The forecast for Wednesday was WET with a good possibility of strong storms in the evening hours depending on if the sun ever came out that day and how much the temperature rose.
Morning was definitely spot on; with pouring rain and thunder rumbling like the sound of a tractor pulling an empty gravity wagon back and forth on the road in front of my house. Horses were going to have to stay in the barn, as the air temperature was hovering just above the freezing mark and it was going to be impossible to put the horses outside without them getting drenched to the skin in the rain. I didn't want anyone to get chilled.
So, rather than turning them out after their breakfast had been eaten, I decided I would stay in the house and do some house chores in the morning, then go to the barn after lunch and (hopefully) turnout horses during the break in the rain we were supposed to get midday. It's always easier to clean stalls while the horses are outside, so I just flip-flopped my typical stalls-in-the-morning, house-in-the-afternoon schedule.
DH had been hinting on Tuesday about wanting some macadamia nut cookies, and this rainy morning was a perfect time to make some. Thankfully, Tuesday I had planned ahead and taken a stick of butter out of the fridge to warm up and soften.
The first step in making the cookies was to gather the ingredients. So, I began by retrieving that stick of butter from the barn-shaped cookie jar on the counter.
"What?!?" you say. Butter in the cookie jar? Huh?
Yeah, when I want to set out a stick of butter to soften, I've learned to put it in the barn cookie jar (which, as my overflow cookie jar, rarely gets used because I don't often make double batches of cookies since the kids grew up and moved to houses of their own). Otherwise The Yarn Thief will jump up on the counter, no matter which counter I put the butter on (or try to hide it under a dish towel), and lick/eat it. She didn't used to jump on counters at all, but in the last handful of years she has developed the bad habit of doing it when I'm outside, or at night when DH and I are sleeping. Always when there's nobody nearby to discipline her for it.
Getting the container of macadamia nuts out of the pantry, I looked at the level of the contents and suspected I was going to be short on the needed amount of nuts. Bummer. What could I sub in for the lacking macadamias?
Walnuts! Walnuts I have plenty of on hand, and they sounded like they would go well with macadamia nuts and white chocolate chips. So I altered my recipe a tad and made Macadamia Walnut Cookies instead.
In the process of making the cookie dough, I used up the last of the vanilla in the little bottle I use for measuring out of when cooking and baking. And, oops, the cabinet where I keep my steeping jar of vanilla revealed that I forgot to start another batch a month or so ago when I bought the vodka to use to soak vanilla beans in thus making vanilla extract.
The sun never did come out on Wednesday, although the rain stopped for a couple of hours. It resumed again around 8:00 p.m. in the form of thunderstorms and kept up most of the night. Based on how much fuller the horses' water trough were Thursday morning than on Tuesday evening when horses last had access to them, I'm guessing we got somewhere in the range of 5-6 inches of rain in about 36 hours.
Macadamia Walnut Cookies
(For macadamia nut cookies I use the basic Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip recipe, but instead of chocolate chips I use white chocolate chips and add 1 cup macadamia nuts.)
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
1/2 cup shortening or lard (I use lard since I'm very sensitive to soy as I get older and soy is now in just about all brands of shortening)
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup white (granulated) sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/4 cup all purpose flour (I use unbleached)
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup white chocolate (vanilla) chips
1/2 cup chopped mac nuts
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
Mix together sugars, butter and shortening/lard until creamy. Stir in the eggs and vanilla. Add in the flour, baking soda and salt, then stir until combined. Next add the nuts and white chocolate chips and stir enough to evenly distribute through dough. Place on to ungreased cookie sheets by rounded spoonfuls.
Bake at 375 degrees for approx. 9-11 min until edges are browned. (Baking time varies by oven; my old one was 10-11 minutes, the newer one seems to get it done in 9 minutes.) Remove from cookie sheets and cool on wire racks.