A Recipe for Coconut Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies

I have taken to making cookies every Thursday night as kind of a week-capper. Cookies are a powerful pick-me up in the field and it's a nice treat to have fresh cookies in the car for the inevitable weekend adventure.

For some reason I am loathe to buy oatmeal cookies, but homemade they are my favorite. For those who also <3 homemade oatmeal cookies, I present the following concoction:


Coconut Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies

2 eggs
2 sticks (1/2 C) butter or butter-like substance (I use that "Smart Balance" stuff)
1 C. dark brown sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 C. whole wheat flour
1 tsp. baking soda
dash salt
2 C. oats
1 7 0z. package shredded coconut
1 C. dried cranberries

*Mix eggs, butter, brown sugar, vanilla
*Stir in flour, baking soda, and salt
*Stir in oats, coconut, and cranberries
*Bake at 350 deg. F for 11 min.
*Makes more cookies than you need

These are soft cookies so I recommend baking them on parchment paper or a baking sheet you don't mind using a metal spatula on.

St. George

St George is a strange little town, pulled between being a modern city (because this is more profitable) and a quiet Mormon enclave. The town tries very hard to attract outdoor enthusiasts and modern professionals, but seems to fail with gusto. Road biking does seem to be popular here, however, and that combined with a just-adequate bike trail system makes me miss biking very much.

Most of St. George is closed by 6 pm and never opens on Sunday, and as you can imagine this precludes a night life. There's certainly a cupcake shop opened curiously late that could pull some decent business if there was a reason to go downtown at all. The only bar in town (literally, The One and Only) serves 3.2% beer and is max-skeez. A strip-mall coffee shop has live music Saturday nights and once a month the city hosts a musician in the park, but provides a stage with seeming disregard for acoustic requirements.

History surfaces in two interesting ways in St. George. First, the streets have never been narrowed from the width required for wagon travel. A standard residential street is adequate for 5 lanes of modern traffic. This makes crossing the road quite intimidating: A car could be 1/4 mile away and I'm wondering if I'm gonna make it.

More interesting, however, are the acequias. On the edges of super-wide streets, are deep drainage paths. For flash floods? I mused when I first saw them. Yet even when it hasn't rained for weeks, water is still running through these cement chutes. In front of many of the houses are simple steel gates....and it didn't click until I saw someone watering their lawn by diverging the water onto their property, flooding their lawn, and then closing it off again. (The entire system is gravity fed and as you can see in the picture, most property sits just below street level to take advantage of this.) Fascinating! A real acequia in use! However, the amount of water we're talking is disgraceful - it's the g*!damn desert - and I have not yet learned what regulations are in effect today...though I am not optimistic there are many.

ZEYE-uhn

Last week's adventures took us to Zion National Park. We hiked up to Angels Landing - a fin of rock sticking straight out into the middle of the canyon - with a trail that sometimes narrows to less than 3 meters, 1000+ foot drops on either side.



Camping on BLM land was absolutely gorgeous, but 4WD required.

Finally got in a little climbing this week up Bluff street by the Chuckwalla trail head. While I do like indoor climbing, having outdoor routes 15 minutes from one's abode is pretty awesome, and I am planning on expanding my gear collection to include a few more rock climbing essentials.

More than Three-Two

The euphoria from Mesquite, Nevada is just fading…like a child in a candy shoppe, I walked around Lee’s Discount Liquor in happy wonder. Just being there made me drunk. I turned bottles of wine reverently, paced the beer cooler, sauntered in a stupor through isles and isles of liquors…

… parched from the desert sun and Utah alcohol policies, the thirsty young scientists find themselves in an oasis called Nevada where they may have at last the stuffs to drown out their hopeful dreams….