What to Write About?

Elated after my first blog post, I spent the whole week telling everyone at work about my awesome new blog, and how productive I'm going to be, and how I'm struggling, really, with identifying myself as a blogger, something I never really thought I'd be, and how, really, there are hundreds of craft and recipe blogs out there that I can't compete with, but I'm really going to try to be something different, I'm going to focus more on the writing, I'm going to tell funny stories and include valuable life lessons.  I'm not going to give you the link, I told them, until I have more posts and it looks like a real blog.

So everything I did this week, I thought about writing up in a blog post.  But every day, I realized that I had actually done nothing blogworthy.  I went to work, some customers irritated me and some didn't, I came home and played Minecraft.  Every dream I can remember from the past few days has been about work (customers order things from me, then I get really confused about why I can't find the espresso machine, then I realize work is in my bedroom, then more customers come up, and it's all very confusing) and about Minecraft (those were pretty cool dreams, where I was going about the real landscape as if it was a Minecraft world, punching trees and grass blocks).  I thought about opening up the granola bars that I vacuum-sealed a month ago to see how successfully they have been preserved, but then I realized that vacuum-sealing is vacuum-sealing and that means that they are almost certainly just fine.  Well, maybe I'll open them in a week or two to see.  In any case, none of these things are blogworthy.

On my day off, I finally put the carrots in the dehydrator.  It was 10:30 am, and as I spread them out on the trays, I felt very good about how productive I was going to be.  I was listening to NPR, and NPR doubles productivity, because while you are slicing carrots and steaming them in preparation for preservation, you are learning all sorts of new things, like how John Boehner's name is pronounced BAY-ner, which you never would have known from just reading the boring politics articles in the New Yorker, which is the only periodical you read, and you occasionally wonder why people don't make fun of that guy's name more.

So it turns out, carrots go from this:

to this:

in a matter of about eight hours.

So what did I do with those eight hours?  Who knows.  I probably played Minecraft and looked at Pinterest pretty much the whole time.  I also organized the recycling and swept the floor.  Sweeping the floor, of course, is fruitless, because the broom movement only makes the dog hair tornadoes swirl and spread all over the place, when before they were neatly settled into the corners.  Anyway I did the best I could.  And though I did the dishes in the morning, by the evening there was a pile twice as high.  Funny how that happens.

The next morning (late morning) in the subway station, I took out my notebook to write a little about the multiplying dishes and the impossible sweeping so that maybe I could make it into a blog post.  I had only written a few lines when a man who may or may not have been crazy started yelling at me from the other side of the turnstiles.  "Me and you ain't never gonna get along," he said, I think.  He was just pointing at me and yelling, and I really couldn't understand what he was saying.  Something about minding my own business?  Was he yelling at me about how I was taking notes?  What the hell!  After he walked out of the station, I made a quick note: "I'm putting this away now, but not because of the crazy yelling guy."  And I pretended not to be bummed out about it, but I was.  The first time I take out the dumb notebook in a month, and I get yelled at about it.

So that's my story this week.  Feeling discouraged because of crazy people who yell incoherently, doing a whole lot of un-blogworthy things, having endless work dreams, and on top of all that, forgetting to take my vitamins, which I just now realized.

But tonight is different.  Tonight, I made cookies.

Interesting how the cookies are what ultimately made this a blogworthy day, seeing as how we also walked 2.5 miles in the park while even more carrots were shriveling up in the dehydrator, and I made an egg sandwich for lunch while listening to Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, and I read a few chapters of the book that I have been totally neglecting in favor of this computer.  It's amazing how much easier the book is on my eyes; I should really go back to books full time.

When my cookie-taster, the one I'm marrying sometime next year, expressed an interest in some classic chocolate chips, I began work immediately.  These cookies are worth writing about, and they are worth telling people the web address to this thing.  Hopefully they are worth reading through all of that previous stuff up there, all that stuff I just wrote even as these cookies were still cooling on the counter.  So here is my recipe, adapted from the instructions you find on any package of chocolate chips, and of course, cut in half.

Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies

with a little peanut butter

and of course

Whole Wheat Flour

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup butter, softened

1/4 cup peanut butter (I used creamy, though you could of course use crunchy, and I probably used more than 1/4 cup; I was estimating, because no one likes scooping the peanut butter into the measuring cup and scooping it out again--that's too much peanut butter loss on the sides of your implements, plus more things to wash after)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 egg

3/4 cup whole wheat flour

1/4 cup plus a little more all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

a little salt

Half a 12-oz package of chocolate chips.  I didn't measure how much that is.  A cup?

You pretty much know how to mix this all together, I'm sure.  Classic cookie instructions.  Creaming the butter and sugar, adding the other wet stuff, mixing in the dry stuff, chocolate chips come last.

 The substitution of the peanut butter plus the whole wheat flour made it so my dough was maybe a little more dry than it should have been, but no matter.










If you roll up the cookie balls with your hands, they should stick together fine.  And maybe, like me, you have a pre-cut piece of parchment paper waiting for you in the box!  This time it didn't escape unscathed; the chocolate chips left their mark.  It's okay, I'm not crazy enough to try and save my parchment paper a second time.






Bake at 375 degrees for something like fifteen minutes, until they are just starting to get a little brown on the edges.  Mine mostly kept their round shape, maybe next time I'll squish them a little before they go in.

As usual, I baked a few cookies and rolled up the rest of the dough for the freezer.  Here's the cookie log all wrapped up, posed next to the plastic wrap my mom bought for me at Costco when I was twenty-one and moved into my first solo apartment.  It was a two-pack.  We may finish the second roll just before leaving New York.  Four years later.  Is plastic wrap supposed to last you that long?

These cookies are, of course, best enjoyed with a cold glass of milk.  Which I don't have a picture of.  Though starting this dumb blog has made me into somewhat of an insane person in the picture taking department, I haven't gone that far.  Yet.

On tomorrow's menu are turkey burgers on homemade buns.  Bun style is to be determined, but wouldn't it be neat if they were pretzel buns?  We'll see what my burger-maker thinks.  And maybe it will be blogworthy....