Four Pounds Of Butter

The baking season is in full swing here at the StudentNurse household. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have gone through four pounds of butter in the last week. Yes. I know you're thinking about saturated fat and heart disease and heck, you're nigh on a Health Professional here, StudentNurse, but that four pounds of butter was distributed pretty evenly over an entire elementary school

(that was the root beer cake for Family Heritage Night - bake something from your heritage! and somehow a root beer cake struck me as something my midwestern relatives may have baked at some point and I was feeling pretty ironic and all until someone plonked down a pink, greasy box with several dozen donuts in it)

and two elementary classes (carrot raisin muffins and sugar cookies X 2 batches oh, and the chocolate chip cookies that didn't go where intended because of a case of strep throat in one of the StudentNurse kids). And I have to say, too, that I am fully aware as a near'bout Health Professional (just a little over three months here, folks!) that all of this butter and sugar and root beer flavorings are not good in such quantities (especially since nutrition is one of my areas of self-appointed expertise (I couple that with my other Area Of Interest: vector-borne diseases- "Ask Me About Hanta Virus!" my bumper sticker would say), but, I repeat:

It Is The Baking Season. It can't be helped.

So, about the above cookies (that'd be batch #2). I got the recipe here and it is the best sugar cookie recipe I've ever met and I tell you I have made at least two batches of sugar cookies q year (q= every for you non-nurse-y types) for at least a decade using a different recipe every time and I am difficult to please.

I like these a bunch because they are not too sweet and, subsequently, they can take a full load of sprinklin' sugars, raisins, red hots, or mini M & M's without burning your taste buds with SWEET. And, by the way (and since you already think I'm evil in the nutrition department), the inventor of mini M & M's should be awarded some sort of candy Nobel Prize. Those things are perfect for making little mouths and buttons (et al.) on cookies. And, shut UP (no, YOU shut up), I am way more frantic about food dyes than you are - WAY MORE. I understand Yellow #5 is Satan's Own Yellow, but...

Baking Season.

Those poor snowmen need eyes and buttons here, people! My husband almost ran to our local grocery store to purchase candy corn so that I could fashion little candy corn cob pipes for those guys. THAT is evidence, too, of our devotion to The Baking Season. And did I mention that we live in a neighborhood considered to be grocery-store deprived (sure, plenty of liquor stores) so much so that not one, but TWO non-profits set up fruit and veggie stands within two blocks of my house (in either direction) on two different days of the week. And, also, when he made the candy corn offer it was well past 11 PM.

OK. A couple of notes on my sugar cookies.

A) What's up with refrigerating overnight? Forget it. An hour, maybe, but COME ON, this recipe calls for softening the butter and it's not a pie crust. Texturally these things are great. They are short-bread-y and not as sturdy as some work horse sugar cookies and so require careful packaging up to move from your house to the place of consumption/ admiration, but, just yum.

B) I used orange zest because my lemon tree is sorrowful and neglected and has two tiny green lemons waiting to perish in the unseasonably chilly weather going down right now.

C) You will need to use lots of flour on rolling surface and pin: this dough is sticky. I made it twice and once did fridge it overnight and that batch was even stickier than the dough I disrespected.

D) Have I mentioned how much I love parchment paper? That's my other bumper sticker: I *heart* Parchment Paper.

Finals Ate My Brain

Unable to rub words together to form sentences: it's finals time. And what happens in the StudentNurse household at the same time as 2/3rds of the finals weeks at Nursing School U? (No, gnashing of teeth and letting the house get to a disaster of CPS-taking-away-the-kids proportion happens EVERY finals week). Yes. One of the kids has a birthday. And, remember when they were three and you could get away with baking one cake? Now there's the school cupcakes and the family party ("Hey Bumble bee, howzabout a make-your-own-sundae bar for the family party?": Phew, that worked!) and the friend party. So, add the house already a disaster and a couple of baking prjects and now the house is a sticky disaster. And that's just the thing about this place: the fun never stops! We're sticky, but we have cupcakes lingering around. There's ice cream in the freezer and a doll wrapped in pink paper hiding in the laundry room. So it's a mess and papers are here and there and books are this way and that and dishes are under and over and in between...There's only so much paper, so many dishes and so many books available left to add to the mess, right? It can only get as bad as it can get because there's a limit to the materials here. (All right that's a serious stretch, but...) And one of my finals was canceled because of glitches with the school's networking system! It's a holiday!

