cookies & kodak moments.

Move out of the way awesome OSCA cooks, Jen Graham is in the oven now.  Now, before your jaws all drop to the floor and a sound resembling a baby fox in distress squeezes out of your lungs, let me say that I have successfully made lentil curry, broccoli, and mashed potatoes by myself since I've been here, and the triumph doesn't stop there.  This past Friday, to keep myself from eating Oreos & peanut butter, I decided to do some baking.  Yes, Jen baking.  No, house burning.  Here's the recipe (for 48 servings -- I cut it all in half to make 24):

2 3/4 cups of flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup of softened butter
1 1/2 cups of sugar
1 whole banana mushed
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

You combine all the dry ingredients in a bowl, and in another bowl, you stir together the butter and the sugar.  Then you add the banana and stir/mash until it's mostly smooth.  Add the vanilla, and then slowly mix in the dry ingredients.  I like to use my hands for this part.  As I balled them up to set on a cookie tray, I rolled them around in a mixture of sugar and cinnamon.  They cook for about 7-10 minutes in an oven that's heated to 200 C.  Which might be something like 400 F?

And, yes, there are no eggs and no milk!  And you can use margarine for butter I assume, if you want to be super vegan!  (I just hate eggs because it makes me afraid to eat the dough...)  Eggs are a binding agent, and since bananas are sticky, they act the same way!  I didn't have any problems with the cookies with bananas in the place of eggs.  And they were a huge success!  Here is a picture!

Bananas to the right just to prove I did it.  They were really so delicious!

On Saturday, we went to the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher with the International Students Society, and here are some pictures.  I'm really too lazy to say much about it, and I really do think that photos speak for themselves, but I do want to say something about our walking tour of the Burren.  The guy who took us around could tie an ancestor to that land as far back as 200 years.  That's ten times longer than I've been alive.  That's about how old the state of Ohio is, folks, and I certainly can't trace my family back that far, let alone connect them to a plot of land.  Think about how well you'd know a place.  Oh, man, it just blows my mind.

 Cow @ The Burren, which is the Land of the Fertile Rock.  Basically, a boatload of exposed limestone, which releases nutrients into the soil, and also stores water and heat, making this one of the most fertile regions in Ireland.

A little tower of rocks put up by the British so that they'd know where they were in the mountains.  Some people use them as meditation spots nowadays.  Fascinating how meanings adapt to generations.

 Teletubbie Land, or The Shire: 2011, or The Cliffs of Moher Visitors' Center.

 Poll na Brone, an Iron Age (?) portal tomb.

My goals for next week are pretty much the same as my goals for this week.  I didn't accomplish much, but, in my defense, I was catching a cold which has now settled comfortably in my nose.  New goal is to have done a considerable amount of reading, which probably won't happen, but a girl can dream, can't she?  Hope you enjoyed the pictures.  It's off to Belfast next weekend.

Cheers!