Daily Read #31: Get your bake on

So I know that I've razzed Christmas enough. This post will only be about one of the few things that I honestly and truly love about Christmas: Cookies. Although I'm not really ready to give the holidays too much credit for baked goods, I eat enough of them year round that it's not like I'm staring at the calendar every year starting in January saying, 'Come on Christmas. Need me some cookies'

I remember being in a church class as a young teen where the instructor had us write down characteristics we would look for in a spouse. Now it might surprise many of you to know that perhaps the most popular response among the boys as the number one trait wanted for Future Mrs. Me to possess was that she could bake.

Now given even a few years there would have likely been a shift in what 12 year olds were looking for in a wife from Betty Crocker to Betty Boop as we stopped thinking that we would like to marry our mothers, but for 12 year olds baked bread was a priority. However at the time baking didn't make my list. That's not to say that it wasn't important to me; contrarily, it was too important to me to leave up to the crap shoot of love.

I knew that baked goods needed to be a part of my life, whether or not they were made with love by a wife.

So I bake.

I'm a man and I bake.

Now I know that men cook but it's most always slanted as a natural extension of our inner hunter. Our gender is not supposed to admit to cooking unless by cooking we're talking about what we have recently killed, gutted and butchered before roasting it before us with its blood splattered on our smock (manspeak for apron).

If you ever show up on my doorstep and I've got blood spattered on me---it's likely a nose bleed not a wildebeest. However on any given day, you may show up and find me splotched with flour. Although our society has 'modernized', if you're a guy and someone opens the door and you've got flour dusted on your cheeks, you're going to have some explaining to do.

Sad though it may be sometimes I like to go with the quick answer and tell them I'm sheet-rocking. No follow-up questions with that response. However, if I happen to confess that I'm actually just doing a little holiday baking most everyone with one eye-brow raised, begins to question me like Barbara Walters

Don't even get me started on taking the finished product to friends and neighbors. I cannot tell you the number of times I've had to just nod in affirmation to phrases like, 'Ooh! She didn't need to make us anything." "I need to get the recipe for these from your wife", or my favorite, "My husband wishes his wife could bake like this too!". Under very rare instances do I correct them, but to all you in the blogosphere be forewarned that if you get Cookies from the Harts. 95% of the time, Jan's contribution was cleaning up not baking.

So suffice it to say, I bake and I bake well.

Here let me show you.



Yep I made these. And actually I've uploaded them with a new blog widget called scratch and sniffer. Go ahead and scratch your screen to get a whiff of how delicious they smell.

I won't tell anyone that you actually tried that.

These are family favorites. I think for a couple of reasons. First they are delicious. Second we are chronic multi-taskers; anytime we can consolidate two great things into one, we'll do it. We eat cookies; we eat candy. At some point someone got the genius idea that we should start putting candy in our cookies.

You've heard of Turducken right? Well I at some point I'm going to bake candy in a cookie which I will then bake in a cupcake and then Freeze, wrap in Ice Cream, freeze again, dip in hardshell and serve with hot fudge--I'll call it Molten Icecupcooken.

As far as I know there is no hex on any of these recipes by one of my foremothers that will make anyone eating the end-product prepared by someone out of the bloodline breakout in hives but let someone you wouldn't mind seeing suffer from boils try the first one just to be sure.

Will you be able to make them as well as me? Probably not, but there is only one way to find out, preheat your oven.

A couple of cookie basics.
Two words: parchment paper; don't bake without it. Get yourself some precut sheets from Orson Gygi. Tell them Judson sent you.

Second, other than your sugar and any mix ins like chocolate chips, always always pre-mix your dry ingredients. Put the flour, baking soda, powder, salt, [cocoa] into a gallon size ziplock bag and give it a few shakes before adding it to your wet ingredients.

Lastly it doesn't apply so much to these featured cookies because you have to form the dough but for your basic drop cookie get a cookie dough scoop. It portions out your dough so you get uniform cookies and you don't end up manhandling all of the dough.

Peanut Butter Cup Cookies:
***Warning these contain traces of peanuts***** [and by traces I mean gobs]
Cream:
1/2 c. margarine
1/2 c. peanut butter (smooth)
1/2 c. white sugar
1/2 c. brown sugar

Beat in:
1 egg
1 t. vanilla

Add dry ingredients:
1-1/4 c flour
1/2 tsp salt
3 t. soda (not a typo you really need 3 teaspoons. It is what makes the cookies rise up so much that you can press the peanut buttercup down into the cookie"

Roll dough into small balls 1 tsp or so place in miniature muffin tins with paper liners.

Bake 10 minutes at 350. Remove from oven.

While still hot press 1 peanut butter cup into each cookie(Generic peanut butter cups like sam's choice or Palmer's work better than Reese's).

Rollo Cookies:

Cream:
1 cup butter (softened)
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar

Add:
2 eggs

Mix together then add to wet ingredients:
1/2 cup cocoa
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt
3 cups flour

Mix wet then dry ingridents with creamed butter and sugar. Wrap about 1 tsp of dough around a rolo. Roll in powdered sugar and then Freeze (Absolutely essential). Bake at 350 for 12 minutes. Maybe a little less (hard to tell because the cookie's already brown) once the rollo has flattened out they are pretty much done.

Cool before eating unless you like scorching your taste buds with molten caramel.

Hidden Mint:

These cookies are delightfully minty fresh. Has the Holiday rush left you no time to brush? Don't worry about it--grab one of these on your way out the door and eat it on your way to the next party--you'll be ready for even the most intrusive personal space violators. They apparently also travel very well which I wouldn't know because they usually don't make it far from the oven. [I guess technically I'm still carrying them around everywhere I go so yes they do travel well].

