I had a blog before this one, and I was just rereading it (yeah, slow night!). I would like to repost most of an entry from Saturday, November 1, 2008 because it is a really great entry!
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Life in St. Louis
For those of you following my blog…haha! I know no one is. But anyway, at the beginning of September, my boyfriend and I moved to St. Louis for him to play with the SLSO this year. What have I been doing? Well, a few gigs, a few students, and really that’s about it. At first all the free time was really refreshing (I was used to working every day for about ten to twelve hours) but by now I’ve gotten a wee bit bored. So what I like to do is break up my day into thirty minute blocks, and plan activities around that. Okay, not really. But I’ve had more time to practice, sleep, cook, and work out. I also get a lot of business done.
One of the things I did recently was make some delicious pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. Only I used butterscotch chips. I’m going to give you the recipe here, because these cookies are truly awesome.
Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies:
INGREDIENTS
* 1/2 cup shortening
* 1 1/2 cups white sugar
* 1 egg
* 1 cup canned pumpkin
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
* 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
* 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
* 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
DIRECTIONS
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease cookie sheets.
2. In a large bowl, cream together the shortening and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg, then stir in the pumpkin and vanilla. Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, nutmeg, and cinnamon; gradually mix into the creamed mixture. Stir in the walnuts and chocolate chips. Drop dough by teaspoonfuls onto the prepared cookie sheets.
3. Bake for 15 minutes in the preheated oven, or until light brown. Cool on wire racks.
Notes from me: I did not include the walnuts, I’m not a big walnut fan. The dough turned out really wet, and the cookies do not spread, so you can put them really close together. Lastly, they took more than 15 minutes in my oven, so be sure to check. Even when I took them out I wasn’t really sure they were done because they were pretty light, but they passed the taste test.
I have been teaching a violin class at a nearby school–there are five kids in the class, and it’s beginning violin. I’m not very good at discipline–I tend to let the kids distract me with random questions too much. By random questions I mean questions like, how are bows made? I hate to not answer stuff like that, because I love when kids are curious, but it tends to derail the class. We’ve had about five classes so far. I am trying to be more in charge. I will have to lay down the law a bit more, and insist that we stay on track. On a bright note, the kids are doing well–each week they have met my expectations. I suppose I need to raise my expectations of them!
I also have three private students so far. They are fun–one adult, one high school student, and one 4 year old, all male (a big change for me). The four year old is so fun! At the end of the first lesson, I showed him the stickers, to pick one. He looked through a bit, and then said, “Where are the batman stickers?”. As if, naturally I had batman stickers, and he just couldn’t find them. Unfortunately I did not! Since I was so used to mainly girl students, I had a lot of hearts and stars, but no BATMAN. Since then I have purchased batman stickers.
The other funny story about my four year old. We’ll say his name is Daniel. The second or third lesson, I called him Daniel, and he looked at me, and said “That’s not my name, my name is Andrew.” I was HORRIFIED, worried that I had called him the wrong name, and I looked at his mother to apologize. She rolled her eyes, and said, “yeah, for some reason he has decided he would rather be called Andrew. Just ignore it.” It was hilarious!
Note from Hannah today (not from the past): I plan to make those cookies again this month, I remember how delicious they were!