I started this blog as a creative way to express my passions of cookies, family, friends, contemporary folk music, farmhouses gardening and cottage living. I am a Registered nurse and having worked at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh ICU for 18 years I wanted a break from that stress and so began my quest to start a "cookie business" Beginning from our home, my husband, my sister & I began the company with chocolate chip cookies baked from scratch on a small Hobart 20 qt mixer. My husband & I raised 2 wonderful daughters who both worked in the business as children. Today we operate from a 2000 sq ft commercial location outside of PIttsburgh PA in Plum Boro. The company, Country Cupboard Cookies is growing and I have been finding myself busier and busier with the daily running a business issues. I found I needed to get back to my creative roots somehow. So here I am. Though I hope to also let people know about my cookie company through this blog, mainly I will write about life surrounding the business...family, friends, my roots from a farmhouse in Scottdale, Pa where I learned to bake, my love of cottages, gardens and COOKIES!!
No matter how many cookie recipes I try, no matter how many people tell me that oh, these are the best cookies I've ever tasted, I honestly have never been satisfied with my chocolate chip cookie recipe. Until now. I tried the simple idea of chilling the dough prior to baking for not just the usual hour, but for 1 1/2 days! A couple of tweaks to the recipe i.e. using dark bittersweet chocolate mixed in with the semi-sweet and a slight increase in sugar worked to make this my favorite chocolate chip cookie! They are crisp are the outside, soft almost gooey in the middle and the layers of chocolate are divine.
Dar Williams, a new favorite of mine, I've seen her in concert both at Falconridge , a huge 4 day concert, and Pittsburgh, a small venue in South Park, Dan & I have been fans since. This is posted for my friend Toby, who's always been there for me and helped me accept and face life with courage in so many ways. Love you!
Go ahead, push your luck Find out how much love the world can hold Once upon a time I had control And reigned my soul in tight Well the whole truth It's like the story of a wave unfurled But I held the evil of the world So I stopped the tide Froze it up from inside And it felt like a winter machine That you go through and then You catch your breath and winter starts again And everyone else is spring bound
And when I chose to live There was no joy It's just a line I crossed It wasn't worth the pain my death would cost So I was not lost or found
And if I was to sleep I knew my family had more truth to tell And so I traveled down a whispering well To know myself through them
Growing up, my mom had a room full of books and hid away in there Her father raging down a spiral stair 'Til he found someone Most days his son And sometimes I think My father, too, was a refugee I know they tried to keep their pain from me They could not see what it was for
But now I'm sleeping fine Sometimes the truth is like a second chance I am the daughter of a great romance And they are the children of the war
Well the sun rose With so many colors, it nearly broke my heart It worked me over like a work of art And I was a part of all that
So go ahead, push your luck Say what it is you gotta say to me We will push on into that mystery And it'll push right back And there are worse things than that Cause for every price And every penance that I could think of It's better to have fallen in love Than never to have fallen at all
'Cause when you live in a world Well it gets into who you thought you'd be And now I laugh at how the world changed me I think life chose me after all
I have to admit that Richard will always be my favorite songwriter/musician, a concert that my husband convinced me to attend with Tracy Grammer, Dave Carter, Joan Baez and Richard actually started our shared folk music craze.
