…this 1898 silent short by George Albert Smith, and Bill Evans’ sweet and melancholy rendition of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”
May your celebrations be merry and bright, and your new year filled with hope.
Blessings, friends.
Blog
The Bigger they are….
So, if you happened to be shopping, or viewing, or listening on Amazon today, you may have hit a snag with your cart or streaming, or just trying to sign in.
I suppose it’s typical for some of us, but I thought it was me. I mean, that is my default setting if something goes wrong. It MUST be me (or, in this case, my old equipment). But, after hours of troubleshooting, resetting devices, reinstalling software, updating, cursing, and nearly pitching my phone AND computer out a window when nothing worked, I did a simple search and discovered that Amazon had crashed…globally.
What I felt was something like relief…and then annoyance—at myself for not realizing sooner that my gadgets and I weren’t the problem, at COVID-19 for making me so damned dependent on the internet for STUFF, and at Amazon for dominating commerce and our lives.
There’s more that’s ticking me off, but I’ll leave it there. There’s too much of the day left to spend it on griping. Better to spend it reading a book.
However….
Note to self: the adage is true. The giants DO fall harder. Don’t get caught under the rubble.
Ack.
©2021 All Rights Reserved
Fragments
Stop-and-go traffic. You inch forward. Maybe you see cars up ahead moving, and hope, and hope…but then realize you’ve been fooled. All of you creep and stop, creep and stop, creep and stop.
I’ve been chain reading. We’ve had several losses of dear friends in the past month, amid worrisome news about loved ones, and most of the books have provided a relief from grief and stress. I won’t bother you with the handful that did not, except to say that 80% of the prose in two of them was made up of sentence fragments. The remaining 20% was made up of simple sentences.
Creep and stop, creep and stop, creep…and I stopped reading on page 10.
Fortunately, the book I read after that put me securely back on the road to relief and enrichment. And, when I finished it, I baked.
The Chèvre cookies pictured above are my new favorites—rich yet light, tart yet just sweet enough, and altogether as satisfying as a work of nuanced and soul-nourishing fiction.
I was going to rant today about the overuse of sentence fragments. In fact, to illustrate how annoying they are, I was going to write an entire post in sentence fragments, but I’d much rather share cookies with you. The recipe uses gluten free flour, although wheat flour can be substituted in equal measure.
***
Chèvre Cookies
Ingredients
4 ounces softened Chèvre
4 tablespoons softened unsalted cultured butter
4 tablespoons softened Spectrum Organic Vegetable Shortening
1 scant cup gluten free flour mix**
Beat Chèvre, butter, and shortening until creamy. Beat in flour mix. When combined into a soft, yet firm enough to handle dough, shape first into a ball, then into a log about 2” in diameter, and 1 foot long. Wrap in parchment and refrigerate overnight.
The Next Day….
Preheat oven to 375º. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
Mix 2/3-3/4 cup sugar with 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon.
Remove dough log from refrigerator. Unwrap and flatten the ends of the logs. With a sharp knife, cut the log into slices about 1/8” thick. Dredge the slices with the cinnamon sugar, and place on prepared cookie sheet about 2″ apart.
Bake for 10-13 minutes, turning pan halfway through, until the cookies are golden brown. Cool on cookie sheet for five minutes, then transfer to a rack to finish cooling.
**Gluten Free flour mix
1 cup brown rice flour
1 cup white rice flour
2/3 corn starch
1/3 cup tapioca starch
Happy baking. Happy eating. Happy reading.
©2021 All Rights Reserved
Barbara Froman 