Peanut Butter Cookies

Due to Christmas break, I forgot about the fact that I have no flour.  I remembered this fact about halfway through making a new loaf of bread.  I dug through the cupboard in hopes a bag of flour would magically appear.  I found a little bit of whole wheat flour - less than the bread recipe called for, but it was all I had.  As near as I can tell, it survived, but only a taste test will tell. 

I had also planned on making Peanut Butter Coffee Cake.  All week, I've been thinking about it, so by this morning, I was craving something peanut-buttery.  That's when I hit the no-flour-roadblock.  Instead of letting it ruin my Saturday, I did the only thing I could think of: I Googled it.

I found a recipe for Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies.  Skeptical but willing to try anything once, I gave it a chance.  It's the easiest recipe I've ever found, and the results of the scientific taste test are conclusive - delicious!  Always a team player, I'm sharing the recipe with everyone else (or at least the 3 people that read this blog).  I found it in about 3 different places, so I'm not sure where the original came from or I would give that genius credit for it.

Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup sugar (I used half white sugar and half brown sugar)
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon baking soda
(I added 1/2 cup of chocolate chips as a variation.)

1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Beat together peanut butter and sugar with an electric mixer until smooth.
3. Add egg and baking soda, and beat until well mixed.  (This is where I added the chocolate chips.)
4. Roll 1 teaspoon of dough into a ball and place on baking sheet.  Flatten with tines of a fork in a criss-cross pattern.
5. Bake until puffed and golden pale, about 8-10 minutes.
6. Cool on baking sheet about 2 minutes before transferring to wire rack.  (I usually ended up leaving mine for about 5 minutes - they are very fragile when still warm). 

Crumbly (especially when warm) and VERY peanut-buttery.  I suppose they would go down well with a glass of milk, if you are so inclined, which I am not. :-)

I doubled the recipe and ended up with over 5 dozen small cookies.  This picture makes them look huge, but they're really not.

The Firecracker Incident

I was awakened early this morning by a loud crashing sound.  I looked at the clock.  4:00a.m.  Fantastic.  I wondered, as any sane person would, what the heck had just happened.  Being curious, I cautiously opened the door to the hall.  I didn't see anything out of the ordinary.  No broken windows, toppled piles of junk, or burning anything.  I didn't smell anything out of the ordinary.  I didn't hear anything more.  It was weird.  A noise that loud should have left some evidence.  I went back to bed, but my over-active imagination went wild.  I slept fitfully until my alarm went off 2 hours later. 

When I got up, I noticed that something smelled bad.  It didn't smell like smoke exactly, but I couldn't quite place it.  Still slightly spooked by the night noise and not wanting to get halfway through my shower and be interrupted by the (one working) smoke alarm, I decided to investigate.  I opened the door to the hall, and was shocked by the haze drifting up by the ceiling.  It was definitely smoky/hazy in the hall.  That scared me.  My biggest fear living in this building is the fear of fire, because of our lack of working smoke alarms.  The smell was stronger in the hall, too, but it wasn't a smoky smell.  I still couldn't place it. 

I knocked on the door of the apartment next door.  Of all the people to wake up, I felt least bad about waking up John.  He said that noise had woken him up to.  He also said that the smell was reminiscent of burning rubber, which was closer than anything I could compare it to.  Because nothing seemed amiss in the hall, we figured whatever it was, was probably originating from the basement.  So, we slipped on shoes and went exploring.

(A note about construction: Most buildings/houses in this area have an "arctic entry."  It is a small room between the outside door and the door to the inside.  Some stores in the lower-48 have this type of small area between doors.  The arctic entry to our building is where the stairs are.)

As we opened the door to the arctic entry, the smell blew us away.  Whatever was burning was definitely still there.  We rounded a corner and started down the stairs when we saw it.  A spent firecracker with its insides strewn across the doorway and bottom 3 stairs.  Of course.  The loud crashing noise and weird burning rubber smell was from a firecracker that someone had lit and launched through the door of our building.  Nothing was actually burning (luckily), so the smell and smoke were just residual.

I was feeling pretty foolish about waking John up because of fireworks.  He said the firecracker actually made him jump out of bed because it was so loud.  His apartment is just on the other side of a wall.  "I thought it was Armageddon," was his exact quote.  I found out later that he hadn't gone back to sleep after having the wits scared out of him, so I didn't feel so bad after that.

When I came home from lunch, someone had swept up the firecracker guts and propped the doors open to get rid of most of the smell.  The hallway still reeks, although not as bad as it did this morning, and I'm probably never going to get the smell out of my apartment (the outside door won't open - I'm pretty sure it's blocked by ice).  Let's hope this was a one-time experience, someone's bright idea of a joke, and not a pattern of harassment akin to what drove the most recent VPSO out of town.  

The Perfect Guy

My sister and I have come up with the outward characteristics of the perfect guy, if he were to exist.  I'm still thinking about the inward characteristics.

He would have the looks of Michael Vartan.  (Think the teacher in Never Been Kissed.)  (If you really think about it, that movie is wrong on so many different levels, but I digress.)

He would have the voice of Frank Sinatra.  (Or Bing Crosby)

He would have the dancing skillz of Dick van Dyke.

He would have the heart-melting romanticism of Jimmy Stewart.