The trip to Oregon was great, with a little surprise snow the first morning that didn't last. That was supposed to be the "no precipitation whatsoever" day, and after the snow it rained steadily all the way down the highway to see my mom. She's doing pretty well, but her new older dog is possibly scarier than the last one. It chases after you and barks and growls when you leave the room, and comes up to you and barks and growls when you enter it. All is good so long as you never try to go anywhere. I genuinely fear it will bite someone before long. :(
Thanks to all of you who helped with the gluten-free flour suggestions for the peanut-butter chocolate-chip cookies! We went with King Arthur, a 1:1 flour. Not sure of the results? It tasted all right when first mixed, but the dough was so wet that HalfshellHusband ultimately added 9 tablespoons more flour. That's a LOT, and that typical bitter aftertaste started to creep in.
The cookies still turned out pretty good, if little grainy. My sister says it's best to chill the dough for a while before deciding if it's a good consistency, and she also mentioned using sticky white-rice flour to help bind it. So, something to try for the next experiment!
The trip and the chance to see family were all really nice. Then it was back to work, back to finishing that second Idol story, and then reading a bunch of them and still maintaining the vague hope that I'll get around to some of the things left dangling last weekend when we went out of town.
The Christmas cards, for instance. \o?
