Baking Day

Today is baking day or rather make the dough to bake on a later day. One of the local churches is having a variety show on Saturday so many of the women are making cookies to share. I made 3 different kinds, all of which will get their own blog so y'all can have each recipe individually. None are my original recipe, so I will mention where I found each of them. The first one I found on the back of a package of Nestle Toll House dark chocolate and mint chips. I will give my opinion at the end along with any changes I would make in the future.

Mint Chocolate Delights

Makes about 4 dozen cookies

2 cups all-purpose flour

⅔ cup Nestle Toll House Baking Cocoa

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

1 cup (2 sticks) butter or margarine, softened

⅔ cup granulated sugar

⅔ cup packed brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 large eggs

1 ⅔ cup (10-oz package) Nestle Toll House Dark Chocolate and Mint morsels

Preheat oven to 325°.

Combine flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt in a small bowl. Beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla extract in a large mixer bowl until creamy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in morsels. Drop by well rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets.

Bake for 11 to 13 minutes or until cookies are puffed and centers are set. Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes, remove to wire racks to cool completely.

These aren't bad. I was expecting them to spread out while baking, but they retained their shape. I used a combination of butter flavor Crisco and regular vegetable shortening because it is what I had on hand and cheaper than butter. The cookies are nice and moist, but crumble when transferring to a baking rack.

All in all, I would make these again, but would add more chips (morsels).

Trying New Things

 It seems like every single time I try something new, it blows up in my face. Case in point. Tonight I decided to try a new cookie recipe from one of my newer cookbooks that looked and sounded good. I followed the recipe exactly, only substituting preserves for jam because I was unable to find jam. The dough seemed to be right, but when I baked them, the cookies looked and tasted awful.

A few years ago, I attended a happy hour during Pride Month. There were supposed to be drink specials, but when I finally got to the bar, there weren't any and the one drink I did purchase, was in a small plastic cup and cost $14. I also went to try to meet new people, but it seemed that everyone there already knew everyone else thus leaving me in the dust yet again.

A few years before that, I tried meeting new people by joining Meet-up groups for those with similar interests. I tried a photography group and we met in Central Park in the fall. it started out ok, but within a very short span of time, I lost the group and got bored as all of the photographers were taking pictures of the same things over and over and moving on very slowly. I and several others decided to branch out on our own to further explore the park. Mind you that by this time we had lost the rest of the group entirely. We walked around the park and ended back at the 59th Street station where we went our separate ways. When I reviewed the meetup later, I mentioned that we had branched out and did our own tour because we had lost the group and I got kicked out of the group. I was more annoyed than anything, but it still hurt.

Given my disastrous history of trying new things, is it any wonder when I tend to stick to my routine and rarely stray from it? I like routine and patterns and when my routine changes I get anxious and upset.

Have you ever tried something new and it backfired? Let me know in the comments.

Abercromie & Fitch

 I'm watching the Abercrombie & Fitch documentary on Netflix and the ONE thing I remember the most about working in a store next to one was the constant smell of cologne. It was so pervasive that even once the store closed permanently, the entire area still stunk. The other thing that was most noticeable would be the giant photo of a half naked man at the entrance. He would be attractive and white. I didn't really think much about the company as a teenager because I didn't have access to a mall and never really thought about how exclusionary the company was. ALL of their models were attractive and white. You didn't ever see any variety of people. No gays, no blacks, Asians, Hispanics. Just white.

When the company first started in 1892 by David Abercrombie (Ezra Fitch was a frequent customer who bought into the company in 1900), they catered to people like Teddy Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, and Ernest Hemingway- rugged, heavy outdoorsmen and carried such items like fishing gear, guns, camping gear. When they moved to a Madison Avenue location, they started to carry sportswear for women. The store filled the entire building and housed a shooting range in the basement, on the mezzanine paraphernalia for lawn games, archery, skiing, and free diving. The second through fifth floors were for clothing for different climates or terrains. On the sixth floor were a picture gallery, a bookstore (focused on sporting themes), a watch repair facility and a golf school (fully equipped with a resident professional). The seventh floor included a gun room with hundreds of shotguns and rifles, decorated with stuffed game heads, as well as a kennel for dogs and cats. The eighth floor contained fishing, camping and boating equipment and included a desk for a fly- and bait casting instructor who gave lessons at the pool which was located on the roof. The fishing section alone was stocked with over 48,000 flies and over 18,000 fishing lures.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Abercrombie_%26_Fitch)

It was founded as an upscale sporting goods store that was completely revamped into what it is today by Mike Jeffries after the company was purchased by Limited Brands in 1988. In 1910, they began selling women's clothing, becoming the first store in New York to sell clothing for both women and men in one store (citation needed).

This is very similar to both Orvis and LL Bean as they both focus on the outdoors, camping, fishing, hunting and spending time in the outdoors.

As a teenager in the 1990's growing up in a very rural area where the nearest shopping mall was an hour away, MTV was only accessible to families who could afford satellite (cable wasn't available in my town and still isn't) or those who subscribed to magazines like Seventeen, Tiger Beat, Teen Beat, etc.. What they did was discriminatory and illegal and while they were sued and settled, they never admitted any guilt nor faced any real consequences for their hiring practices.

I think that documentaries like this one (White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch) are hugely important because they not only show the illegal business practices, but they also show how some of the employees felt about working there and the sexual assault that some faced and the blatant discrimination (hiring employees of other races and then either scheduling them for only night shifts and scut work or not putting them on the schedule at all).