Better Than Chocolate

This recipe celebrates 13,000 hits for Mommadods' Blogarhythmz!

 

I have been a confirmed chocoholic my entire life.  Lately, however, I find that although I continue to crave chocolate, I derive less and less pleasure from it.  Instead, my palate loves spicy warm notes, like cinnamon, ginger, and cumin.  Unlike in my youth, when our freezer was always filled with ice cream flavors such as chocolate fudge and chocolate-chocolate chip, my freezer today is more likely to contain dulce de leche or pistachio ice cream.  I enjoy my chocolate as part of a duet, enjoying mocha chip or mint chip far more than plain chocolate.

So for this, my final Mommadods recipe, I have been asked to share these special gingersnaps.  These are incredibly easy to make (provided you have a well-stocked panty) and stay fresh for a couple of weeks in an airtight container—that is, if you can keep yourself from eating them all at once.

One important note:  the beauty of these cookies is its blend of spices.  If you haven’t purchased fresh spices is 10 years, you will not get the same flavor.   Use these cookies as an occasion to treat yourself to fresh jars of spices.

 

Ginger Snaps

2 cups all-purpose flour (I have also used white, unbleached, whole-wheat flour)

2 teaspoons baking soda

2 teaspoons ground ginger powder

1 ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground cloves

1 teaspoon salt

½ cup vegetable shortening

¼ cup butter, unsalted, at room temperature

1 cup light brown sugar, firmly packed (you may use dark if you have it)

1 egg

¼ cup dark molasses

2 teaspoons grated orange zest

White, granulated sugar, for coating

Sift together dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, salt) into a bowl and set aside.  Place shortening, butter and brown sugar in a large mixing bowl.  Beat with an electric mixer on high speed until fluffy and sugar is well incorporated.  Add egg, molasses and orange zest and continue beating until just blended. 

At low speed, add flour mixture slowly and mix until incorporated.  Do not overmix.  Cover the bowl and rest in the refrigerator at least one hour.  (It is OK to leave the batter overnight.)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Coat baking sheets with non-stick spray or a thin coat of butter.

Put granulated sugar on a small plate or in a bowl.   Put some water in another bowl to keep fingers moistened while working with the dough.  Using a small ice cream scoop (1 to 1 ¼ inch in diameter), portion the dough into balls and roll lightly in your hands.  Drop each ball into the sugar to coat.  Arrange the balls on the prepared baking sheets, about 2 inches apart.

Bake about 12 minutes until the cookies are golden and cracked on top, but do not allow them to brown at the edges.  They should remain soft.  Cool them on the baking sheet for one minute and then gently slide them onto wire racks to cool.  Store the cookies in an airtight container at room temperature, hiding them before they disappear!

Middle Ground on the Playground

I found it curious how many people were ready to kiss the world goodbye over an ancient Mayan misperception.  Even though there was a rational and plausible explanation for the end of the Mayan calendar, many folks held out at least some possibility that the sun would not come out tomorrow. 

During my tenure at a large corporation, people often walked around with a similar sense of doom.  In my eleven years there, we had large-scale riffs at least three times, laying people off with no notice and scarcely more than a howdy-do.  Because the aftermath was so devastating—even for those of us who were invited to stay—the environment became a sort of pressure-cooker.  We worked under the constant stress of needing to outperform, quarter after quarter.  Once, when senior management had been sequestered behind closed doors for the better part of a week, I asked my boss if there were going to be lay-offs again.  His response:  “You don’t get off that easy.  You have to stay and make it all work.”

It seems as if our society has fallen into this type of a trap.  We no longer feel compelled to find resolutions.  Rather, we let things fester and escalate, hoping that something will come along to relieve our suffering and take the problems away from us.  The end of the world was a convenient excuse to let chores and bills ride.  We do the same thing with election cycles.  Look how little was accomplished in Congress during the last year, betting on the false inevitability of a new administration.   There is little difference between December 22^nd and the morning after the November elections; the sun still rose on a new day filled with old problems.  As we were fond of proclaiming in my company:  same bullshit, different day.

As a melting pot, we are a country of people with a broad array of ideas and differences.  By its very design, our government is adversarial and polarized.  Our Founding Fathers understood that compromise is essential for unity—that’s why we lock up our representatives in one place far from home and give them deadlines to resolve issues.  General elections are designed to poll the will of the people, leaving our elected officials to represent our interests in the give-and-take of law-making.  Of course, it has never really worked this way.  Instead, the chambers are filled with acrimonious proceedings where many officials engage in personal battles of wills.  It is a giant game of “chicken.”  We have lost the spirit of fair play and social justice, replacing it with a system where “I cannot win unless you lose.”

