"A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in the lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do no work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothens and...
Michael Lesiuk
Serious Chocolate Chip Cookies with Walnuts
This is a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, I guess, but it's a really fancy recipe and takes a lot of time to do. You have to brown a bunch of butter, and toast a bunch of walnuts, and refrigerate the dough, and blah blah blah. But it's all worth it, though, because...
Banana Bread with Streusel Topping
The recipe is an amalgamation of two recipes. The banana bread recipe comes from here at Recipe Zaar. It uses sour cream. I already had another banana bread recipe, but I wanted to try something new. I adapted the recipe a bit to include chocolate chips. And because...
Don’t change your printer’s toner when it tells you to
Two months ago my printer (an HP-2170W Laser Printer) told me it refused to print anymore pages. It told me I was out of toner and I had to replace the cartridge. But it was lying to me - there was plenty of toner left. In fact, since that time, I have printed...
Soft and Chewy Oreo Cookie Cookies
A long time ago I came across this Chocolate Chip Oreo Cookie Recipe at Two Peas and Their Pod. The recipe was good, but it was mostly a chocolate chip cookie with a few chunks of Oreos in each cookie (which, indeed, is a perfectly fine idea for a cookie). But I...
Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Cookies (thin and buttery)
It took me a surprisingly long time to find an oatmeal cookie recipe that I wanted to try (about 10 minutes, which is practically forever if we're talking about "Google time"). I just wanted plain, thin, and buttery oatmeal cookies. I finally adapted a Chewy Chocolate...
Simple Blondies
I mentioned in my Simple Brownies post that I was more of a blondie man than a brownie man. Thus, a blondie recipe. This blondie recipe is simple and pretty much impossible to screw up. I don't really try other blondie recipes (much), because this is all you need....
Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Real-Life Trial by Combat
I'm studying Ivanhoe right now, and I came across some interesting articles about the book and its connection to a real-life trial by combat... in 1817. So I thought I would blog about the details, because though I think it is really interesting it will probably never...
Simple Brownies
I am more of a blondie man than a brownie man, myself, but my girlfriend likes brownies. So here are some brownies. I got this brownie recipe from Cookie Madness. My criteria when searching for this recipe was that it had to use an 8x8 or 9x9 pan, it had to be...
Banana Bread with Walnuts and Chocolate Chips
I still haven't discovered anything worth putting on a good banana bread. Butter, peanut butter, Nutella: all of these fail to improve upon that which is already perfect. (Admittedly, I have found that banana bread is a good bread for French toast. I've seen others do...
Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
Here's the original recipe from Recipe Zaar, which is apparently taken from the Toronto Star, and they apparently got it from... Barbara Bush. Say what you will about the 43rd president of the United States--his mom makes a pretty darn good oatmeal chocolate chip...
Chocolate Chip Cookies (using cream of tartar)
I got this Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe from a blog called A Pookie Pantry. It appears to be this AllRecipes version, but with the addition of cream of tartar to the cookies. I bought the cream of tartar for like three bucks then realized that I only needed about 1/4...
Writing habits: Anthony Trollope
I started a post comparing the writing habits of Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Ernest Hemingway, but I found that for each writer the most interesting theme about their writing was unique to them. Trollope is a machine. Dickens is concerned primarily with his...
Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Coconut Cookie Mix Cookies
The title of this post is the hardest thing about making these cookies. The recipe is easy because there is very little measuring. I basically played with the measurements of the ingredients, and added coconut and more chocolate chips. I increased the butter a bit...
Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip Cookies
I like cookies soft, and most Peanut Butter Cookies do not fulfill this criteria. Too much peanut butter seems to mess up the consistency... yet the actual taste of peanut butter is so good. These cookies are my solution. The taste of peanut butter is not...
Advantages of ebooks (in an ideal world)
So I got to wondering what would happen if ebook publishers somehow had a bunch of money to make ebooks really awesome (instead of kind of lame, poorly formatted, and with limiting DRMs). What would some of the advantages of ebooks be in an ideal world? Email your...
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Cheesecake
Fact: Peanut butter is the best thing that exists. When I was in Europe almost no one I talked to had tried peanut butter. The one person I talked to about peanut butter who had tried it thought it was really weird and not very good. For breakfast people would give me...
Dear Mr. Director of Wildlife Canada, sir
Dear Mr. Director of Wildlife Canada, Sir, I think you should know that the underground world of "Moose vs. Gravity" has really taken off, and if you are interested in this highly lucrative opportunity, all I need is a few more moose to replace the ones that have...
Some ideas
Little helmets and scuba gear so that bees can go underwater. A flashlight that turns on and off really fast, so that when you point it at something, that thing becomes the object of a disco. A game called "Dance Rules Revolution," in which long, boring rules for...
Giant Chocolate Chip Cookies
This cookie is great because it is chocolate chip and it is huge. I would compare it in size to a hockey puck. I got the recipe from here at vanilla sugar, but I took out the nuts, added an ounce of chocolate, and also ground some of the chocolate before adding it to...