Recipe - Pale-N's (Sugar cookies w/ extras)

...why not? It's a simple cookie...

A friend of mine asked me if I would bake sugar cookies with white chocolate chips and candied ginger to serve at a fundraiser for her dance company, Coriolis.

Certainly! I responded. Now...how do I make them?

Quite simply it turns out...

I started out with this recipe: Easy Sugar Cookies, and tweaked for the following recipe.

Goods:

2.75 c flour

1 tsp baking soda

.5 tsp baking powder

.125 tsp salt

1 c butter (softened)

1.5 c sugar

1 egg

2 tsp vanilla

.125 c candied ginger

.5 c white chocolate (chips or chunks - your call)

Prep:

Chop up your candied ginger into tiny little bits. I use flour to help prevent all the bits from sticking together.

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Action Plan:

1) In a small bowl, mix together your dry ingredients: flour, baking soda, baking powder. Add your bits of ginger and white chocolate into the mix.

2) In a large bowl, cream together your butter and sugar. Add in your egg and vanilla - mix that all together.

3) Gradually add your dry mixture into the wet mixture until everything's combined into one happy ball of cookie dough.

4) Dole out spoonfuls of dough onto ungreased cookie sheets. The cookies will spread as they bake, so be mindful of distance. (I made tiny cookies—less than a teaspoon of dough each—and placed them about 1.5 inches apart.)

5) Bake at 375°F for 7-10 minutes. (I pulled mine out at 7.5 minutes for a very pale color and chewy texture.)

6) Let cool...then enjoy!!!

The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream

I watched this documentary recently and found it quite depressing, disturbing, downright scary and pretty convicting. Watch it. After having seen it, I felt somewhat like a mad man running around from here to there with his hands on his head shouting, "What do I do? What do I do?" and generally looking like a crazy person. It made me want to quit my job, buy a bike and start a garden.

But what do I do??? What do we do???

Seems like we're looking at a massive overhaul of our very way of life. And our resources to do so are dwindling every day. Well, that seems like a problem. What can we do???

There's just (obviously) no simple solution, which talking heads in the film (like James Howard Kunstler, whom I found fascinating) just loved to reiterate. Lots of gloom and doom. But it's reality. It's happening, which is why it's so freaking scary.

I just saw a preview for Flow - "the scariest movie in the festival" at Sundance according to WIRED. Can't wait for that one. The End of Suburbia definitely goes in the same category...probably a few notches lower-more on a national than global/humanity scale. But one way or another it appears we're headed for quite a calamity... Woohoo! Bring on the vegan muffins! -_-

The Walkmen on Pitchfork TV - Juan's Basement

Part 1 of 3 - "In The New Year"

Part 2 of 3 - "On The Water"


Part 3 of 3 - "The Rat"

Recipe - Vegan Muffins

I found the original recipe at www.theppk.com.

The goods:

1 c whole wheat flour

1 c all purpose flour

½ c sugar (or ⅓ c agave nectar)

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

½ soy milk + a few drops of lemon juice

¼ c unsweetened applesauce

¼ c canola oil

1 ripe banana - mashed

1 egg replacer = 1 tbsp flax seed meal + 3 tbsp water (simmer to combine to egg consistency)

1 small apple (granny smith) chopped to small bits

1 carrot grated

½ c raisins

¼ c walnuts chopped

Action plan:
Step 1) Preheat oven to 375°F.
Step 2) In a medium to large bowl combine the dry ingredients: whole wheat flour, all purpose flour, sugar (if using agave nectar, add with wet ingredients), baking powder, cinnamon, baking soda, salt.

Step 3) In a separate large bowl mix together the wet ingredients: soy milk + lemon juice, applesauce, oil, banana, egg replacement.

Step 4) Add the grated carrot, chopped apple, raisins and walnuts to the dry ingredients and mix together.

Step 5) Add that mixture into the bowl with the wet ingredients and mix until everything is moist.

Step 6) Grease your muffin tins with canola oil and fill with muffin batter.

Step 7) Bake in oven for approximate times - Mini size: 10 minutes; Standard size: 20 minutes. Make sure to check that muffins are cooked through using a toothpick.