The next “end of the world” is the so-called Fiscal Cliff deadline.  I find it distressing to see our partisan drama played out for the world to see.  We decry other nations for refusing to find balance and compromise, yet this is the very example that we put on display.  When two sides are this far apart, there is always middle ground.  Yet our officials are afraid to step up and compromise, lest they be castigated by their own parties.  I call working toward a win-win situation “leadership.”  Apparently, there is a new name for this type of bipartisan behavior:  political suicide.

Learning to share and take turns is the most basic of developmental skills.  Most children learn this on the playground before they enter kindergarten.  Digging in one’s heels is never a winning strategy—not for children or adults.  In policy making, as in life, no one gets exactly what they want.  It is better to fall short of doing enough of the right thing than to do nothing at all.  Perhaps we need to resort to schoolyard tactics to motivate our leaders.  If all the Congressmen play nicely together, let’s give them milk and cookies.

Tough Love

During this year of blogs, I have told a lot of stories about my father.  His presence consumed my childhood.  He was difficult, strict, judgmental, and closed-minded.  It made growing up very difficult.  As a child, you are hardwired to want to please your parents and there was just no pleasing him.  When I got straight As he would complain that there was no room for improvement.  A 97 on an exam was not acceptable if someone else achieved a 98.  If I had a triumphant piano performance he would ask what I was going to do tomorrow to top it.  He had a short fuse that could ignite without warning.  Whoa be to he who became caught in his crosshairs. 

Despite how hard he was on me, I never doubted that he loved me with every inch of his being.  This was obvious when I met any of his friends, who seemed, over the years, to know more about my accomplishments than my father ever acknowledged to my face.  They must have doubted the existence of the far-away daughter who led a charmed life of top schools, glamorous concert venues, and the fast pace of corporate life.  He made me sound unreal.  It took well into my 40s before he would ever admit that he was proud of me.

I remember when I was very young—the only girl of my family’s generation—having a very peculiar exchange with my father.   Pointedly, he made me promise that no matter what, I would always be his little girl.   He made me say it, “I promise I will always be your little girl.”  Then he underscored it by saying, “Someday you will want to tell me that you aren’t my little girl any more.  You can NEVER say that now.”  At the time, it seemed like a ridiculous conversation to me.  I was oblivious to the manipulative undertones of such a statement, but he understood what I was then too young to understand.  The day would come when I could no longer be held to that promise. 

My father loved testing people.  A man of strong and slanted positions, he would try to outwit people in arguments, proving that his opinions were right.  He would twist things so that even when he was dead wrong, he retained the ability to justify his own righteousness to himself.  He had a way of creating conflict where none was necessary—feeling at his most comfortable and superior in the throes of verbal battle.  What he perceived as his greatest strength, I came to recognize as his greatest weakness.  His scheme went awry when my husband entered the picture.  Tom was a man of his own mind, not subject to the power my father had cultivated over his family.   My father tried again and again to dominate us, or to divide us against each other.  My father was never able to convince my husband to take his side against me.   It was the end of a relationship based on manipulation and dominance.  Inevitably, my father had to be told, “I am not your little girl anymore.”  It wounded him deeply, as I knew it would; however, when he recovered we began a different sort of relationship.  I won’t say that he ever saw me as an equal, but he did begin to see me as an adult.

Through the years, we had a lot of fun with my father.  My husband and he developed a close relationship of shared interests, including skiing and mixing the perfect dry martini.  My children anticipated a visit from ‘Grampa’ the way most kids look forward to Santa Claus.  They loved his excessive bear hugs and wrestling with him on the floor.  He loved to go to my son’s youth hockey games or to watch my daughter figure skate.  He was larger than life and full of laughs.  He turned to my husband for his extensive oral surgery needs, declaring my husband to be “the best doctor he knows.” 

We lost my father nearly three years ago, well before his time.  I will always remember vividly the challenges of being his daughter, but I also remember a man who loved with all his heart.  Even when I feared my father the most, I never doubted the depth of his love.  It was his way.  And as much as I wanted him to accept me for the person I am, I had to learn to love him as he was.  Strangely, that was the easy part.

