, spaced 4 inches apart, on each baking sheet.

5.  Bake for 18 minutes or until pale golden brown.  Remove from oven and cool on wire rack.

Makes 24 cookies.

Now, here’s the important stuff:

Use the parchment paper.  I never have used it before in any recipe that called for it, but now I know what a lovely invention it is.  It helps  prevent sticking and cleaning up afterward is ridiculously easy.  You can lift the entire sheet of paper, with cookies intact, to transfer it to the cooling rack.   Parchment paper will not catch on fire in your oven – not at 300°F anyway.  You’ll find it in the grocery store next to the aluminum foil.

Don’t skimp on the quality of your ingredients.  In my cookies, both sugars, the flour, the egg, and the butter were organic.  The vanilla extract I had made myself by soaking sliced vanilla beans in light rum.  I used Guittard milk chocolate chips.  There’s an old saying about how you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

Feel free to skip the nuts. These don’t need nuts.  There is a high chip-to-dough ratio in these lovelies and you will not miss them.

Give each cookie dough ball plenty of room.  A two-tablespoon-sized cookie dough ball is pretty darn big.  They will spread out during cooking.  A lot.

I’ve always wondered about the whole bit with the groundhog seeing his shadow, or not.  I mean, if he DOES see his shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter?  And if the weather is overcast and there is no shadow to be seen, it’s an early spring?  This never made sense to me; it seemed backwards.

Long story short — I was reading the Wiki article on Imbolc, since it’s Imbolc as well as Groundhog’s Day, and I found the following something:

Imbolc is also named as the day the where the Cailleach, the hag of Gaelic tradition,  gathers her firewood for the rest of the winter.  Legend has it that if she intends to make the winter last a good while longer, she will make sure the weather on Imbolc is bright and sunny, so she can gather plenty of firewood.  Therefore, it is seen as a good omen if Imbolc is a day of foul weather, as it means the Cailleach is asleep and winter is almost over.

I love it when I find pieces-parts of the universe that neatly snap together.

Today is also the Feast of Brigid, a goddess associated with poetry, healing, and smithcraft.  In the blogging world, today is a day for poetry.  My contribution this year doesn’t seem to fit in as a poem — more like a prose-poem.  I offer it anyway, since the beauty of the prose shines through.

Dreamtigers

In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger — not the jaguar, that spotted “tiger” that inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along the Paraná and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant.  I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo; I would rank vast encyclopedias and natural history books by the splendor of their tigers.  (I still remember those pictures, I who cannot recall without error a woman’s brow or smile.)  My childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but they are still in my dreams.  In that underground sea or chaos, they still endure.  As I sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it’s a dream.  At those moments, I often think:  This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger.

Oh, incompetence!  My dreams never seem to engender the creature I so hunger for.  The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it’s flimsy-looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it’s altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than like a tiger.

- Jose Luis Borges

Enjoy your day, whichever you celebrate.