Cream:
1/4 c. butter
1/4 cup shortening
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 c. brown sugar

Add:
1 egg
1 T. water
1 t. vanilla

Mix in dry ingredients
1-1/2 c + 2 T. flour
1/2 t. soda
1/4 t. salt

Form dough around mint (I prefer to use the smallest York peppermint patties I can find). Bake at 400 degrees for 10-12 minutes.
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Also pictured were pumpkin cookies and while combining vegetables with butter and sugar is also a strategy our family cookbook frequently employs. You'll have to wait on that one.

Daily Read #30B: Fruits of your labors.

You're being doubly blessed today. Two daily reads in one day does life get any better?

Make sure you check out Andy's read below. Andy is my first cousin once removed if you're a strict pedigreenie. We've always just been friends who happened to run into each other at family reunions. We're about 2 months and about a foot apart.

Andy is 6'6; needless to say I look up to him. [I remember when we both ended up at BYU freshman year I wondered what the soreness in my neck was that first week and then I realized it was from hanging out with Andy.]

Andy graciously offered to contribute to GoodReads which I think you'll soon realize is awesome. He doesn't dangle his modifiers and is precise in his use of their and they're. Those of you bothered by this* if you are still reading will appreciate this especially. [You know who you are]

Well we've obviously got internet back at home. [You would think we were going without heat or running water with how bad we suffered]. We just were so worried that we were falling behind on our indexing....

I've got three posts started but for now I'll leave you with this also guest authored but by Rachel. If you have been with us since last edition you'll know that our blogs readership was one of the contributors to the Palmer Family's victory in the Hoopes Vision Video contest. If you missed out go back and read some of the older posts.

Ryan had the lasik procedure done last Thursday and naturally it was pretty awesome. If only we were still practicing the whole eye for an eye thing anyone who voted could have gotten free lasik too---too bad.

I have to admit I'm a tad bit jealous. But maybe Ryan will give me his old glasses.
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My camera has been having some struggles lately (since it took a dive on a hard wood floor) So it literally took days to get it to import our pictures from Ryan's surgery. But luckily I got 'em!

It's now been 3 days since he was 'lasered' and it's going really well. His vision out of his right eye is "crystal clear". His left eye is still adjusting and is slightly blurry, but the doctors said that it will stabilize within the next couple weeks.

I tried to take pictures of everything at Hoopes (and probably succeeded in looking like the crazy 'scrapbooking mormon' in the process).


One last 'glasses' picture together before going into Hoopes. (It's really hard to take self portrait pictures with this big heavy camera.)

A dorky picture of Ryan in the elevator on his way to Hoopes.

Prepping for surgery. Right after this picture they took his glasses off him. We won't be needing those anymore!



This is Dr. Hoopes and his assistants working on Ryan. The waiting room was really cool. I could see everything through the glass wall and they put the surgery up on the tv screens.


Ryan's eyeball! They put the blue marks on his eyeball with a special marker that shows them where 'horizontal' is so they can tell if everything is lined up right. It's a bit freaky to watch it happen, but at the same time you can't look away. We have it on DVD, we'll bring it down for Christmas. We can play a game to see who can watch the video and eat grapes at the same time without gagging.



This is Ryan walking out of the operating room with his new eyes. At this point his vision was "cloudy and milky".


This picture was taken the next morning. Ryan can read the bottom sentence with the smallest print (even while holding it at arms length). When he went in for his preliminary evaluation, he couldn't read anything. Even with the blurriness, he's a pretty solid 20/20.


Doctor Barney took this picture of us at the end of Ryan's follow-up appointment. Weston Barney is from Richfield and knows Ryan. In fact, Ryan 'saran wrapped' Weston's brother to the goal post in High School.



Ryan has to tape these 'eye guards' to his face at night time so he doesn't accidentally rub his eyes while he's sleeping. He only has to do this for a couple more nights. It's a good thing because his eyebrows are getting quite thin. Just Kidding.

It was fun to pick up the girls from school and show them Dad's new eyes!
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This was such a wonderful experience for Ryan and for our family and we were truly blessed to have it done for free!

Good Read #30: Ring out Wild...Unaccompanied Voices?

This is my first post to "Good Reads for Good Deeds"--thanks to Judson for letting me come aboard. I thought I'd devote my first entry to one of my favorite parts of Christmas: music.

When we arrived at our little hospital branch chapel this morning we found that our old, worn carpet had been replaced with a snazzy new gray and brown weave. Unfortunately, in the process of switching out the carpet the organ had somehow been unplugged/broken/killed. We never quite figured out how the music died, but we never got the organ to work.

I've occasionally conducted the music in church (who doesn't want to see a tall guy in a bow tie wave their arms around?) and the branch president asked me if I could pick out some hymns to sing a capella. Yikes. I decided that our lack of accompaniment was the perfect opportunity to test our congregation's Christmas carol confidence.

I'm here to tell you that while we weren't awarded a grammy, "Away in a Manger," "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," and "The First Noel" sounded beautiful. There's something magical and wonderful about people--lay people, untrained people, confused and lost people--joining their voices together to sing a song about "Peace on earth and mercy mild."

I remembered afterwards that the Puritans didn't use music in their services, and they may have done away with hymnals all together. While I think we'd be in trouble come New Year's, singing from memory and from the heart without the crutch of the organ was pretty special.

I'll close with this video that some of you may have seen. It's been making the internet-rounds, but is a good one. I think things like this should happen more often: