chocolate chip cookie recipe

 just for posterity, although I probably already put it on here

1 cup salted butter, softened

1 cup white sugar

1 cup brown sugar, packed

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 large eggs

3 cups all purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

2 cups chocolate chips

375 degree preheated oven

8 to 10 minutes until just BARELY browned on bottom

let sit 2 minutes on pan outside oven, transfer to cooler sheet lined with parchment paper

Three butter baking recipes for the Fall and Winter cake cookies

 

It is winter, and a good time to bake, and have the butter cookies and cakes to snack on through the colder days, also good for holidays and for special dinners

 

 Butter Cake

1/4 cup butter

1/2 cup white sugar

1 large egg

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

2 tsp baking powder

1 cup all purpose flour

1/2 cup whole milk

cream butter, sugar add egg and vanilla, mix others in separate bowl and well combine, then put in glass or ceramic container in oven at 350 degrees for 40 minutes or until fork comes clean and top is nicely golden and brown in small points

serve warm immediately if possible, if not : place in OFF oven with a bowl of water or cover with aluminum foil on stovetop to cool down - serve with fruit over the top, warmed pie cherries, apples or peaches in their natural syrup

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Sugar Cookie

3/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1 1/3 cups all purpose flour

mix these together well with a bit of cinnamon

cream 1 cup softened butter with 1 cup sugar, 1 large egg and 1 tbsp vanilla extract 

add a tiny bit of milk to the proper consistency, not too much

form small balls, 1 coffee teaspoon full and place well apart on ungreased pan, you may smash them down a bit with a fork (crispier, watch them closer, they are flatter to begin with), or not (take longer, be more dome-shaped)

bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes or until beginning to brown underneath but not on top 

remove to parchment paper on pan and let cool before storing

(Mark wants to add nut flours to this recipe and I'm not sure how that will work - will see and add recipe that worked to this later if it is good)

We mashed up six to eight brazil nuts in a mortar and pestle and added the sticky mash to the sugar and butter mixture to make a second batch of cookies

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Banana 'Pudding' cake (No butter, good to make use of bananas before they go off)

2 nearly overripe bananas (softened, starting to get black streak, not so soft they fall apart when peeled)

mash in the bottom of a ceramic pie pan, add 3 large chicken eggs and break yolks, add a few tablespoons of white sugar, splash of whole milk, dash x 2 of salt over top - mix well

add about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of brown rice flour (depends on the milk earlier) and a shred of well crushed baking powder - consistency should be that of slightly thicker pancake batter, may add a handful of chocolate chips or nuts, but not too much as the batter is fairly thin in the pie pan

let sit for 5 minutes on countertop while oven heats to 350 degrees - to allow the baking powder to start to form small bubbles in surface

when oven has heated, place inside and bake for 40 minutes or so, until the edge at the pan begins to show browning, and fork comes clean in middle

let cool, and cut, store in refrigerator

cats reluctantly inside from the rain

 Minion and Lyffan curled up during a cold rainstorm outside

 

Lyffan is sleeping on the little woven mat I made and placed on the footstool

 

 

 

There is another 'off' day to compare to, but I crashed very early because it was just a very hard week here...  working on Welsh and French this morning, will check out that picture game again with the Lithuanian -  planning to tune into a Youtube channel later - looks like I'm not getting called in.  This weekend will be a lot of running around at work because it is a holiday for some which means extra running for us.  The multilingual Youtube I watched yesterday was Lombard (a language in northern Italy, near Milan), French, Spanish and Romanian all trying to translate things each other was saying in a guessing game - it was very interesting!

 

 

Sweetie and Minerva are sisters, and they both want to sleep on the couch

 

pretty leaves on the way back from the mailbox

 onigiri rice balls made yesterday

Minerva wanted to eat them.. all the other dogs were interested in Mark's potato chips.  He pointed out to me as I was forming them in my hands out of the rice pan that Minerva was pointed at me, and all the other dogs were pointed at him.

