Being Hit Below the Belt...Twice

Wow. Do something good, get kicked twice for it. For the last few weeks I have been planning a "Praise & Prayer" Hour with two other parishioners at my Church. Deb & Jim are extremely musically talented and have asked me to help them to bring for lack of a better word a P&W hour at our church once a month.  Well we had the first one two nights ago and we had 6 people show up. Better than we thought. It seemed to go over very well. So of course, as my life goes, I do something good for God and satan has to come and throw in his two cents. I was hit twice by him, through a person who is supposed to be one of my best friends, is my flesh and blood family and where does the blow come from? Why to mock God and my Pro Life beliefs. I won't detail it because it's not worth mentioning. The first blow yesterday made me angry and frustrated. Then today's made me want to cry. Weep for the fact that someone could mock God and the unborn victims of abortion so coldly. The thing is that, I have been on my guard and walking on egg shells with this person. We did have a discrepancy about a month ago and I thought everything had blown over but I guess I'm such a horrible person. I don't want to beat myself up but, this is probably the the thing I hate the most about being a "devout" Catholic. That if I do good, I'm kicked in the face almost immediately. Sometimes it's just easier to give up. But of course, that's what satan wants. And in the long run it's not what I want. End Rant.

Double Chocolate White Chocolate Chip Cookies

So if there was one thing I was making sure I was perfecting in my last year of undergrad at FUS was that I was going to make a cookie that tasted just like the Subway ones. Specifically the Double Chocolate Chip Cookies. So I made many a cookie, and eventually found out how you make that cookie taste like chocolate, almost brownie like and now I will share it with you!

The Mint Variety - Great for Christmas!

What you need:

• 1 1/3 Cups & 1 Tablespoon Butter or Margarine (either will work, it just depends on how fattening you want them)
• 1 Cup Sugar
• 2/3 Cup Brown Sugar, Firmly Packed
• 1 Tablespoon Vanilla Extract
• 2 Eggs
• 2 1/4 Cups All-Purpose Flour
• 2/3 Cup Cocoa (Royal Dutch Cocoa is better)
• 1 Teaspoon Baking Soda
• 1 Teaspoon Salt
• 1/4 Cup Milk
• 12 oz Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
• 6 oz White Chocolate Chips
• Optional: 6 oz of any of your favorite flavored chip (Mint, Cherry, Dark Chocolate, Milk Chocolate, Peanut Butter, Butterscotch, Cappuccino, etc.)

1. Preheat oven to 350°F 
2. Take a brown grocery bag and cut it apart and put in on the table. You will put the baked cookies on here. It helps to absorb the excess grease and makes for easier clean up! My Grandma's way to make cookies!
3. Combine 1 1/3 Cups Butter, Sugars & Vanilla in a large bowl until creamy. I use a wooden spoon because that's how I was taught. You have muscles, use them!
4. Add the eggs and mix thoroughly
5. In a microwave safe bowl add 6 oz of the Semi Sweet Chocolate Chips & 1 Tablespoon of Butter. Heat in the Microwave until it's at a liquid consistency.
6. Add the liquid chocolate to your batter and mix together
7. In a separate bowl, combine Flour, Cocoa, Baking Soda & Salt. Mix thoroughly
8. Add the dry ingredients to the batter, alternating with the milk. Stir until blended.
9. Stir in the remaining Semi-Sweet Chips and the White Chocolate Chips.
10. Drop dough onto an ungreased cookie sheet in 1" balls. I like to use a melon baller because it gives perfectly shaped cookies.
11. Bake for 10 minutes. I take them out when they look like they are almost done. This way they stay soft. If they are over baked, in a hour they will be no better than a hockey puck and I for one do not like hard, crispy cookies.
12. When you take the cookies out of the oven, this is when you can add the optional chips. In the picture I used the Mint Chips. I just added 4 or 5 to each cookie on the top. This way they have more of an aesthetic appeal then if they were mixed in with the dough. You can add any kind of Chocolate Chips at this step. The sky's the limit!
13. After I add the chips, I remove the cookies from the cookie sheet to the brown bag
14. After the cookies have cooled (you will be able to tell because the chips on top have re-solidified and you can touch them without them being mushy) you can remove them from the brown bag and put them in an air tight container. 
15. To ensure the cookies stay soft, put a piece of bread in the container. This will work for cookies that have already hardened too, The moisture of the bread goes into the cookies and they become soft again!
16. When I made these for Christmas I got 93 cookies and this is a single batch. I did however eat some of the dough so I could've had more but I guess 93 is a lot. You can make the cookies bigger, but you will get less cookies

So there you go kids! My favorite cookies! And yes, I do believe they taste as good, if not better than Subways!

Immune to the Economy

So I'm pretty much gonna be losing my job soon. No Customers = No Hours. Am I sad, or worried? HELL NO!!! I'm actually quite excited. Why? Because I finally have an excuse to get back into the health field. So back when I was a senior in High School, call me crazy but I had 3 jobs and went not only to High School, but was taking College Credits. So I was a busy child. Well the class I was taking was the CNA course, or to expand on the acronym: Certified Nursing Assistant. I can't really remember why I decided to take it but I did. I did my Clinicals at Portage County Health Care Center. I loved to talk with the residents. I worked in a Nursing Home in the Kitchen. I was in the Health Field, I had my foot in the door then I went in another direction. I mean I don't regret getting out of it. I think it was good for me to do other things, it made me grow out of it. I was able to get a feel of the workforce outside of Health Care. Well when I did Portugal Mission, I realized how much I missed working in Health Care. So now a year and a quarter later, I'm really digging into it. I am preparing to re-take my CNA certification. I read like 100 pages in the book in the last 24 hours! I don't do that! But I did. I have this really crazy motivation and I love it! By the end of this week, I should have registered to take the exam! Thursday I am going to practice my skills which we'll see how rusty they are. Hopefully I'll take my exam sometime around the 1st of February! I'm not really nervous, I just want to work in a place I'm passionate about again. I also want to volunteer at Ministry St. Michael's Hospital. They have volunteering with the Hospice Program and that is what I want to do as a Nurse so what better way to find out if that's where I want to be than to volunteer with that. I know I won't get paid, but I think it will be rewarding in it's own way. Otherwise I'll hate it and I'll know to go elsewhere in the Nursing Field. All I know is that these next couple years are going to be quite exciting and unpredictable. So why the title "Immune to the Economy"? They say that Nursing will be Immune to the effects of the crappy Economy. So I should be good to go. Bring it on!