copyright Marceline Donaldson 2010
I have been experimenting with cookies and wanted to share the recipe and the process that came out of those experiments.
The cookie is fantastic. If you have just a little will power you can eat and enjoy only one. If you have no will power, the cookies are gone before they cool and you are left with a heavy stomach-ache because these are heavy cookies meant to be enjoyed one at a time.
Ingredients:
2 cups organic stoneground whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking power
1 teaspoon salt – we use himalayan salt, some people use sea salt, try for the purest and most organic salt you can find
1 heaping teaspoon cinnamon
1 and 1/2 sticks organic butter
2/3 cup organic peanut butter
2 and 1/2 cups organic turbinado sugar
2 large organic eggs
1 cup – or to your taste – organic dark chocolate chips
the same amount of roasted organic peanuts
1 teaspoon or 1 tablespoon or to your taste organic vanilla oil
I made these cookies without baking powder and they were almost rock hard. You had to really work at eating them. I tried them with baking soda and they were still rock hard. I sort of knew you add baking soda when baking with sour milk products, but I didn’t know why or what happened if you added it to other baking times and now I know. It was only when I added baking powder did I get great cookies.
I always wondered why add baking powder and I now have my answer. When adding baking soda or nothing, the cookies came out of the oven and they were great – soft, but not too soft, etc. When they cooled, however, they also hardened – really hardened – late night stand-up comic jokes hardened. When I added baking powder, they cooled and stayed nice.
There are many stories about cookies made for dunking in coffee and now I know why. They are cookies where the baker forgot to put in the baking powder, or picked up the wrong box and added baking soda without thinking.
I found a recipe for baking powder, but haven’t had the guts to try it. It is 2 parts cream of tartar to 1 part baking soda. Anyone out there try this? Any feedback you want to give the cowards among us? With real experience from a friend I might take the plunge. When your grandmother dies, your experience corner is gone and you have to rely on your own hard-won experiences. My grandmother has been dead for quite a few years so i’ve had to rely on my own experimenting, except where friends came forward to share. Make peace with your family before the silence falls – you miss a lot after that happens – the stories, but mostly the life experience. You can either get it from those older than you in your family or you can reinvent the wheel over and over and over again. Why in your family, you ask? Because you share the same culture, tastes, history, DNA. We don’t want to recognize that and try to move on to – ‘my friends are my family’, but it is not true. Your family is your family.
You know, after all these years, and thousands of breakfast conversations I am beginning to understand why so many people have such negative feelings about their families. Mostly, they are trying to change class and culture and family is like a bright red blinking neon sign which makes that more difficult. Either they show up and ‘out you’, or your newly acquired way of speaking, eating, thinking, living are put in jeopardy because family comes along with the old ways and you have to struggle to maintain your new higher status. What a stunner! I guess you all knew that already. Reject your class, race, culture, history, DNA and you are forever conflicted and have heavy conflicts with those who knew you when. AH! Truth telling in a cookie recipe, but then when you reach my age you can take all kind of liberties.
Now – preheat your oven to about 325-350 degrees.
Put the butter in an electric mixer with the paddle attachment and mix on almost high speed until it begins to lighten in color and texture. Add sugar and continue to mix while the two blend and become sort of like whipped cream. Then add the peanut butter and mix until all are combined.
In a separate bowl put in flour, baking powder, ground cinnamon and mix with a large spoon, picking up a spoonful of the flour mixture and pouring it back into the bowl over and over again to let a lot of air get into the mix. I don’t believe in sifting. You have to do that with non-organic white flour to get the pesticides and the little lumps out before using it – you know, the tiny little lumps in the flour and the black flecks which are the remains of the bugs which were killed in the flour by the pesticides when the flour was in the Silos – where it got an infestation of bugs – which were killed off with the pesticides, left in the flour, with the pesticide residue, to deteriorate and are now the little black specks and little white flour covered lumps you have to sift out before using. Since you are using stone-ground organic whole wheat flour you don’t have to worry about that.
Back to your mixer – once the sugar and peanut butter have been added – crack your organic eggs and add them to the mixer one at a time. Don’t mix too much after adding the eggs.
Gradually add the flour mixture, turn your mixer to low and mix only until the flour is incorporated into the cookie dough. Add the chocolate chips, peanuts and vanilla, again mixing only until they are well distributed. This is the crunch time for baking – too much mixing and you get a tough product – so be careful at this point.
Refrigerate the dough until it is firm – or until you are ready for freshly baked cookies. You can bake these all at once, or you can bake them as you want freshly baked cookies. The dough will last in the refrigerator a couple days. Impress your friends, bake cookies after they have arrived in just a little over ten minutes – the time it takes to make tea and put together a pretty serving tray to gossip over.
We use them for afternoon tea. They are substantial enough to bridge the gap from lunch to dinner without eating too many. The problem is, whenever I eat them I don’t want tea I want hot chocolate. The two go together like peanut butter and jelly, or rice and gravy.
To bake you can have either small bite-sized cookies or larger ones. For small cookies, take a teaspoonful of dough, roll it in your hands to make a ball and put it on a greased baking sheet. The size of the dough you take out of the bowl and roll is dependent upon the size of cookie you want as a final product. They will spread a little when baking, but not much.
These are very rich cookies so you don’t want to make them too large, most people won’t be able to eat a large cookie and they will waste your hard work and hard-earned money by eating a piece and leaving the rest.
