Cool Weather, Warm Cookies

I cannot wait for the weather to warm up a little bit around here....I feel like we're a bunch a bears hibernating. It's been so cold, that we've just been staying in the house most of the time. Rick was waiting for the weather to warm up to a delightful 40 degrees, so that he wouldn't get frostbite while taking down the Christmas lights outside our house. No such luck, so he had to go out this weekend and take them down, despite the uncomfortably cool temperatures.

Today was grocery shopping day, so as we drove across town to our destination, Tyler kept me in line with the rules of the road. As we passed a school zone Tyler said, "Uh Oh Mommy, you need to slow down to 20!", to which I replied "There's no school today", and maintained my 35 mph speed. Every time he sees a speed limit sign he lets me know if I need to speed up or slow down. He also reads me the street signs whenever he gets the chance. "Mommy, we are on East Yakima". I don't know if it is our new GPS system or all of our trips to and from California that has given Tyler such an interest in reading roadsigns. Heck, maybe he is just showing off his reading skills.

One good thing about the cooler weather, is that I don't mind turning on the oven and baking up a batch of cookies. Last night I made Coffee Cordials out of the December/January issue of Everyday with Rachael Ray. They have a strong coffee taste and smell thanks to the 2 tablespoons of instant espresso powder that goes into the dough. They are also supposed to have a chocolate covered espresso bean on the top of each cookie, but I already ate the beans that I had bought for this recipe, oops! The glaze called for 4 tsps of whiskey, which I thought was odd. It would probably taste a lot better with a Kahlua or other coffee liqueur.

More ducks or tomatoes?

While shopping at Costco, I bought another package of sandwich bread (which contains two loaves) thinking that we needed more at home. Well, come to find out we already had some bread in the freezer, so I really didn't need to buy any more. What to do with the extra bread, you ask? Feed the ducks, of course....that's is why Tyler and I found ourselves at the park with an armload of bread.

The amount of ducks at the pond always amazes me...I can't believe how many there are! I was asking Tyler what he thought there was more of....ducks in the pond or tomatoes growing in our garden. I can't tell, I think it's a toss up. There seems to be hundreds of both!

I love feeding the ducks, but there are always a few geese at the pond too. Sometimes, a whole flock will stay for a while. It's funny, the geese always walk straight through the crowd of ducks and will stand right in front and beg for bread. Look at the picture below (you can click on it to see it larger) those two geese at the bottom are standing right at my feet! The one on the bottom right is like, "Uhh...you got any more bread, or what?"



Yesterday, Tyler was browsing the pantry and came across my bag of mini m&m's for baking and proceeded to insist that we needed to use them up. After a little browsing on the Internet, I decided to make monster cookies. The recipe is from the Cookie Madness blog that I visit all the time. What I like best about her recipes is that they are usually for small batches (since she bakes cookies every day), which is great for a small family like ours.

The verdict....they are very tasty. The whole recipe is supposed to make 8 monster sized cookies, but I made 16 smaller cookies instead. They have almost no flour and are made mostly of peanut butter and oatmeal. Oh, and I even pulled out the magic bullet for this one (pssst....see Mom, I'm not even home a week and it's already in use). I didn't have enough quick cooking oats for the recipe, so I pulsed a handful for regular old fashioned oats to make up the difference.