New Friend Laurel (Kate!)

I spent the last week with a "new" friend-- Laurel, the grown up! It was a lovely 3 days with her in Portland. Stayed in her first real apartment, visited her first non-student job and enjoyed watching her take care of the "family" of room mates. She was a super tour guide and found us some great things to eat... We had lots of fun conversations about kids books, and food, about Portland and home. And a couple hard conversations as well. All in all, I just love my new and improved Laurel and am looking forward to see what is ahead for her...

Chocolate Cookies

Chocolate cookies--really chocolatey chocolate cookies! This sunny summer morning my new oven was ready to bake, after 3 months of kitchen remodeling. And I knew just what I wanted to cook up! It couldn't have been more fun-- mixing up the melted chocolate, the brown sugar, the nuts... dropping the sweet spoonfuls of dough onto the cookie sheet... and then pulling out the hot, fragrant cookies from my shiny new oven. What a glorious moment! They tasted as rich and chocolatey as I had remembered them. So if you want to make some scrumptious chocolate cookies here is the recipe:

SCRUMPTIOUS CHOCOLATE COOKIES

2 2/3 cups chocolate chips (divided in half)
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup canola oil
2 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup flour
1/4 tsp. baking powder
2 cups chopped walnuts

Melt 1 1/3 cup chocolate chips in ithe microwave (1 1/2 min.) Mix in the brown sugar, oil, eggs and vanilla. Then add in the flour and baking powder. Finally stir in the remaining chocolate chips and nuts. Drop by spoonfulls onto a cookie sheet.

Bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes.

Oh joy to have the kitchen full of hot, sweet chocolatei-ness again!! I promise you won't be disappointed in these cookies, if you love chocolate as much as I do!

I have a long and loving relationship with libraries. In elementary school, it was the dark, quiet room filled with new friends--Dr. Dolitle, Laura Ingalls, Otis Spofford and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. In summer I would ride my bike to the public library and fill the front basket with a weeks reading. In Jr. High I decided to forego the usual elective class for an hour of dusting and sorting books in the school library. There I met up with historical fiction and a wall of biographies. During college years my part time job was shelving books at a huge public library, but on Saturdays the children's librarian left me to sit in her place at her desk and help children locate their own stacks of books. When we moved to Spain with our small children, the biggest deprivation was the lack of books! How many times did I read Madeline over and over to our boys! So with the help of our church in Fullerton we collected over 1,000 really good children's books to start a children's lending libarry for the missionary families scattered across the province. Nowdays, I prize my card from the Fulerton Library. I slip in the door to a seeming oasis of quiet and restoration. Unlike the mall, you don't have to count up the cost of each item you select, so I stack book upon books with happy anticipation. I take a few more than I know I can possibly read for the luxury of choice of books piled on my beside table. Cookbooks, biographies, historical fiction, travel books, something to make me laugh-- all from the library!

The Thankful Heart

For over 25 years, come the month of November, I post a large. blank page of white paper on the fridge, along with a mug of markers on the counter next to it. It's my Thankful Heart Chart. I started when the boys were tiny-- wanting them to realize they had plenty of reasons to give thanks. By the time Thanksgiving rolls around the chart is full of drawings. The grandparents are always up there, also things like chocolate cake and trees, libraries and the kids's school friends. I have those charts all tucked in a file and you'd think by now with evidence of hundreds of reasons to be thankful, that I would be the most grateful person on earth! But I'm finding that a thankful heart takes a great deal of persistence, a daily blessing count. So I'm working at it. Blessings today? Larry working into the evening on our new kitchen floor, quiet conversatioins this past week when Ani came to visit, muffins and laughter with dear friends this morning, a merciful God I can pray to for the health of a friend, the green of the maple tree out my bedroom window and the banana/chocolate ice cream waiting for me in the freezer. God is good.

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