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Covid, Cookies, and Consternation

There are two things I want simultaneously, but they are mutually exclusive. If I get the one, I cannot have the other, and if I get the other then I cannot have the one. Most of this past summer I have been on the fulcrum of the teeter totter with my wants perched on either side, trying to navigate to one or the other while keeping my balance, which did not happen.

It was a summer of sliding, slipping, falling off, running this way then that way. There were dreams of connection and happiness bursting into showers of sorrow, and oceans of sorrow blossoming into hope.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I have the one, but not the other, or rather a chance at the one with the exclusion of the other and have spent days grieving the loss while still being grateful for having the chance.

To complicate this whole mess, and it was messy inside and outside, all of this was done on the poverty diet, designed to keep me functioning with my underlying medical condition (POTS) while managing a super tight budget. Some malnutrition may have occurred along with a few lost pounds, which were readily found again, thank goodness.

I made some music, wrote a practice exercise to focus on weaknesses in my skill level (happy to report that it’s working as designed), wrote about 12,000 words for the sequel to Witchified: Cesily’s Grand Opening plus updated the artwork.

I’ve been painting in the art studio focusing on Water. There’s a series of 5 paintings that I will put up for auction (eventually) to raise money for the recovery efforts in Lahaina after the horrible fires there that took place on Aug. 8th. These are learning paintings, and I’m slow, so I will naturally miss the news cycle, and for most of the world this tragedy will be behind them, so once they are finished the most I can hope for will be to raise awareness, and be a fresh influx of money, even if it’s a small amount, to encourage and let everyone know they are not forgotten. Updates on the paintings can be found here.

I just settled back into my place where I had been planning to move out from, and sort of got the hang of my job when I got Covid. Today is the final day of my isolation, so Happy Labor Day, cough, cough, sniffle.

The whole weekend has been managing this illness, and in the few bits of the day where I feel okay, doing some laundry, cooking, washing dishes, and oh yes, I made cookies. Comfort cookies.

Here’s the thing about this batch of cookies. I had all of the ingredients mixed together for a batch of delicious Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies, but the dough looked unnaturally crumbly.

“Why is it dry?” I wondered, then with a growing horror realized I had left out, of all things, the egg.

Now I have two choices, and neither of them are ideal.

I can cook the crumbly dough and have crumbly cookies, and that will be how the cookie crumbles.

OR

I can try to add the egg into the dough and risk having cookies which look like and taste like they are covered in baked egg.

I imagine this can all go badly. I can’t go back in time and separate out the wet and dry ingredients. I mean there’s a reason why these things are done in a certain order.

Against my better judgment, I broke an egg into another bowl and whipped it so that at least the yoke and the white were mixed thoroughly and then, cringing with self-loathing and spite and regret, dumped the mixed egg into a well I had formed (somewhat) with the dough and began folding and stirring and watching the yellow slime of the egg coat the surface of the dough, the chocolate chips, the oatmeal with a fascinated disgust until at last I could bear it no more and declared it time to form and bake the cookies.

Some days there are no good choices, just ones that are suboptimal. Trade offs. You can feel that either way you are losing, and can forget that maybe either way you are winning. Either way there will be cookies.

The cookies came out tighter than usual, but tasty and with no obvious indication that the egg had been added last of all. They do not easily crumble.

And if you’ve read this far, or are a reader of this blog long time, here is a gift to you. The secret of these cookies is that they are made with half ww flour, and half regular flour, so the glycemic index on them is lower than if they were only made with regular all purpose flour. Plus they have a little more fiber, a little more flavor, and a little more substance. I spent years adapting recipes to whole grain alternatives, and this recipe has been tested and refined to be delectable.

I have a recipe for a big giant batch of cookies, which was great when there were a lot of bellies around me demanding cookies, but since I live alone, and I just make cookies for myself, I have the small batch recipe, too.

And I’m sharing the recipes here.

Thank you for reading. This is now a cooking blog. 😉

Big Batch
Little Batch – notation at the bottom right is for my contrary tiny oven, just ignore and adjust the main baking temp/time to your oven. Most cookies do fine in the middle of the oven.

