I just baked another double batch of chocolate chip cookies. With as many batches as I have baked lately, people are going to start thinking that this is all I do these days. It really is not. I promise. It feels like it lately though. It was nice to have the week off from cooking while in Atlanta, I will admit to that completely. Vacation was nice.
In all fairness, I made these cookies for a purpose. I almost always make cookies for a purpose. I just go well above and beyond the purpose. Ben has a “meet the teacher” activity tomorrow morning at the church. He will wander over to the church in the morning with Lance and have breakfast with the rest of the Primary, he as a teacher and Lance as a student. Lance will meet his teacher for the new year and Ben will meet his new students for the year. From his roster he has eight kids on his list of four year old children in his class this year. The cookies are for the kids in his class. I will bag up a couple for each of the kids for him to hand to each of the kids tomorrow morning.
Now I have to confess that this batch of cookies was not my best batch as far as dough consistency. It was cold in the house and the butter would not soften. It was cold outside today. It never made it above 50˚F today I believe. It was cold in the house as a result of that. It is hard to get butter to soften properly when the house is cold. It did finally soften up after I decided I was cold enough to bump up the temperature on the heater. Another problem we had was the semi-frozen eggs in the carton in the fridge. I had forgotten about the eggs that were frozen in the carton when we made scrambled eggs for our big family Christmas Brunch. I was quickly reminded when I opened the carton to find the one cracked egg and the others were semi-frozen. It was not a crisis per say, it just meant that overall the consistency of the cookie dough was not the same as usual. Not bad, just different and not the same. The cookies still turned out good. The dough just was not up to my usual par.
I also had problems defrosting pork chops today. I know this is not the normal thing for me. I do not eat them. I have a leftover Apricot Chicken Breast from dinner last night that I can reheat so everyone else was going to have grilled pork chops. I even went to Home Depot and exchanged our empty propane tank for the BBQ grill so that we would have gas for the grill to grill them with. Of course the best laid plans sometimes go astray when the pork chops do not defrost enough to get them apart. Alas, I wandered to Kroger to get a couple of gallons of milk because we were down to a single mostly frozen gallon of milk (see a trend here?) and some bread. I decided I would just grab some additional hamburger patties, hamburger buns, and some chips. We would hamburgers and chips for dinner tonight and call it good. We could do the pork chops tomorrow night.
As for the partially frozen gallon of milk? Well that has been partially frozen for over a week and an half now. It is the spare fridge. That was where the egg carton was where the eggs froze as well. I think I need to double check the temperature settings on the fridge again and make sure that someone has not inadvertently adjusted the settings because this is not the first time I have ended up with frozen eggs. This is the first time I have ended up with an entire gallon that has ended up partially frozen and has stayed frozen for this long. Interesting at best. I figure I will just use the gallon of milk to cook with this coming week as it will be separated more easily than normal. I should check other things in there for their state of being frozen.
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