In The Kitchen With Kate: 3 Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies

After my last peanut butter cookie fail, I was ready to redeem myself!

Ortsofsorts reminded me of the three ingredient peanut butter cookies – and I remember having made them before and they turned out great – and last night I was craving a treat – so it was on in my kitchen!

First, I don’t remember the recipe I used last time, so I hit up my Pinterest and found several that all had the same three ingredients:

1 cup peanut butter

1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar

1 egg

(Bake at 350 for 8 min – if you were wondering!)

Now, here’s where it gets interesting.  We only have crunchy peanut butter at the house.

Okay, I figure that modification won’t be an issue, I do it all of the time.

But, I was starving.  I had supper going on the stove; a wonderful quinoa mexican casserole – but it just looked too healthy.

So out came the chocolate chips.

Because chocolate.

Not bad, I used my scoop to get uniform sizes, but as I started to hatch mark the first row, I could see the flaw in my plan.

Do you see the flaw, yet? All of those wonderful nuts and chocolate chips have prevented the cookies from holding together like you normally see in cookies.  Because it is gluten free, there is no flour to bind things together! And on the cookies where a lot of chocolate chips were prevalent, when I went to hatch them, they fell apart.

But, you know me – I’m making these suckers anyway! You never know, the heat of the stove may make the ingredients magically bond to each other!

Or not…

Yup, that happened.  My gluten free three ingredient turned four or five ingredient peanut butter cookies with chocolate chips did not magically fix themselves in the oven!

Now, for those that only had a couple of chip and were in one piece with they went in the oven, they came out great! The ones that had fallen apart, well, they stayed apart; however, they also seemed to disperse the oil.  See the glistening around a few of the cookies? I think that was the peanut oil.  And, these things were insanely oily, not in a tasted gross way, but in a use 2 napkins per cookie way – and it really did just taste like peanut oil, so I have a feeling that this recipe shouldn’t be modified with crunchy peanut butter!

And well, you probably shouldn’t throw chocolate chips in there, either.

Naturally, we ate them all. It was a dessert before AND after dinner kinda night!

This is What Sad Looks Like

I have found the physical manifestation of “sad”.

Freezer meals.

For one.

Meals just for me.

Not to share with anyone.

That my friends is what “sad” looks like.

Mr. T is growing up, and he’s out of the house more than he is there – but, let me tell you before I forget, he’s so awesome!! He had signed up for some things and declined to sign up for others because he was “stretching too thin”  He said that he had certain priorities and wanted to be able to commit to them, and still needed to be able to balance everything else in his life.

I don’t know if he is the smartest teenager in the world – or if he was throwing my buzz words back at me so I wouldn’t question him, but either way, it was a win! 🙂

Back to being sad, now!  I’ve been keeping an eye open for small individual containers because I knew this day was coming, no matter how often I visited the river Nile!

I found these on sale at the grocery store.  5 for $1.

That is twenty cents each!  I had to grab a set – I figured for $1, if it failed, it was worth the experiment!  I took the left over quinoa, spinach and artichoke pasta from the day before, portioned it out and sealed those suckers up! Now they are stacked neatly in my freezer ready for a day when I’m all alone… all alone…

On the plus side, I learned how to make a frappuccino at home!

That my friends is the physical manifestation of Happy!

You can go here to watch Collin at Hip2Save teach you how, too! It’s not an endorsement, I’m just giving credit!

OHHH… here is a sneak peak of our Pin Pen Pals Project!! Thanks to every one who participated and mailed their pieces back!  I can’t wait to share the competed project with y’all!

And lastly, here is my final thought:

Letter to Your Teenage Self

My sister sent a group text:

If you could write a letter to your teenage self and only use 5 words – what would you say?

Mr. T answered almost right away “Boy you are cra cra”

My dad responded with “Evaluate Actions support Values Daily”

By now I had my response prepared “Their opinion does not matter”

Then my niece chimed in “Be yourself all the time”

And my sister, who started it all finished it with “You’re stronger than these trials”.

It was an exercise surprisingly more fun than I expected! And I loved reading the responses from the rest of the family!

🙂

In other news, I have my great grand-parents antique high boy dresser (I forgot to take a picture before I started sanding!).

This lived in their garage, so it’s not in good shape. But it’s got great character!

And I’m sure it was my sister that graffitied the inside!

The dresser is all sanded down and my original plan was to stain and seal it, since it’s missing one knob, I can’t restore it and since it is just going to live in my guest room, it doesn’t have to be a show piece.

Come to find out, it’s good news that I can’t restore it, and that it doesn’t need to be a show piece because when I sanded down the top I discovered an oil stain… Not stain so much as an oil slick! I sanded off the stain and varnish; however, the oil did seep into the wood and now I’m afraid it won’t take a stain properly.