Celebrating Doomsday

When I set out to write a year of blogs, it was not only a Leap Year (making my task 366 blogs, rather than the infinitely easier 365 of other years), it was also the year that contained the dreaded date 12/21/12—the end of the Mayan long count b’ak’tun.  On this day, many believed, the world would come to an end.  Period.  Finito.  

I have never been one to subscribe to planned apocalypse theories, believing that when our world ends it will be due to the random, miscalculated act of a lunatic rather than by design or fate.  Based on what I have read about Mayan record keeping, it is not likely that the end of the calendar is a prediction of doom.  Rather, it is more likely that the ancient Mayans simply stopped counting at the completion of a long cycle.  They were a people who liked balance and symmetry, particularly in numbers.  The long count calendar was a multiplicative series based on artifacts of nature that spanned over 5,000 years; they had reached a natural stopping point and were tired.  Perhaps, with that established point so far off, they simply had no immediate need to continue, making the carving in stone of the following cycle what we in the business world refer to as “next guy’s problem.”  The abrupt end to their calendar only seems abrupt to us because we live at this particular moment in time.

It is easy to understand why the next cycle of the Mayan calendar was never undertaken.  Blame the Spanish conquistadors who fought through the 16^th and 17^th Centuries to overtake the Mayans, altering the trajectory of their civilization.  Like our own Native Americans, who became either assimilated or disenfranchised, the blending of European cultures with indigenous ones gave rise to new traditions.  Although there continue to be pockets of Mayan cultures and Mayan-speaking peoples throughout the Yucatan in modern times, they have adopted many of the trappings of the modern world—our standard calendar among them.  Perhaps this series of unfortunate events has them believing that their world ended long ago.

I plan to wake up today and check that my blog posted, just like I have done every day for the last 355 days.  In the days leading up to today, I bought green bananas, paid my bills, washed my car, and finished wrapping some gifts for my children.  We will not be able to absolve ourselves of the mess we have created by clinging to an old prophesy or an ancient misinterpretation.  All the problems of yesterday remain for us to solve.  It's just another day where partisanship, violence, hatred, automatic weapons, prejudice, domestic abuse, and social injustice run rampant. 

Of course, if I am wrong, I predict a record low number of hits on my blog today. 

Space Grab

I remember as a child watching the Apollo 11 mission plant an American flag on the surface of the moon.  I thought it peculiar—although I did not understand enough to question those feelings—that we could land on a body in space and brand it with our national icon.  I thought that the moon belonged to the Earth.  How was it possible that we could claim it for ourselves?

At some point during the past forty years, we turned our eyes from the skies to the wonders of cyberspace.  Instead of light-years, our universe is now measured in bandwidth—a nearly limitless capacity for communication and data transfer.  Almost without notice, we stopped dialing in and became wirelessly connected.  Long distance charges disappeared.  Grandmothers everywhere became computer literate, emailing photos of their grandchildren and downloading their favorite books to hand-held devices.  We all thank G-d that Al Gore gave us the Internet!

On this Fantastic Voyage, however, (gratuitous Raquel Welsh reference for those of my generation) we are not just scientific explorers.  We are capitalist mercenaries looking for the next big score.  One thing I learned from working for a publicly-held corporation is that “growth” is the only thing more important than profit.  Making a killing is never enough.  It is important that profits grow at a constant rate; there is no resting on the laurels of flat profits.  Investors bet on which companies can sustain growth; the real money is made from that speculation.  It was only a matter of time before large corporations made us victims of our own acquired thirst for more:  more apps, more text, more music, more speed. 

I thought I was doing a nice thing when I purchased the new iphone 5 for my daughter’s birthday.  As the youngest in the family, she is forever getting the hand-me-down technology.  Her many-generations-old Blackberry was on its last legs, sometimes not even turning on.  When kids are at college, their cell phone is their lifeline.  It is a virtual intercom system to all their friends and family, as well as an alarm system to the parents for help or money.  Her old device was hindering her life and quashing her happiness.  The launch of the new device was well-timed with her birthday, making it possible for her to be one of the first kids to have an iphone 5 on campus.  It is not the sort of thing we typically do, which made the surprise even greater.

But, ah, the hidden costs of doing business.  We are Verizon subscribers.  During the one-hour phone conversation required to upgrade to the iphone 5, I was informed that I would be required to migrate to a new service plan, as the old plan was “no longer available.”  The former $30 per month “data plan” would now be $30 per month for 2 gigabytes of data.  Together, the sales associate and I audited my daughter’s data usage on her Blackberry and determined that she used, on average, .000159 gigabytes per month of data.  Convinced that I was signing up for an equivalent service at an equal price, I accepted the terms and conditions.