Bake these about 12-13 minutes. Don’t bake them much longer than that or the bottoms will burn. They will be soft to the touch when you take them out of the oven and look as though they are not thoroughly baked. Ignore that – they are – these are tricky little cookies. To get a really good final product the baking time is the most crucial stage for these cookies.
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Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.
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Olive Oil and Windows
Sunday, September 25th, 2011copyright 2011 Bettina Network, inc.
Ed. Note: We had three letters from people who use the Bettina Network about the Olive Oil blog. I have tried to combine them into one blog taking the different points made by each one so all the information from all three letters is contained herein. Hopefully, I have been true to each persons points in their letter. They were responding to the blog we wrote on using Olive Oil to clean and polish your wood furniture.
“Thank you for your information on olive oil. I have been using it for sometime now and have found it works beautifully on my windows. I clean them once a year and when they’ve been cleaned, I rub all around the inside and outside of the windows with olive oil. Thank goodness I found this in time because otherwise I was looking at replacing my windows, but I would only have gained about 20 years and either me or the next person would have had to change windows again. That’s great for this throw away society, but not great for our middle-class pocket books. I don’t mean to get political here, that is simply my observation and experience, please don’t take it out of context.”
“Thank you for the blog on olive oil. That is not the first one you have put in your Bettina Blog. I followed through and started to clean my furniture with olive oil. That worked so well I have been using olive oil on everything. I splurge and use organic first cold pressed oilive oil. I know that is kind of ridiculous and probably also extravagant, but it makes me feel better. I hope you will write something about cleaning your windows with olive oil. I have a hard time during the winter opening and closing my windows. They worked very nicely when they were first installed about 12 years ago. They are now very hard to deal with, so after reading the furniture blog and realizing windows are made of wood just like furniture, I cleaned my windows (with the help of the young man who cleans for me) and I was awed by the results.
He didn’t want to use the olive oil. He thought it was going to make a mess whicdh he didn’t want to have to clean up. So I gave him a choice – use olive oil and only olive oil or don’t work for me anymore. Its my house and I call the shots here.
I have noticed the smell in the house has changed. I’ve begun smelling my friends’ houses. We are all clean freaks and have our houses cleaned once a week thoroughly. What I thought was a great clean smell when you walked in the door is really the smell left behind by petroleum. I didn’t recognize it as such because I had connected that with a clean house. My mother used every new product that came on the market and I have followed her using more expensive products thinking I was really getting my house clean. I wonder how much illness I have caused in my family by using those petroleum based products.
I firtst washed my windows all around with Mrs Meyers – I like her essential oils added to her all around household cleaner. I especially like the smell of the geranium oil. After I’ve washed the windows I use a rag with olive oil and go all over the windows again, especially using the olive oil rag on the inside of the windows and the grooves on the sides of the windows where the windows and storm windows go up and down. I make sure those two “weep” holes at the bottom of the storm windows are open so water or condensed water vapor can drain to the outside.
When I finished with the olive oil treatment on the windows I closed them and had a cup of coffee wondering what had I just done and why! It began to seem rather foolish to have done all of that wiping of olive oil into the wood. I even used “OOOO Steel Wool” in a few places where the wood looked a bit dirty and then wiped the residue from the steel wool off with my olive oil rag.
The guy who works for me came to get me in the kitchen. He was kind of excited and wanted me to see what happened. I was amazed and so was he. He was delighted not to have to use rubber gloves to clean and what he was so excited about was the fact that the windows went up and down the way they did when they were new. He didn’t expect that result and quite frankly, neither did I. It is a side discovery that has solved a number of irritations about my windows. When I saw how the inside and sides of the windows looked the next morning I was thrilled. I was especially happy about the new smell in the house. It was not a petroleum smell, but a nice, non-existent odor that would not hurt anyone.
I don’t know if you will use this or not, but even if you don’t I wanted you to know how grateful I am to have been pushed over the edge to giving up my harmful chemicals for something as simple and natural as olive oil. Who would have thought it would produce a better result and solve more than one problem. If I had cleaned my windows the way I normally do, the sticking and hard to move them up and down would have continued and worsened until I replaced them. Now I have beautifully working windows, smooth hands and a good conscience. Thanks Bettina!”
“I love the blog you wrote about using Olive Oil to clean. I started with my furniture and have been cleaning everything with my olive oil. I have two bottles – the organic, cold pressed which I keep in the kitchen for cooking and for salads and the bad kind which I keep in the basement for cleaning. I used it most recently on my windows getting ready for winter and it worked so well I had to write and tell you about it. Thank you for the suggestion.
I especially like what it has done to my hands – working with no rubber gloves and my hands are truly beautiful and soft. I think I am going to start a movement to seek out and get rid of every cleaning substance in my house which is petroleum based and then move on to my family, then my friends, then to just anybody who will listen to me. I might even start my own blog on “cleaning with olive oil”. I might not succeed since there are also petroleum derivative products which are hard to know about, but give me a year and I will be expert at it. Hope you will publish my writings as I discover more and better ways to clean with substances which are good for me and thee health-wise.”
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Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!
[give_form id=”3763″]
______________________________________________________________
Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.
Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.
Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.
Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net
This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com
TO LEARN MORE about Bettina Network, inc. try www.bettina-network.com
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