Which means, I’m turning to y’all for help! Do I attempt to stain it? Do I break a cardinal rule and paint it? Do I paint it AND possibly go get an old gigantic map and mod podge the map on the drawers?!?

What do y’all think? I’m taking any and all suggestions!

I have the perfect Easter basket item!!

Easter is coming up and I loved this idea for non-candy in the Easter basket! Erica is a Scentsy rep, just in case you need one! 🙂

gracedbyemilie

Recently I showed you the perfect little gift for Valentine’s Day (here).  While it was quiet here on the blog, it got great reviews overall and my customers loved it.  I’m dropping off my final load of Valentine’s gifts tomorrow for a sweet friend and can’t wait to hug her neck and show her how cute they turned out!

Today I’m thinking about Easter.  I know, I know…it’s early, but hey…I like to be prepared!  We just recently released a new Scentsy buddy.  I LOVE our buddies.  My kids LOVE our buddies!  They’re awesome.  But this one just SCREAMS Easter basket to me.

But before I show you… (I know the suspense is killing you right???)

I struggle with the Easter basket.  My kiddos don’t have a shortage of candy in their lives but for some reason it bugs me to hand them a basket full and say, go…

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When Guided Meditation Fails

We’ve discussed before that I am de-cluttering my life.  Y’all were with me for the de-clutter challenge, which I won and failed at the same time!

Getting rid of things is the easy part.

Getting rid of the million of repetitive thoughts that crowd my brain, not so much!

I have a very monkey brain.  It’s all over the place, never settling in one spot for long.

Part of my declutter is trying to deal with those thoughts – especially the repetitive, redundant ones. I don’t need to think the same thought 100 times in the space of 5 minutes. Which happens. Frequently.

To help combat this, I’ve added meditation to my daily life.

For someone who doesn’t sit still very long, this has been a challenge.

Alas, it’s important to my growth, so I’ve powered through.  I started small; just a few minutes at a time.  I found a few mantra songs that were longer and I used them.  I found a comfort in the meditation. (It probably didn’t hurt that I usually did it immediately after my yoga class, but I’m still taking the Win!)

I tried a guided meditation the other day. Thank you YouTube.

It wasn’t bad.

I thought, let’s try more of those!

Below is today’s meditation and my thoughts as I sat there in a very “om” state of mind! Let me remind you – there aren’t supposed to be any thoughts happening, the goal is to clear my head… Okay, we are on the same page, let’s begin!

You are in a  big forest, you are surrounded by beautiful greenery.  You slowly walk deeper into the forest. It is lush and green all around you.

Okay, I’ve been in a forest voice over guy.  I used to live a 2 minute horse back ride from the tree line of a massive forest.

It’s not green and it’s not lush.

A forest has trees and these trees grow tall and block the sunlight from reaching the ground, so a forest, is more brown.  You’ll have some patches of green, but not lush green grass.  Now, if we were in a meadow, yes, there would be green, but deep into a forest, the only green you’ll see is moss.

Ah! Moss!  Okay, now I see green, I’m picturing lots and lots of moss.  I’m focused on my breathing.  I’m back in the zone.

You see a path.  A beautiful green path through the forest with tall trees on both sides.

Again with the green – if it is a path, the obviously the green has been worn away from feet walking the path! Also, it’s not green deep in the forest, but okay, not going through that again.  There is a path.  “hi path! good to see you”.  Okay, breathing in, breathing out.  I got this.

As we begin to walk, we notice the joy within, to be, in this place, this forest, within nature.

Okay, I’m back in the zone, focused on my breathing, I got this! Let’s go voice over guy, I’m ready to meditate! I’m back in the forest, I see the moss, I step over a log, we are GOOD!

As we take this path, we realize how happy we are

Crap, you didn’t tell me I was supposed to take the path! Now I have to run back to where the path is.  Why didn’t you tell me to take the path? I would have taken the path! Am I weird that I didn’t automatically take the path? The rest of the forest looked so much more appealing than the well traveled road – er, path.  Robert Frost? I should look that up.  Path, path, path.  No, I am not happy to be in the forest, I had to run to get on the darn path.

Moving freely.  One step at a time.

No kidding one step at a time.  Who takes more than one step at a time? Is it even possible to take two steps at the same time? Isn’t that called a hop?

Yeah… it was at this point I realized that there was no way I was reaching any type of zen moment and shut it off.

I mean really, shouldn’t some more research be done before they write out a script? And, seriously, guided meditation.

“Guided”

By not telling me to take the path you weren’t GUIDING me!

Obviously I need a different meditation today!

But seriously, am I that wrong for having not taken the path? He just said “you see a path”.  Yes, I saw it, but I wasn’t going to take it!  I bet the rest of you would have though, it would have been automatic for you guys to take the path, right?

Man, I need more zen.  

Does anyone else look at that and wonder how long before the rocks fall over?

No? Just me?

Figures.  Y’all are the ones that took the path when you were supposed to, too!