For the past… I don’t know… 3 years, I have been on the hunt for the perfect chocolate chip cookie.  I’ve tried everything: the recipe on the back of the Toll House Chocolate Chip bag, my trusty Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, all my favorite cooking blogs.  And I finally found one to be my go-to recipe.

This recipe is different from other chocolate chip cookie recipes, in that it uses melted butter.   I think that’s the key to it’s goodness.  There are a few hints from me at the bottom:

Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies (from Cook’s Illustrated)

1¾ cups (8¾ ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
14 tablespoons (1¾ sticks) unsalted butter
½ cup (3½ ounces) granulated sugar
¾ cup (5¼ ounces) packed dark brown sugar
1 teaspoon table salt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 large egg
1 large egg yolk
1¼ cups semisweet chocolate chips or chunks
¾ cup chopped pecans or walnuts, toasted (optional)

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 375 degrees. Line 2 large baking sheets with parchment paper. Whisk flour and baking soda together in medium bowl; set aside.

2. Heat 10 tablespoons butter in 10-inch skillet over medium-high heat until melted, about 2 minutes. Continue cooking, swirling pan constantly until butter is dark golden brown and has nutty aroma, 1 to 3 minutes. Remove skillet from heat and, using heatproof spatula, transfer browned butter to large heatproof bowl. Stir remaining 4 tablespoons butter into hot butter until completely melted.

3. Add both sugars, salt and vanilla to bowl with butter and whisk until fully incorporated. Add egg and yolk and whisk until mixture is smooth with no sugar lumps remaining, about 30 seconds. Let mixture stand for 3 minutes, then whish for 30 seconds. Repeat process of resting and whisking 2 more times until mixture is thick, smooth and shiny. Using rubber spatula or wooden spoon, stir in flour mixture until just combined, about 1 minute. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts (if using), giving dough final stir to ensure no flour pockets remain.

4. Divide dough into 16 portions, each about 3 tablespoons (or use a #24 cookie scoop). Arrange 2 inches apart on prepared baking sheets, 8 dough balls per sheet.

5. Bake cookies 1 tray at a time until cookies are golden brown and still puffy, and edges have begun to set but centers are still soft, 10-14 minutes, rotating baking sheet halfway through baking. Transfer baking sheet to wire rack; cool cookies completely before serving.

* Modifications from Me: Instead of using Chocolate Chips, I took a few squares of Semi-sweet Baker’s Chocolate and chunked it up.    Also, I’ve found that if you refrigerate the dough for a couple of days, they’re even better.  I think it gives the ingredients some time to mesh together.

If you have a favorite Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe, I’d love to try it.  I’m still open to the idea that there is a recipe floating around out there that is even better than this one.

I’m so excited that I can hardly stand it. 

Today, Funnel & I bought plane tickets to Paris.  After years of dreaming, we are finally, officially, going on our trip…. fifteen days in France and Italy in May. 

Springtime, please come soon.

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

- – - Erica Jong

After work last night, I was exhausted.  I just wanted to lay on the couch under a blanket and watch some  movies on Funnel’s Xbox that I had queued up through Netflix.   As I started my movie, my hands felt empty as I lay there.  I needed to do something – sew, knit,  journal.  I was rummaging through my little sewing closet for ideas, and found a bag of felt from when I used to make little robots and birds.  So I used my scrap felt to make a new little friend: Oliver the Valentine’s Day Owl. 

Crafting + “Dirty Dancing” + homeade salsa & chips = a pretty decent night.

A heart garland I made from some fabric and lace scraps:

(( it’s beginning to look a lot like Valentine’s Day! ))

I want to live my life differently. 
I want to live like life doesn’t owe me things.

I was looking through some older photos tonight, and found these from a wedding in October that I was the 2nd shooter at, with my friend Amber Walsh.  I enjoy being a second shooter: I get to practice and learn without all the pressure of having to make sure I get all the perfect shots.  In fact, I hardly had any portraits from this wedding – just details and guests and adorable little kids. 

Here are just a few:

A few weeks ago, my brother texted me and said, “Why don’t you update your blog anymore?” 

I’ve been meaning to, but it seems like blogging gets pushed to the very bottom of my to-do list anymore ((beneath chores, working-out, church stuff, sewing, editing photos, playing Super Mario Wii with Funnel, etc.))   Sometimes life just gets in the way.