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A Reasonable Reason

Trudging through life and weary
I continued to walk this path
Wondering why
Until the day I met you
Nothing makes sense except
The love I found there
In my heart
Overflowing
My love,
You have given me more
Than you know
Just by being the star
In my sky
A long cherished hope
Realized in your eyes
The ocean washes to the shore
Like your heart beat
Steady
The sun shines like your
Spirit brightening my world
The night falls softly
A blanket of goodwill
Soothing away
The worries
When dawn breaks
I hear the call
Now
Love and devotion
Your name
One and the same

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From the Ocean to the Light

Too young
They tore away the veil
All illusions falling into disrepair
Overwhelmed, unguided
Did you flounder on the sand
Tossed from the comfort of the ocean
There receding

The sun it rose and set
The moon appeared and vanished
The stars shone bright and were occluded
By the gathering clouds at night

The wind it howled and rent
The last vestiges of innocence
Staggering there upon the land
You fought for sustenance

You made a friend betrayal
You found a love unloyal
You built a thorny hedge around
That heart

Attacked from every side
Fighting to stay alive
A fortress you did make
To keep you safe
To keep you safe

We met there in the forest
On the twisting winding paths
Our hedges quite entangled
Finding love at last

Carefully we dismantle
Every stone and every branch
We lay aside our weapons
Free our hearts here from the past
Now we plant a garden
Now we make a plan
Now we build a life together

It’s beautiful you see
The seeds of hope we always
Carried from the ocean to the light
Are planted in the earth now
To grow flowers of delight    

~ From the Ocean to the Light, Wendy Kheiry
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Breaking Oh, Enneadic Wings

Are you listening when the sky sings
In shades of blue and grey and white
The harmonies of colors and the breath
Held in the night
The stars all took to wing and flew
They winked out from the light
You may listen to the whispers
You might hear the latest news
But did you ever wonder if the news were true
The thrumming there just out of sight
The rising seas and coming drought
And we quibble over nonsense
While companies and governments and millionaires
Bleed the common people out
With politics divided by the bad guys left and right
There is no recourse left to barter for justice in the land
They pass the buck and pass the bucks above and under ground
With a quiet word and quiet works
They keep the people down
And you think that you are fighting for something good and something true
And you think that just around the corner someone else might fight for you
And they keep raking in the profit while they’re laughing at your prophets
And the way you sell your soul and contemplate the blues
Cultivated
Separated
Understated
Overrated
Walking a barren path among the clues
Where is hope you ask me and I look to burnished skies
The orcas and the dingoes are itching for our hides
Here comes the sun, we better run
Across the floods from hurricanes
Beware
The mother has been patient has come to the last straw
Found the needle in the haystack
Pulled back the chic disguise
Langya’s made the leap across the species line
We’re almost out of time
Don’t look to me for hope
I have a basket full of nope
I sit here basking in the moment
No enemies in sight
As twilight batters down the planet
I revel in the night
Batten down and hunker
In a cold and aging bunker
With some blankets and some coffee
Watch the ending near
I have no fear
I listen to the sky sing
I hear the birds awing
Looking at the forest beautiful and clean
The gods and goddesses assemble
With their fingers about to land upon the button
On the table labeled ‘Reset’
Freya’s hair is tangled in Russia and Ukraine
And Odin’s there in China teasing out that thing
Thor is racing through the starless void
Upon his asteroid steed
There is no need for panicking and hunger
In just a moment there will be not much more left to wonder
Brigid rises from the ashes in the house once gleaming white
And I tell you that the whispers are not heeded
As they fly upon the webs encoded by the slights of hands
The rumbled tumbled jumbled words and phrases
Hearken to an age
When foxes leapt upon the tables in random strings belaid
I tell you the corruption leaking from the inside out
Is corroding all the batteries and redrawn all the lines
In my cup I shake the die about to roll
You ask me for my hope and I knock over my swollen basket
Every nope within clatters across the checkered tiles
You’ll have to find your own
I’m fresh out until next week
When I can run into the woods and gather
What I seek

It’s almost not too late