Oh, did I mention that I have a preceptorship in L and D at the hospital I wanted? Woo hoo!

Nurse Molly's Search is from the Tiny Pineapple site.

Rocket Ship to the Moon

My son woke me up on Monday morning. "Rocket ships to the moon...Getcher rocketship to the moon here."

Aside: my son often wakes me up saying strange things. F'rinstance: when he was three he walked into my bedroom in the middle of the night and started talking about how microbats use echolocation to find their prey because their eyes are too tiny to see. What?

So I got up and I picked out a rocket ship amidst a fairly good selection. I chose the most colorful one because I was bleary-eyed and I felt it was a day that called for something festive.

See, my last big project for nursing school was due the next day and it was a monster of a project: It was, of course, a group project because all projects in nursing school require you to coordinate with at least one if not 7 other people all of whom live more than 30 miles from you and have some sort of unworkable combination of jobs and/ or kids. The three of us did most of the work over the phone and via email. It was one of those projects wherein various incarnations of the written bits are peppering the computer's desktop and they've been given names like "projectbest.doc" and "projectfinal.doc" and "projectfinalA.doc" and "projectfinalnoreally.doc" and so I can't really tell what the most updated version is and it's mixed in with the other docs and ppts and pdfs and I'm getting calls on the cell phone from other groups whilst on the landline with my posse, "What do you think she means by literature review?" and I can't answer because there's two phones and six people and 30 documents and the kids won't go to sleep and are mixing soap and baking soda together in the kitchen thanks to the whole gak experiment and now let's see what happens when we mix this messy substance with that other messy substance cuckoo, cuckoo.

So, I carried the rocket ship with me all day and every time I just couldn't take it I made little rocket ship whooshy sounds and headed to the moon and, I have to say, it helped because here I am. I am not exploded from stress. I have Thanskgiving pie action going on in the kitchen. There are toasty nuts cooling. There is caramel (oh, yes, there is!) in the fridge. There is vanilla custard. There's a graham cracker crust. No. settle down. These are components of two different pies: Banana cream (special request from my favorite niece) and chocolate caramal almond tart (organize those first three words in any way you'd like, but "tart" is the last name.

What was the point? Oh, yeah. So, the project to end all projects was an analysis of three research papers on an issue of interest. But, wait, there's more! We had to put it onto a poster to present it. So it was a three-dimensional paper. Somehow we got the thing together over the phone. Miss J. had purchased the poster and stayed up really late laying it out and nothing was fitting and we had pared it down as much as it would pare.

I showed up to class the next day just a tiny bit early and there's Miss J. and the poster and there were words leaking off the poster and onto the table and the edges of the paper were curling up at the sides and I think I gasped and the instructor walked in and I think Miss J.'s hand went up to her mouth because of the captain's platter of my gasp and the instructor walking in and I felt terrible. We couldn't really say anything because the instructions said that we had to work on ALL ASPECTS OF THE PROJECT AS A GROUP (and, yes, it was all caps). So Miss J. and I are taping up the curly bits and the instructor (sigh, I have to tell you she was my L and D instructor - not the biggest fan of me and you can refer to older posts on that one) says, "Not really in the lean and mean category is it?" In walk other groups with these gigantic posters. Turns out Target is not the place to buy those tri-fold demonstration posters and poor Miss J. had to work all night to fit everything onto this little board.

So we go first and the instructor sits down and scooties the desk up to the edge of the table that holds our research poster and she squwinches up her eyes and we get some comments and questions and maybe I was the only one trying not to cry because, well, this statement should have had a reference and we didn't synthesize the three studies at the end and can't anyone remember the literacy rate in Turkey? And then we get a 97 and we're breathing again. Phew. it's over.

I said goodbye to most of my clients this week. I was surprised at how hard it was. I'm so tired and I feel like I've done what I can in the time I can and now what and I've been ready to move on. All three of them said something along the lines of, "Maybe you can call," or "Maybe we'll run into each other," and I felt like I was the one breaking up a relationship and gave some awkward "Um, yes. Perhaps I'll see you around town," and left and tried not to look back because I didn't want to see their sad goodbye faces and I know I won't see them around because, well, it's over. That's how it is. I'm all professional in my weepiness and all, see.