Lunch

I am not a fan of making school lunches. It is way too hard to convince my pre-coffee brain that putting in the effort to make unique and good lunches each day is really that important. It’s so very easy to fall into the habit of packing the same thing day in and day out. I rarely get complaints from the kids so I can’t be doing to bad and it is always nutritious even if sometimes monotonous.

Of course each and every year and several times throughout the year I vow to start making lunches before heading off to bed even though it never actually happens; or at least not for more than a few days. I always find by the end of the day I’m just too tired to bother. I keep going back to doing it half asleep and semi-focused in the morning.

One part of lunches that I’ve enjoyed the past couple of years however is writing the girls a little message or drawing a little picture and sending it in their lunch.  I’ve done this many different ways on little slips of paper on the edge of a juice box, in the skin of a banana or any other way I can think of.  They are very simple notes of love and encouragement or a silly little joke.   

After hearing from both girls how disappointed they have been to not find any notes in their lunch kits so far this year I’ve realized just how much they have come to love them as well. I also found out that E has saved most of the paper ones I’ve sent and just how much she loves the little joke cards.  She apparently likes to share them with her friends.

So it appears there is one more thing I need to remember to send.   So I decided rather than try to remember each morning, when I dont' remember much I would make a stack of little note cards to send them over the next few weeks rather than do it every day.  Joke ones that flip up to show the punch line for E and very simple pictures and notes for A.  

Hope it keeps them both smiling.

Zbrush - Work in progress

No Time To Lose

Ya, I'm not sure I'll be keeping up with blogging like I have for the last couple of weeks. We'll see how things go, but three classes, on top of a full-time job, and fatherhood is starting to catch up with me.

Things the girls say: Allie has been sleeping in our bed recently - she's been waking up and coming in our room anytime between 12:30 and 5:30 am. She came in the other night, fell back asleep, and then woke up a short time later,looked at me and said "Snuggle with me daddy". Oh...melt my heart!

Workout log: Thursday I did some lifting. Friday was an off day and today (Saturday) I did about 3.2 miles.

Mmmm Cookies

The perfect chocolate chip cookie is soft, it's sweet, and it melts in your mouth and is sinfully delicious.  I've been lucky enough to find one such recipe that is just right and I have been making it for years.  They are by far my favorite cookie as well as my kids and has become part of many a friends's cookie repertoire.

It is a cookie that without fail turns out just right even slightly burnt they still taste pretty darn good with a glass of milk. It’s a very simple and classic recipe which doesn’t have any funny ingredients or odd steps in it; sometimes simplicity is the best ingredient of all.  

I definitely make these cookies more often than any other kind.  Sure I’ve tried different recipes for chocolate chip cookies and I make many other different types but I always come back to this one.  It is the cookie by which all other cookies are judged.

Since my husband was diagnosed as diabetic and our lives have gotten increasingly busy I don’t bake as often as I once did. So it’s been some time since I made these but both girls have been asking daily for me to make some for about two weeks and last night I finally did.

Now I got a little distracted at one point as I was watching a movie from the breakfast bar while making them and I had a little oopsie.  What I did was to add the chocolate chips before the butter and before mixing at all. Normally I would mix the dough with the butter before adding the chocolate chips.

You wouldn’t think it would make that big a difference however I melt the butter before pouring it in so what happened is that I poured a cup of quite hot butter over a pile of chocolate chips which being chocolate melted quite thoroughly.  My mistake was quite evident the moment I turned on the mixer and the dough turned a much different colour than normal.

Realizing my mistake I simply added more chocolate chips and so ended up with chocolate chocolate chip cookies. To quote Richard Scarry, best mistake ever.