Things I forgot to mention about the weekend:

A chocolate bunny pooped in my purse. I found the evidence when I was looking for my misplaced credit/debit card.

When Government Bakes Cookies

It's no secret I work for a US government agency. I'm not telling which one.

I found this in my "food" file, where I keep take-out menus and recipes, and thought it was time to share. It was originally in the Washington Post over 20 years ago.

A Bureaucrat's Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies

For those government employees and bureaucrats who have problems with standard recipes, here's one that should make the grade—a classic version of the chocolate chip cookies translated for easy reading.

Total Lead Time: 35 minutes.

Input:
1 cup packed brown sugar
.5 cup granulated sugar
.5 cup softened butter
.5 cup shortening (really? do people still bake with shortening?)
2 eggs
1.5 teaspoons vanilla
2.5 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
.5 teaspoon salt
12 ounce package semi-sweet chocolate pieces
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Guidance:
After procurement actions, decontainerize inputs. Perform measurement tasks on a case-by-case basis. In a mixing type bowl, impact heavily on brown sugar, granulated sugar, softened butter and shortening. Coordinate the interface of eggs and vanilla, avoiding an overrun scenario to the best of your skills and abilities.

At this point in time, leverage flour, baking soda and salt into a bowl and aggregate. Equalize with prior mixture and develop intense and continuous liaison among inputs until well coordinated. Associate key chocolate pieces and nuts and execute stirring operations.

Within this time frame, take action to prepare the heating environment for throughput by manually setting the oven baking unit by hand to a temperature of 375 degrees Fahrenheit (190 degrees Celsius). Drop mixture in an ongoing fashion from a teaspoon implement onto an ungreased cookies sheet at intervals sufficient enough apart to permit total and permanent separation of throughputs to the maximum extent practicable under operating conditions.

Position cookie sheet in a bake situation and surveil for 8 to 10 minutes or until cooking action has terminated (and before burning action commences). Initiate coordination of outputs withing the cooling rack function. Containerize, wrap in red tape, and disseminate to authorized staff personnel in a timely and expeditious basis.

Output:
Six dozen official government chocolate-chip cookie units.

From the Washington Post by Susan Russ

My comments are in red.
I've never actually tried this recipe. Maybe someday when I'm not on a diet. If you try it, let me know how the "cookie units" turn out.
 

Trick or Treat

We had about 20 beggars to the door last night dipping into the family stash. Fern and Hermione went out together around our neighborhood. Don't they look smashing!



Hermione is wearing a dress I made for Fern a couple years ago, by the way.

 

I'm so proud of myself: I've gotten up in the dark 3 mornings this week and walked by myself. Yay Me!

We had a fire drill here at work a couple weeks ago. I work on the fifth floor so I took the steps up after the all-clear. Oh my goodness, I got to Three just fine, was huffing and puffing by Four and blown down by Five. I tried again a couple days ago with the same results. Now I've vowed to take the steps once a day until it's no longer hard, then I may do twice a day. It's exactly 100 steps to the fifth floor from the lobby. I guess my 1.75 mile walks in the mornings haven't been hard enough for my heart.

Down Hill Slide

I hate this time of year. I'm not talking about the visual delight everywhere you look, the sharp blue sky contrasts wonderfully with the crisp yellows and reds of the maples and oaks. Today I'm talking about the number on the scale.

Kevin's birthday (carrot cake and cheese fries) is followed by Halloween (almond joys and butterfingers), which is followed by my birthday (more carrot cake unless the girl picks it out, then it's cheese cake), which is followed by Thanksgiving (lobster bisque, cherry pie and stuffing) and Christmas (more cherry pie and more stuffing). Food and candy everywhere (not counting the box of full-sized snickers dark bars in my desk). And on top of all that, it's so dark and cold in the mornings now making it so hard to get up to walk by myself.

Next weekend daylight saving time ends so it'll be light in the morning again, AM gets her cast off today, and L is recovering well from her mastectomy of last Monday.

Things are looking up.

Where do you throw stuff away? OK, I know, the trash can, but where else? Here in Maryland office buildings are smoke-free. Which means there are no ashtrays turned trash receptacles conveniently located at the elevators in this new building. The other day I needed a chocolate fix and I knew my project leader had a stash in his office. "Help yourself." Thanks. Yum. Except all the way back to my office I'm holding a handful of little foil wrappers because there are no public bins. Furthermore, now there is evidence of chocolate consumption in my trash can!