One week into using her new phone, my daughter began getting email alerts from Verizon warning that she had exceeded 50% of her 2GB monthly budget of data.    A couple of days later, the warning was up to 75%.  I called Verizon to check whether there was some sort of error.  They pointed the finger at my daughter, saying that she must be downloading all sorts of things.  They read from a script of items that fall under data services.  I checked with my daughter who was not doing anything with her phone other than texting and playing her itunes.  She had not downloaded any apps, used GPS, watched a movie, or ordered any custom ringtones.  In fact, she was so busy with her studio work she had not even taken the time to set up her email.  The one thing she did do was call the computer center to make sure she had the appropriate password for the campus wifi, something that would pretty much ensure that she was not abusing the data services.

The alert emails from Verizon continued, and each time I would call Verizon to try to ascertain what was responsible for these charges.  How could it be possible that, without changing her habits, she was using more data in three weeks than she had used in the previous twelve months?  The question was very specific, but a satisfactory answer was not forthcoming from Verizon.

After many such calls to Verizon, I happened to get connected to an honest and knowledgeable support person.  She informed me that Apple changed its texting capabilities; the new “imessage” activity on the iphone5 is being charged to “data services” rather than as text under the “unlimited text plan.”  Verizon figured out that the data usage would skyrocket under this scheme, so they transformed the unlimited data services plan to a pay-by-the-gigabyte plan.  While promoting and discounting the iphone 5, Verizon quietly forced its subscribers to convert to terms that looked the same to an ignorant consumer but were certain to generate revenues increases for Verizon. 

For the record, AT&T did the same with the release of the iphone 5.  My husband uses his iphone 5 on an AT&T plan.  His monthly fee doubled the first month on the iphone 5 because of the increase in his data usage.

It turns out that there is a happy ending for this story.  It took persistence and multiple calls, (and a threat to return the iphone 5) before someone at Verizon explained that we could turn off the data usage of the imessage and use the phone in standard text mode.  Once we did this, my daughter’s texting was covered under our unlimited text plan, and her data usage returned to its customary levels.

Space may be the final frontier, but cyberspace is a capitalist free-for-all.  We want our toys so badly that we sign up for huge termination fees and even pay an extra service fee for the privilege of buying a new device from the provider.  There is no other industry in the world that has its customers so tied up with extraneous fees and penalties.  We allow it, and then we say, “Thank you.  May I have another?”

A Gun Control Bedtime Story

I must have been about fifteen years old.  I cannot pinpoint my exact age; although I know I was old enough that I was no longer sharing a room with my older brother.  My baby brother was out of his crib and sleeping in a bed in the small room at the top of the stairs that separated my room from my parents’.

It was deep in the night—late enough that the noise of passing cars had subsided, leaving as the only audible sounds the crickets and the gentle sway of the palm trees in the occasional tropical breeze.  Normally, I slept through the night without interruption.  On this night, however, I was awakened by an unexpected sound.  I only caught the essence of the sound on the edge of my consciousness, not enough to identify its source.  Suddenly awake, I was frozen with terror, unable to move as my heart beat hard against the inner wall of my chest.  Breathing as silently as possible, I took deep breaths to try to calm my nerves, slowing my heart by sheer will.

There it was again.  The sound cut through the night, more clearly this time but still unrecognizable.  I tried to let the sound echo in my brain, hoping it would link magically with something in my memory banks, giving it a clear, and hopefully benign, identification.  It was coming from outside my room and down the hall, perhaps by the small flight of split-level steps or even the front door.  At last my mind gave it a visual cue, interpreting the sound to be that of ripping or cutting through screening, such as the type on the screen door that enclosed our heavy wooden front door.  Who would be doing such a thing in the middle of the night?  Were we in the process of being burglarized?

Suddenly I was no longer paralyzed.  I jumped to my feet, figuring that I could tiptoe down the steps and doublecheck that the many bolts and safety locks were engaged.  If I did this before the intruder made his way through the screen to the wooden door, I would save my family.  I had a special way of walking lightly on my feet, stealthily avoiding any creaks upon the hardwood floors.  Silently I turned the handle on my bedroom door and opened it without a sound.  I was halfway down the hallway toward the steps when my father suddenly emerged from my parents’ bedroom armed with a small revolver.  The sight of my figure in the dark hall surprised him and he jumped back.  He took a breath, then tucked his arm and gun behind his back, probably hoping that I had not seen it.  “Go back to bed,” he blurted out tersely.