RECIPE :

Brown rice, washed and cooked with a touch of rice wine vinegar in the water.

let cool just a little bit, then mix in sugar, more rice wine vinegar, and salt

let cool a little bit more

take large spoonfuls of rice and press them together with wet palms spread with salt back and forth until they form balls (rice is still kind of hot, some people use plastic molds for this), set down in container and place Nori or other seaweed strip on top, cover in white sesame seeds, place in refrigerator for eating later with wasabi and soy sauce and possibly red curry paste.

Languages

November 2023, vs July 2023, vs December 2022 

Since they initiated the hearts system on me I haven't been advancing very fast - but I know that Japanese has gone from level 10 to 'level 19' in that time, so their original system is not working there...

old crown numbers here because that is what I was keeping track in before they changed THAT system last year... to levels, and now they've changed it yet again to 'sections and units'  //roll eyes, just pick something and stick with it!

DuoLingo:

French           475 /  464  / 417

Welsh            376 /  370  / 360

Spanish         309 /  294  / 243

Czech           169 /   169  / 160

Romanian     149 /  149  / 144

Portuguese     111 / 111  / 89

Italian             91  /  91  / 83

Japanese       77 ??  /   77  / 65 (not right, I've advanced 9 levels)

Greek             74  /  72  / 61

German       80 /  79  / 60

Finnish       71 /   70  / 62

Norwegian   67 /   67  / 47

Swedish       43 /  43  / 43

Irish             51 / 51  /  51

Turkish         39 / 39  / 38

Catalan        38 /  34  / 23 * (learning via Spanish language)

Polish         30/    30  / 30

Hungarian    26 / 26  / 21

Ukrainian    19 /  19   / 0 (began April)

Guarani         7 / 6  / 0 (began April) * (learning via Spanish language)

Chinese         11 / 4  / 0 (began July)

 

external : Latvian, working on just a little of it here and there

Two workdays language geek

 

As a part-time postal carrier my work week revolves around the weekends, when the full-timers are usually off.  I work during the week sometimes, sometimes I work the entire week with no days off... but it's all sort of up in the air and week to week I'm not sure of anything except - I'm usually working the weekend unless I arrange for something else to happen.  Also - I passed two years on DuoLingo streak the other day... but since the hearts upgrade I'm still quite unhappy with how sensitive the spelling and such is and how much that stagnates my progress.

 

So, this is Saturday and Sunday.  My daughter's birthday was on Saturday but we did things for her on Friday because I knew Saturday was going to be a full day with getting dark early etc etc..

 So I got home, we made dinner and watched a movie and did the dishes and I did a minimum amount of a few languages and crashed.  That is a typical Saturday.. yes. 

 

Sunday I run Amazon packages, and it starts a little later.  It was also Daylight Savings Time so my animals had me up 'early'.. and I got a little language work in because hey, I was up anyway.  Made dinner after work, watched some tv episodes on DVD, did a few language things and played a game, then crashed.. took a Welsh grammar lesson in the middle of the night when the dog had me up, but I failed it by two questions and have to retake it when my credits on that site pop back up. *sigh*  One 'cat's tail' apostrophe in the wrong place or a ddim () nawr instead of a erbyn hyn and it goes down.

I haven't been called in yet on Monday, and my chart is up in the other screen.  I only do the charts for a little bit, and it gives me an idea what my 'average' is... and how much I switch off for variety.  It's also been a stressful few weeks and I realize I fall back to doing more in French at times when I have stress - the grammar level is much much higher than the Spanish or the Japanese, but still, my brain likes it better and starts sub-translating more again as below:

On the route - aucun côté ou autre côté?  Ah!  Na ça va... ça va a ci.

I have no idea why I think aucun côté instead of something like 'ce côté' or 'mon côté' or even 'pas du côté' but it's in my brain that way when I don't have to go the other side of the vehicle and I think it's a mnemonic thing that the two terms 'aucun' and 'autre' feel right and left handed pair to me...