Hot Cookie - the Archive

New Year's Greetings... to all who have spent a few minutes on the pages of my blog. A year ago I promised to bake a cookie per week and drop ten pounds. I was off to a great start when, as you might expect, life intervened. So, where am I now? I have accomplished about three-fourths of my goals. And it's a three-fourths I can be proud of. I have lost 7-8 pounds, depending on which day you ask me, and the cookie count is up to 46 baked, not all blogged. My 70 blog posts amounted to about one post per week, as planned. Just not every blog was about a cookie. I'll admit at times the blog was a slog, and I've considered ditching the baking, the writing and my goals altogether in favor of some other very important task. Let's see. My garden needs weeding, the deck sweeping, several closets have been ignored for years. I'd really like to get on that quilt project I promised my daughter a while back. And my mom's house needs clearing out. All projects for t...

My week: Singing at a music camp for adults. When not singing, we are eating and wine-tasting.  The setting is Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, home of dense, nuanced wines, which flow each evening at the "Fermata Bar" on the campus lawn. Buffet meals in the college cafeteria, and the food is good (really). What to do when faced with lots of easy-to-eat calories? In general, potlucks, parties and buffets can be especially treacherous for people who love food but want to cut back. So many new things to try, and so many that didn’t require any work on my part. Parties and buffets make food way too easy to eat. Nothing--not even preparation time--stands between my mouth and the food except some good strategizing. Remembering that my stomach is only as big as my fist, I have to be picky about what goes down the hatch. Here are some of my favorite strategies: Only a spoonful. If I don't know I'll really like something, I take as little as a teaspoonful o...

Cookie Baking Progress How many of the 69 cookies in the Gourmet Cookie Book have I made so far? My very smart readers will notice that the "count" is included in the titles of each post. My last post was on cookie number 24. That makes 35% of the 69 cookies in the book. (I work with statistics in my real job--can't resist them here.) My excruciatingly smart readers will notice that we are halfway through the year, yet I am only a third of the way through the book. Behind my goal. Time to get cracking. Of course there is some lag between making and writing about each cookie. I have made 28 cookies to date. Would anyone be surprised to learn that more time goes into the writing than the baking? I sometimes have several blog posts in the works at once, and add ideas about several cookies as I play with part of the dough one day and part of it the next, or test whether some cookies really taste better the second day, as the book sometimes says. Still, it's catch-up...