The Most Delicious Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever!

I'm feeling rather magnanimous today so I'm going to share my absolute favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe with my loyal blog readers. Only they're not just chocolate chip cookies. They're so much more. And since a good number of you lived at the Enclave during our BYU days, I'm going to let you in on another secret. I got this recipe from none other than the Culter brothers--Quinn and Drew. In fact, I call them Cutler cookies for lack of a better name since "awesome chocolate chip toffee oatmeal cookies" is quite a mouthful and I'd rather that my mouth were full of these delicious morsels.

Another secret? I LOVE cookies. I used to think that cake was my favorite thing ever, but I've recently determined that cookies quite literally take the cake (pun intended.....another sad example of how David has rubbed off on me). So without further ado, here's the recipe:

1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups oatmeal, powdered
1 tsp. baking soda
½ tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
2 cups flour
12 oz. chocolate chips (See below)

Preheat oven to 400. Cream butter and sugar. Blend eggs. Add powdered oatmeal and mix. Sift together salt, baking powder, soda, vanilla and flour. Add in batches to creamed ingredients. Batter will be very stiff—you might need to use a spoon or your hands. Mix in chips. Place gold-ball sized pieces of dought 2” apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Do not mash flat. Bake 8 minutes

While the sugars, butter, and eggs are blending up in my Kitchenaid mixer, I powder the 2 cups of oatmeal. I use my food processor for this, but you can use a blender if you don't own a food processor. For the record, I love my food processor. It was my Christmas present from David. He felt a little guilty buying me a kitchen appliance as a gift, but I totally loved it. I love kitchen gadgets. Now, I just need a new blender. Anyway, back to the powdered oatmeal. You don't necessarily have to powder the oatmeal, you could just pour it in as is, but I like that the powder makes the oatmeal less obvious (and less chewy) and helps cut down on the need for more flour.

Once all the ingredients have been mixed together, you should have a nice stiff dough. I'll let you in on another secret. I've discovered that any baked good is only as good as the chocolate you put in it. The better the chocolate, the better the cookie--or brownie, or cake or frosting--will taste. You can use regular old chocolate chips and these cookies will still taste just fine, but I prefer to use a special chocolate bar for these cookies. It adds something extra double special.

I use Hersey's Symphony bars with toffee and almonds bits. The tiny bits of toffee and almonds really add something extra to the cookies themselves and the chocolate is very rich and delicious. Far better than some run-of-the-mill semi-sweet chocolate chip. I chop up between one to two Symphony bars (depending on size) or whatever other quality chocolate I have and dump that into the dough, like so.

And because I like toffee so much, I often pour in some extra heapings of Heath's toffee bits.

It adds some more crunch and bite to the cookies. Trust me, it's worth it.

Mix everything up real good.

Now, another word of advice when baking, especially cookies: use parchment paper. The parchment paper prevents the need of using Pam or other sprays to prevent your cookies from sticking to the cookie sheet, it reduces the mess left on the cookie sheet after baking and helps keep your cookie from burning on the bottom. It's an all-around good idea.

I like to put big globs of dough on the cookie sheet because I like my cookies to come out fat and delicious. When the Cutlers made these cookies, they were always big and round and never flattened out. I think they forgot to put in the baking powder/baking soda. I've never figured out why my cookies turn out so differently than the cookies they used to always make for open houses....

....but either way, after 8 minutes, they come out golden and absolutely delicious. I promise. These cookies will ruin all other chocolate chip cookies for you.

They're just that good.

Books Reports, Week One

Since my sister, who has a master's in children's literature, came to visit this month, I've been on a huge young adult fiction kick. I love YA books because they are often (though, I've recently discovered, not always) clean tales with a moralistic outcome filled with colorful characters and interesting plots. I've read two YA book by Shannon Hale the past week that I've greatly enjoyed. I've read Shannon Hale's Austenland, an adult fiction tale of Austen obsession and found it moderately enjoyable for what it was, but I think Hale does much better with YA books, themes and fairy tale re-tellings.

The first book I read by Shannon Hale is called The Goose Girl, which is a re-telling of the Grimm's fairy tale of the same name. It is her first novel. I love re-tellings of fairy tales, most especially because the Grimm Brothers did not really sugar coat anything and modern authors add interesting twists to the tales. I'm not familiar with the original version of the story, but Hale's version tells the story of Anidala (Ani), the Crown Princess of Kildenree. She was born with the ability to talk with animals, taught to her by her aunt, but her parents dissuaded her from enhancing her gift and she was kept away from most animals, except her horse Falada. After her father died after a horse accident, Ani was told that her younger brother would become king and that she was to marry the prince in the neighboring kingdom of Bayern. On her long journey to Bayern, Ani's lady-in-waiting, Selia, turned on her and Ani was forced to flee and become a goose girl, tending the king's flock of geese while Selia masqueraded as the Crown Princess from Kildenree. Through her work as a goose girl, Ani re-learns how to speak to animals and control the wind and is able to confront Selia and her guards and take her rightful place as Princess and Bayern's future queen. Though the plot was, at times, rather formulaic (with all the usual and predictable twists), I still really enjoyed The Goose Girl and would recommend it to anyone. There are two books in the Bayern series (Enna Burning and River Secrets) which I've checked out from the library but have not read yet. They follow minor characters from the The Goose Girl.