At that very moment, the suspicious sound rang out again.  This time, however, it revealed itself more clearly to both of us as we stood in the hallway.  My tiny brother, asleep in his bed, had sneezed.

I crept back into my bedroom and packed myself tightly with the covers and blankets, needing the comfort against the chills that traveled down my spine.  In the morning, no one spoke of the incident. Not then, and not since.

Gun control is not about curtailing freedom.  It is about protecting people’s welfare against unlawful, excessive and inappropriate use.  I highly recommend David Hemenway’s book, Private Guns Public Health, (http://www.press.umich.edu/script/press/17530) which takes a public health approach to gun control.  David was my economics professor in graduate school.  His books are very insightful and highly readable. 

Drug of Choice

When my son was a little boy, there was an adorable little bit he used to do.  With exaggerated facial gestures, he would act out, “Happy New Year, Sad New Year, Mad New Year.”  It was a silly thing, but for the last few days it has been echoing through my mind.  It reminds me how quickly our oblivious happiness can be cut short, replaced with unbearable sadness, and followed by righteous anger. 

Since the Newtown tragedy there has been an outpouring of support as people sign petitions and “Like” online photo arrays.  These are silly token gestures, but we are all desperate to find something that we can do.  I suppose that reaching out to find shared pain is a productive enterprise at some level.  One of the more disappointing swells of activity I have observed is the shocking number of people who have rallied to decry gun control efforts in the aftermath, knowing that this tragedy will put gun control into the political crosshairs.  There are some things about humans I will never understand.

What I do understand, however, is the healing power of music.  It has been interesting to watch the sensitivity with which networks have resumed regular programming, knowing that it is their job to make people laugh and feel good yet taking a moment here and there to offer the buffer of a choir of children, or a heart-wrenching inspirational ballad.  Tonight on The Voice, the judges and contestants opened with Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, each singer holding a placard with the name of one of the fallen children.  The stage was lined with memorial candles.  As they sang, the artists’ eyes welled with tears, each of them breathing to embrace the depth of the lyrics and the heartbreaking arc of the melody line.

In that moment, I closed my eyes and felt the music enter me.  The malaise of these last days is still there, but it was somewhat lessened by the rehabilitative power of the music.  As the final three contestants completed their final performances, they offered a collection of entertaining and inspiring tunes, each one raising my energy by a degree.  It will still take time to recover from the horrifying display of man’s inhumanity and violence, but through the music I am finding hope and comfort.

Because I have lived my life steeped in music, I have a vast store of musical go-tos that serve as my spiritual medicine cabinet.  The second movement of Beethoven’s 7^th Symphony is something I use when I allow myself to mourn.   It is a warm hug when I need a good cleansing cry.   I tap into Ravel’s Swan of Tuonela when I want something transcendent to release myself from all physical trappings.  Within its fanciful breezes I find color and beauty with an absence of pain.  It’s like a morphine drip without side effects.   For despair, I go to Chopin’s enigmatic Mazurka in g-minor, Op. 67.  He was so very ill he would have known or feared his life was at an end, yet his sorrow cannot overpower the hope that shines through the simple and brief melody.  I have written in past blogs about the unusual power of the key of g-minor; that Chopin was caught in a g-minor mood at the end of his life is not at all surprising to me.

I have told my husband on many occasions that if I were to be lying terminally ill, I would want to hear the slow movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto.  Composed in the key of B major (a striking tonal contrast to the E-flat main key of the concerto), this movement possesses a melody that can only be described as “heaven sent.” (It is rumored to be the inspiration for Leonard Bernstein’s Somewhere from West Side Story.)  There is a something exposed and vulnerable about this gem.  It is what I imagine a choir of heavenly angels would be singing. 

So many of the great composers suffered personal pain or debilitating illness:  Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gershwin, Tschaikovsky, Brahms.  It is inspiring that such beautiful music would be the byproduct of a painful journey.  It is the triumph of will over circumstances, evidence of the enduring human spirit.

For those of you who, like me, have trouble making sense of what is going on in this world, tap into a classical music station to sample my personal drug of choice.  It is powerful, state altering, victimless, and free.