Émilie

This recipe (which, btw, I owe entirely to Monica’s brilliance) has made me quite famous in quite a few households, so I’m posting it here in case you’d like to attempt the magic on your own:

Almost Vegan Cookies*

from the kitchen of Monica and Emily

1/3 cup crunchy peanut butter (if you don’t use Skippy, add extra oil for best texture)

2 Tbsp. oil

1 cup sugar

1/3 cup milk

1 tsp. vanilla

1 cup flour

½ tsp. baking soda

½ tsp. salt

1 cup oats

½ bag chocolate chips

Cream together wet ingredients (peanut butter, oil, sugar, milk, vanilla) on medium speed until smooth. Add dry ingredients and combine.  Bake on greased cookie sheets at 425˚ for 6 minutes for perfect, melt-in-your-mouth cookies. (Tbsp. sized balls work best.)

*To make this recipe truly vegan, substitute soy milk for regular milk, and use dark chocolate chips or a substitute.

I have only skimmed the surface of this fantastic (so I hear–I’m on page 8 ) book of feminism, and I have already been distracted by some fun discussion of word etymology and the power of words. I’d like to share:

Words hurt, soothe, inspire, demean, demand, incite, pacify, teach, romance, pervert, unite, divide. ~inga muscio, p.8

How will you use your words today?

Even as much as I’d like to be the perfect teacher like my aunt Mary C, I recognize that sometimes I am using words to demean and demand more so than teach and inspire, but I think that we could all stand to be more conscious about our choice of words, tone, and body language. At least if you incite/divide/hurt/etc., do it purposefully and with full knowledge. Don’t forget that words that you may mean to soothe may have a different power on the listener. I challenge you to be more aware of your receivers.

Think about it.

May I lift my glass and give three cheers to two old friends from Greensboro who drove up (from South Charlotte) to join me for dinner!! I hadn’t seen Leslie-Ann in two years! I’m very lucky to have Gary living in town, and also that he was kind enough to share LA this time…

We (mostly I) talked for several hours about our jobs, our lives, and a few things we remembered from high school. In some ways, I felt oddly like an adult entertaining friends the same way my parents used to: madly rushing around to make the living room look presentable, then serving wine and talking loudly about boring adult stuff. On the other hand, we were eating pepperoni pizza and chocolate chip cookies…

It’s strange (and now I believe glorious) to be straddling the line between adult and youth, but LA, Gary and I did a great job tonight of enjoying the best of both worlds.

I love you two!!

I got to sleep in 3 whole hours…so it is now a nice fat 8:00 am. I say “fat” because the expression in French meaning “to sleep in” is faire la grasse matinée, which translates literally to “to make/have a fat morning.” I like to think that that means you are making the morning “fat” by making it longer, but it makes me giggle to think that it could also mean that the person sleeping in is the “fat” part… you lazy cow! How glorious.

The sleeping in this morning is of course grâce à (thanks to) less than 1/2 an inch of snow and now some very scary drip-droppy rain. So as my yankee colleagues laugh their asses off at us, I’m going to go back to bed and make some more fat morning.