After The Goose Girl, I picked up Princess Academy, another book by Shannon Hale. This is another fantasy book in the same mold as The Goose Girl and was, quite honestly, much different than I was expecting, but no less enchanting. Here again, we follow the story of Miri, a young girl born and raised on the distant peaks of Mount Eskel in Danland who is forbidden to work in the linder quarries with her father, sister, and the rest of the residents of Mount Eskel. Miri believes that her father considers her too weak and unworthy to work alongside him. Then, a royal messenger announces that the priests have discovered that the future princess of Danland will come from Mount Eskel. All the eligible girls of the town are taken to the "Princess Academy" where they learn to read, write, dance, and understand all matters of commerce, diplomacy and conversation in preparation for a ball with Prince Steffan, who will then choose his bride. During her time at the Princess Academy, Miri learns the truth of why her father won't let her work in the quarries and discovers that her new education can help improve the lives of her friends and family on Mount Eskel even if she does or does not become the princess. It's a quick read and a very enjoyable story, though I enjoyed The Goose Girl more.

Rounding out the books I read last week is Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, by Amanda Foreman. This biography was the inspiration for the recent movie The Duchess starring Keira Knightley (ick) and Ralph Fiennes. It's a very engaging biography of Georgiana Spencer, an ancestor of Princess Diana, who, at age, 17 become the Duchess of Devonshire when she married the Duke. Georginia was a fashion arbiter, amateur politician, hopeless gambler, and a friend to some of the most famous people of her time, including Charles Fox, Charles Grey, and the Prince of Wales (later George IV). Despite her beauty and social graces, she was largely unappreciated by her husband and took many lovers, including Charles Grey, the future British Prime Minister, while her husband had a long affair with their mutual friend, Bess. The Duchess was beset by many debts from her gambling addiction and her extravagant lifestyle and, in her later years, by ill health and a loss of self-confidence. But, until her death, Georgiana reigned as the most beloved and vilified aristocratic woman in Britain. Foreman's biography of the Duchess (her Ph.D. dissertation) is not over-bloated and long (a problem with MANY biographies I have read) though the chapters on the complicated political matters of the day dragged a bit. Foreman does a good job of placing the Duchess in her political context, but I wish she had had offered a more in-depth look at the social and cultural world that Georgiana inhabited. Also, the Duke is an ever enigmatic character in the book and I wish Foreman had perhaps delved a litter deeper into the Duke's personality, motivations, and biography as well. Overall, I found it to be a rather interesting biography of a very fascinating woman.

So there you have it. What do you think if you've read these books? Do you want to read them? Also, if you have any recommendations, please send them my way. Happy reading.

Ode to John Steinbeck

To begin a new series (I hope) of posts about the books I've read recently, I thought I'd kick it off with an ode to John Steinbeck, my favorite American author. (Inspired in part by Emily's latest blog post. Thanks Emily!)

Like most American teenagers, I read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath during Honors American Literature my junior year of high school. Well, I should clarify: I read half of Steinbeck's classic tale of the Great Depression and then read the Cliff Notes. Because that's what my crazy, leaf-picking, bird-calling honors English teacher told us to do. Lady was crazy. And not in the good way either.

Needless to say, I did not appreciate Steinbeck then. In fact, I think I've blocked out a lot about the Joad family and their dusty flight from Oklahoma in my mind. It was way beyond my comprehension or my literary maturity at that point. (I was, however, quite enthralled by Emily Dickinson and The Scarlett Letter though.)

I did not reacquaint myself with John Steinbeck until I moved to Monterey. If you know anything about Steinbeck, you know that he was born and raised in Salinas, an agricultural immigrant town some twenty miles from the beautiful bay of Monterey. Many of Steinbeck's novels are set in California--particularly Salinas and Monterey--and they have a very distinctive and almost tangible sense of place about them. To read John Steinbeck is to taste the dirt of Salinas's rolling hills and to smell the salty sea air hanging over Monterey's Cannery Row.

For months after I moved to Monterey in 2005, I would pass this statue of the author along the boardwalk of Cannery Row (now a tourist destination) on my way to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where I volunteered on the weekends. And every week, I would think to myself that I should really read something by Steinbeck, seeing as how he'd written about the very place I was currently living.

So I picked up Cannery Row at the local public library and I fell in love with Steinbeck's prose and the almost effortless way in which he breathed life into the people and the places that he wrote about. In the prologue of the book, which is really a compilation of stories about Doc Ricketts (a real person) and the men who worked in the sardine canneries that give the street its name, Steinbeck essentially tells us how he sets about to capture the world through his words:

"How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise--the quality of light, the ton, the habit and the dream--be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book--to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves."

