moment of luxury (honk if you love PBS!)

Last night I tried to make falafel and it turned out to be a big oily mushy mess, bummer. Today I'll skip the new tries in favor of some classics. The coffee is brewing now. (wooooooooonderful) Next up, oatmeal raisin cookies. Can't go wrong... as long as you don't forget to add a key ingredient.... which I have done on more than one occasion.

Oatmeal cookies

• 2 sticks butter
• 1 1/2 c brown sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs
• 2 cups oats
• 1 1/2 cup flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup chopped walnuts
• 1 cup raisins

Beat butter, brown sugar, and vanilla. Add eggs and mix. Add oats, flour, b. powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt. Mix on low. Add nuts and raisins. Scoop onto greased pan and cook for 10-13 minutes at 350.

While the cookies are in the oven, I'm enjoying my wonderful fair trade coffee and reading my favorite magazines that just came in the mail!!!! The Week compiles all the weeks news and shows up in our mail box, to our delight, every seven days. This magazine and NPR are pretty much my main sources for news these days. We also love Utne. It's a compilation of the best indie press and just has lots of interesting articles about anything and everything. Utne comes every two months, so we get a little more excited when that arrives. I used to never read magazines but Sam's family gets these and whenever we'd visit I'd bask in their glory. At some point, I converted and now I read them both cover to cover at every opportunity. While I'm in teacher mode, I also get a good kick out of Time for Kids, but I'm not sitting at home reading a magazine made for 4th-6th graders... right now, at least.

Anyway, cookies, coffee, and magazines are great. No big surprise there. Enjoy the cookies and check out this ever so interesting issue of Utne where a chunk of the articles are dedicated to thinking about creativity and how it's changing with the times, for better or worse.