This evening, I was reflecting on some of the big things that stood out to me this year:

Funnel and I bought a house. Buying a house was one of those things that we desperately wanted from the time we got married, but it always seemed so far off and impossible.  I am so thankful that we were able to finally do it this year. And I have a confession: I honestly wasn’t 100% sure about our house the night we put in our offer.  It was smaller than I had hoped, it was neglected and beat-up and filthy, and that all scared me.   And now I’m in love with it.  I think it’s adorable and homey, and it’s ours.   I told Funnel, “I don’t know if I want another house after this.  I think I might want to live here forever. ”

We found our church.  It was almost a year ago that Funnel and I started attending Xenos Christian Fellowship.  I’ve never been to a fellowship like it: it’s basically a community of “home churches” and we were invited to a home church by our friends Joe and Michele (I photographed their wedding two years ago) and we loved it.  I love doing church in this way: enjoying a meal with our friends, studying the bible in someone’s living room, praying together.  And within our home church, I’m in an even smaller group of women that meet every other week to read the bible, pray together and really just share what’s going on in our lives.  I am so thankful to be around people who love the Lord so much, and I’m really starting to understand what “community” is supposed to look like.   I love our church and I love the people in it.

Loveletter Photography is growing.  I had so much fun with the weddings I shot this year, and I am encouraged to think that I am a little closer to the day when I can quit my “day job” and do photography full time.   I love weddings, and I love, love, love that we live in an age that there is equipment that can document forever the most fleeting and precious of moments. 

I was reminded of how fragile life is.    This year, so many of our family and friends and co-workers were bombarded with death, loss, tragedy, cancer, illness.  I think I am more aware than I ever have been in my life of how fleeting our time on earth is .  Tomorrow is never guaranteed – for any of us.  It’s something that is on my mind a lot now.  This is something I wrote after my cousin’s son past away in February:

- the counterpart -

i go through periods of my life where i am consumed with death. thinking about the ways people die, how it feels to die, the transition into the afterlife, heaven, hell, epitaphs and obituaries. i don’t mean to be morbid, but i am just being honest. i am very afraid of losing the people i love, and even dying myself, and i have to really fight away these thoughts so that i can think and behave like a relatively normal person.

this last bit, was brought on by corey’s death. the little four-year-old son of my cousin.

a child is the last one you expect to die. especially a child in your family. you hear about a child dying on the news, but that is normal, expected. it doesn’t happen to people you know, people you love.

but it does.

and i wonder, sometimes, what else is written in my life book. what other “unexpecteds”. what other sadness. what other funerals i will attend.

but you can’t live like that, worrying, wondering, fearing.

thinking about one of the people who spoke at corey’s funeral. he talked about the human condition. we are embodied creatures and embodiment gives us the freedom to run, and laugh and play. to have picnics and go on long walks and clutch the people we love close to us. but being embodied means that we will stumble, fall, break limbs, break hearts. die. we can’t embrace the good and reject the bad. we have to accept it all.

in the good times, we have to be aware of the counterpart. not dwelling on it, like i often do, but be aware of it in the back of our minds. and in the sadness, we must think of the joy we have experienced. and will experience again.

I am thankful for 2009.  And I am excited for 2010.

I read this here yesterday and I thought it was worth sharing:

“a few years ago, my father shared with me some wisdom about relationships. he said (in essence): ‘your relationship is not about that big fight you had yesterday, or your wedding day. it’s about all the other days. it’s about the day-to-day rituals, the patterns of behavior and the consistent, general attitude you have towards one another. love is not about those really good days or those really cranky days. it’s about everything in between: the way you talk about your day, the favors you do for each other without even thinking about it, and the last words you speak to each other before falling asleep at night.’ “

I like that.  I think every couple has the wonderfully happy “movie moments”  and the times of crisis, but I think that person is right – it’s about how you treat each other day to day.  In fact, the vows we exchanged on our wedding day even said, “I promise to love you in the midst of the everydayness and the specialness of life”.  

I love our “everydayness”.

As a lot of you know, Funnel and I are planning on adopting one day, so I read a lot of adoption blogs.  One of my favorites is A Bushel and a Peck.  Lisa is the author, and she and her husband have 11 children – 4 of them are adopted from Ethiopia.  One of her adopted daughters, “Honeybee” has a dream of going back to Ethiopia and visiting her grandmother and welcoming home one of her friends who is going to be adopted!  Plane tickets to Ethiopia are expensive, but Honeybee really believes God will provide a way for her to go. 

Lisa is auctioning off a beautiful quilt on her blog to raise the money for her daughter’s ticket to Ethiopia.  Raffle tickets are only $5, or you can buy 5 for $20.  If you donate today (November 19th), Lisa will double the amount of entries for the amount you donate! 

Instead of spending $5 on Starbucks today, will you join with me in helping to send Honeybee to Ethiopia?