And since reading those words, I have loved John Steinbeck. And that love was reaffirmed when I read East of Eden while in grad school and which, in my opinion (and his), is Steinbeck's best work and one of the most beautiful pieces of literature written by an American author. It starts rather slowly as a quasi-autobiographical tale of Steinbeck's family, and then it begins to intertwine itself with the tale of Adam Trask and his two sons, Aron and Cal as an allegorical re-telling of the story of Cain and Abel. If you haven't read East of Eden or if your only experience with Steinbeck is your high school reading of The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men, then I encourage you to read more. You will not be disappointed.

I bought a collection of Steinbeck's most famous works for my birthday. There's only one book in the collection that I haven't read yet (Travels with Charley in Search of America) which is at the top of my to-be-read list but I can't wait to re-read East of Eden or Cannery Row, The Pearl and yes, even The Grapes of Wrath. Maybe now, I'll appreciate it a little more.

Ultimately, I just love the way Steinbeck works with words and how he expects more from his readers. In East of Eden, Steinbeck writes about the way two men, a father and son, read books:

"Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands." (East of Eden, page 280)

And if you read Steinbeck, you can't help but get it all over your face and hands and heart. There's a reason the man won a Nobel Prize for his writing.

And you too may discover the beauty of the word timshel.

Up next, reviews of three of the books that I have read recently. I know you are all sitting on the edge of your seats in anticipation.

Post-Partum Aunt Depression

Shocked? I know Anna is....it's been a loooong time since my last post.

In my defense, I'm having a serious case of the blahs. Sometimes when life gets too busy--or too boring--I shut down and become incapable of doing anything productive even though I can think of twelve thousands various things to do. Also, I'm in withdrawal right now.

I miss these two. Those big beautiful eyes! Those pouty lips! And the chubby cheeks. I need some chubby cheeks to squeeze....and soon.

Aww, look. A little smile. James is such a good big brother, when he remembers that he has a sister....

Is this picture killing anyone else? Babies! Asleep!**

Due to the ever reliable and efficient way that military flights run, I got to spend two extra days with my sister, her husband, and her adorable children. But before I could let Anna go, I thought I'd teach her a thing or two about accessorizing.

She really loved my red necklace. Besides, as her aunt, it's my duty to make sure that she is always adorable and looking fabulous.

Perhaps next time, I should teach her to accessorize with her clothes. You know....when she's actually wearing some.

Just a thought.

I promise to be back with more posts soon. I've got some pictures to share of the cats (yes plural, heaven help me) and I thought I'd start blogging about all the books I've been reading lately. Or I could tell you all about the joys of getting a root canal and the subsequent pain I have been experiencing, but I have a hunch ya'll might not be as interested in that as kitties.

But I could always be wrong.

**Dear Cassy,
Thank you for coming to visit and bringing your babies and making my womb jump with joy and think it wants a baby of its own. Thank you SO very much. Also, can Brigham come visit again? He's such an excellent dishwasher.
Love your sister who is NOT pregnant,
Liz

Visitors

It's official.

I'm in love with this face.

I mean, how does someone resist such a face?

They would have to be made of wood. Or iron. Or steel. Whatever people who do not melt into puddles of blubbery goo are made of when faced with such pouty lips, chubby cheeks and rolls of fat.

They simply can't be human. But me? I a big glop of blubbery goo when faced with my niece's adorable face.

My sister, her husband, and their two children arrived in Hawaii late Wednesday night. They spend a few days on Oahu with David and I and are now spending this week on the Big Island. I already miss Anna.

Also, James is now huge. He's two going on five. Seriously.

On Thursday, we went for a hike to Makapuu lighthouse (see below) and then to Bellows AFS, my favorite beach on the island.

Bellows has the softest, most powdery sand of all the beaches, is the least crowded (because only military can access it on the weekdays), and has hot showers.

James enjoyed playing in the sand and destroying sand castles. And even though he used to LOVE beaches when he was younger (like 6 months ago), he was suddenly very afraid of the water.

He just wanted to play in the sand.


But as he watched his parents swim in the ocean he just couldn't stand it anymore and ran into the water.

The water is also a really pretty color at Bellows.

Look at that fist! He could so beat up on kids twice his age.

And once again, I'm a blubbery gloop of goo.

Geez, she doesn't even have to try, does she?

On Friday, my sister and her family went to the Arizona Memorial and then I sent my sister and her husband away to go to dinner while I watched the kids.

For the record, Anna is a terrible flirt.

Especially with David. Apparently, she has no respect for our marital vows.

We tried to feed James dinner and David taught him how to growl and shake his fists while eating.

And when I would point my camera at him, James would lean over and give me this face.

I mean, what's an aunt to do?

On Saturday, we went to the Polynesian Cultural Center for the day. Of course, it rained the whole time we were there, but it was still fun and James enjoyed running around and watching all the female hula dancers and the drummers. Anna just giggled and gurgled as she always does and charmed every one she met. I can't wait to see them one more time before they leave the islands forever. I really miss having family around.