Apple Cider Cookies!

Okay, so the icing is … evocative, and you can tell exactly which cookies were iced by my wife, she of I Might Not Want A Lot of Icing, and which ones were re-iced by me, of Fuck Diabetes More Icing, but the house smells Goddamned delicious and I have actually managed to successfully bake something.

Credit to @bdylanhollis over at TikTok, who found the recipe (he cooks vintage foods, and his account is fantastic,) baked better-looking cookies than mine and is also more entertaining.

The recipe: in a large bowl, combine 3/4 cup of softened butter, 1 cup of brown sugar, 1/2 cup of regular sugar, and mix. Add an egg. Mix again.

In a second bowl, combine 2 cups of flour, a pinch of salt, a teaspoon of baking soda, and 1/2 teaspoons each of nutmeg, allspice, ginger, and cardamom, along with 2 teaspoons of cinnamon. Mix.

In yet another bowl, chop the hell out of an apple (I used a Fuji, and probably could have used one and a half or two of them, since they were small) and add a quarter cup of apple cider. Note that in the video he appears to be using way more than that; I assume that’s just for filming purposes.

Add the bowl with the flour to the first bowl, mix, then pour in the apples and mix more. Mix forever. The dough will be super sticky, which is fun.

Chill. He doesn’t say how long; I gave it 25 minutes and called it good. Get ’em onto a baking sheet (this was enough for 26 cookies using one of those dough-baller-thingies) or two and bake at 350 for “at least” seventeen minutes; I gave them 18 1/2 and they were still super soft out of the oven but I don’t think they were underbaked. They’re just soft cookies.

For the icing, mix 3 tablespoons of melted butter, a third of a cup of cider, and powdered sugar. Lots of powdered sugar. Just dump a whole bag in there. It’ll be fine. (Directions are “until it’s thick.” This will produce way more icing than you need and probably not as much as you want.)

Ice and eat. Then lick the icing bowl. My God.

It is fall break

… so am I making chili in the slow cooker?

Yes. Yes I am.

In which I’m definitely back in schools again…

20180827_fbl_at_notre_dame…because my annual First Or Second Week of September Head Cold is back, after a two-year absence, just like goddamn clockwork.  I was hoping that not actually being in the classroom would allow me to avoid it this year, but no to that; it’s laying around and moaning all day for me!  Hooray!

On the plus side, there is Football tonight.  We’re in that magical nine days or so every year where I want to watch football, not because I enjoy sports in general or football in particular but because football represents summer ending and, finally, the beginning of autumn, which is my hands-down no-doubt favorite season. The hoodie months are approaching.  They’re almost here!  I can tell, there’s football on TV!

By next week I’ll be over it.  But there’s a Notre Dame game starting in about half an hour and the good thing about being basically immobile right now is that so long as I make sure I’m planted in front of the TV I’ll be able to watch the whole thing.

…uh, anybody wanna bring me dinner?

The only thing…

…preventing this from being a perfect Saturday is the fact that it’s Thursday.  That said, lounging about all day in jeans and a hoodie, reading two and a half entire books, and finishing the day with salmon and mashed potatoes for dinner is basically nothing but win.

Okay so we’ve gotta fight now I guess.

HatfieldClanHere are the rules of Raking Leaves.  Well, the Rule of Raking Leaves, because there’s really only the one rule: you are responsible for the leaves in your yard, period.  The location of the tree does not matter, because leaves blow.  We raked leaves last Saturday.  There were leaves in my yard from oak trees, and I don’t even know where the nearest oak tree is.  Nevertheless, because I am a Good Neighbor, and because the two trees in the front yard I share with my immediate neighbor (in the sense that they but up against each other with no fence as a divider; it’s one big chunk of grass) are both in my lawn, I did my best to blow as many of “his” leaves as I could into our pile.  The majority of them fell off of my tree.  I use an electric leaf blower, and if you had looked right after we did it you could pretty neatly delineate exactly how far my cord let me get into his yard, because those areas were bare of leaves.

My neighbor’s wife and son are outside right now, blowing leaves.  They (or, rather, she, because their son is in a different part of the yard) are blowing the leaves not to the foot of the lawn, where the city can pick them up, but into my yard.  Where the wind is just gonna blow them right the fuck back into their lawn.  And I’m, like, right here, in my living room, and I can see her doing it, because the tree is right outside my living room window.  Plus the city came by and sucked up leaves today, so they won’t be here for at least a week and this is a pointless endeavor right now anyway because there are literally probably still a million leaves on that tree that haven’t fallen yet.

I do not understand people.