He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.
- Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking
Oatmeal Chocolate Mint Cookies
makes about 24 cookies
Preheat oven to 350°F and gather your ingredients.
1/4 pound (1 stick) softened butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
3/4 cup white whole wheat flour (I use King Arthur)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon fleurs de sel
1 1/2 cups whole grain oats
1 3/4 ounces (half 3.5 oz bar) dark mint chocolate bar rough cut into 1/2 inch pieces
In a medium bowl mix softened butter and sugar with a fork until creamy.
Add egg to butter and sugar and mix well.
Carefully pour flour, baking soda, and fleurs de sel on top of butter sugar egg mixture, without blending the dry ingredients into the wet.
Stir the flour mixture very gently as it sits atop the butter, sugar, egg mixture. The goal is to combine and evenly distribute the dry ingredients before mixing them into the wet ingredients (no need to wash a second bowl).
Combine flour mixture with butter, sugar, egg mixture, evenly distributing all ingredients.
Stir in oats.
Stir in chocolate pieces.
Place tablespoon size rounds of dough onto cookie sheet.
Bake for about 8 minutes and then keep a close eye on your cookies. You want them to just start to dry on top and be light brown on the bottom.
Cool on cookie sheet for a couple of minutes and move to wire rack.
They are really good warm.
Enjoy.
"Women live longer than men because they really haven't been living."It was something Diane Keaton's mother noted in one of her journals. She read it in a Tom Robbins novel.
November 15, 2011
Joan Didion
24 - Her mother told her it was her favorite year.
24 - She reads a passage she has written about being a little girl and describing what her life will be like when she is 24. She is wearing a sable coat and dark sunglasses. She will be on the front steps of a South American public building. She will be getting a divorce.
24 - After her husband died she no longer felt 24 because he was the last person who'd known her when she was 24.
While getting dressed I thought of the conversation last night and how it exemplified the little pockets of beauty hidden throughout our lives, even beneath the heavy folds of sadness.
The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. "Launch into the deep," says Jacques Ellul, "and you shall see."
excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
