Mom always used to make pecan crescents (among other things) for Christmas. I did not use her recipe but it was probably not too very different from this one, and they came out perfectly delicious and just as I remember them.
I used, in fact, pecans that Mom herself had shelled. There's maybe a cup left of those. Part of me wants to keep them--at least some of them--and another part of me is chiding that part for being overly sentimental over food.
Anyway.
...despite years in the freezer the pecans were perfectly fine, and the cookies' flavor-- They're even shaped about the way Mom made them. Heh.
There was rather a bit more scraping of the bowl and beater than I expected I'd have to do, but at that, I still expended a shitton less effort making these cookies than I ever have before. Creaming butter with sugar always kills my wrists, even when the butter is soft, so that by the time I'm done mixing the dough my arms are exhausted. This is better.
I got three dozen out of that batch. Did I mention that they're delicious? Light and crispy without being hard--just enough sugar to bring out the sweetness of the pecans without swamping it.
Trying to figure out what kind I'll make next.
Meanwhile, in thee process of finding the pecans, I cleaned off the downstairs freezer and put a bunch of stuff from the upstairs freezer into it, and got rid of very old food; and while the cookies were baking I washed dishes and tidied the kitchen.
This mixer has--as I expected--already gained "cold, dead fingers" status.
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Meanwhile, trying to print the recipe--
Printer chose tonight to run out of toner. No problem, thought I, I've got a spare toner cartridge!
Didn't fit.
When I bought this toner cartridge I specifically checked to see if it fit the HL-2170W and I thought I confirmed that it would work in both this printer and the other Brother laser printer that I had. (And which got donated to Salvation Army.)
But no--it did not. I took it downstairs and tried to modify it with the Dremel--there was an extraneous piece of plastic that kept me from putting it all the way into the carrier--but even with that change it wouldn't fit, and I realized that what I had probably done was to look at two different toner cartridges and somehow conflate them as the same. Argh etc.
I got rid of the other printer because it couldn't be networked. This one can; as previously mentioned I plugged it into the switch and now both mine and my wife's computers can print to it.
Anyway, ordered a toner cart for this printer, something under $11 shipped, so F it. Should get that Monday.
And while looking at toner cartridges, I saw that the drum unit for this printer is ninety dollars. The printer wasn't more than $120, for crying out loud! What am I going to do, pay $90 to keep using a $120 printer, when a new printer with duplexing will cost me about $150?
*sigh*
The economics of consumer printers are ridiculous.
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Got the conifer festooned!
Used the incandescent lights this year. The LEDs are too blue; they look cold, where the incandescent bulbs are much more red, and have a much warmer look.
What I mean by that is the tint the various colors have. Dad taught me about colors, and how even a bright red can change according to the presence of blue or yellow in it. Color was one of his areas of expertise; though it caused Mom some headaches when she'd wash his socks and he'd complain that they didn't match because the color of one sock was infinitesimally different from the other.
The LED lights are very pure colors, of course, because LEDs can be tuned to emit specific frequencies; incandescent bulbs are white and must be filtered to be in color. But I think that makes all the difference.
So even though LEDs are superior for a host of technical reasons, I--like the tube amplifier aficianados in the audio world--prefer the old-fashioned technology.
* * *
Incidentally, we did it: tied 2008 for days without sunspots. Sunday will make 269 days in 2019 without a sunspot, which beats the record for the entire space age.
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It's technically Sunday now, anyway.