Today was a pretty rough day, at least the first half. I am almost 3 weeks into the first semester of the second year of nursing school and the pressure has been mounting and mounting. The instructors have made it clear that they expect a lot from us, from now until the end. We are going to be taking on more responsibility and more of a leadership role in clinicals. Talk about stress!
Along with this pressure and stress came fear and anxiety. Fear and anxiety that I’m not going to do as well as I expect myself to do, that I might fail, that I might not ever figure out where I fit when I graduate, as well as a whole bunch of other little fears. All of this had been building for some time and it all finally came tumbling out of me this morning. I am so thankful that I have a husband who listens to my fears, rational and irrational, sympathizes with me, supports me, and helps me to see things with my cognitive mind when my emotional mind has taken over.
After a long talk and a lot of tears, I felt so much better. It was like someone released a pressure valve on me. It helps to be honest and say the things out loud that we are afraid of or stressed about. Oftentimes when we say them out loud, it gives our cognitive mind a chance to respond and helps us see when our thoughts are irrational or fear-based. When we keep all of it inside ourselves, the emotions keep churning and we continue to respond to all our emotion-driven thoughts as if they were all true.
So after getting everything out in our talk, I decided to take a shower before I started studying. By the way, why is it that the hot water always runs out right when I am about to start shaving my last leg? And it never gets gradually cooler; no, it seems to go straight to ice-cold. Brr!! Anyways, after my shower I decided to bake some cookies before I studied for the rest of the afternoon. The kids had been asking me to bake something all week, so I decided to take a little time and do it today.
Since I made the switch to gluten-free in July, 2012, I haven’t made a GF chocolate chip cookie that I have been completely happy with. I’ve made a few recipes, a couple of box mixes, tried different flour mixes, different flour combos, and I had yet to find a chocolate chip cookie that I was completely in love with. I’ve made a few that were good, but they still tasted like GF cookies. So I decided to do a quick search and see if I could find a good recipe. Lo and behold I found a GF chocolate chip cookie recipe by Alton Brown from 2007! Alton Brown has a great understanding of food and the science behind it. He is my go-to chef when I am looking for a recipe. I have never made a recipe of his that didn’t turn out well or that I didn’t like.
So when I saw that he had a GF cookie recipe, I got really excited! And I was not disappointed. The cookies turned out perfectly! I loved them, the kids loved them, my hubby loved them. And the best part was that they did not taste like GF cookies at all. Which, after 6 months of eating gluten-free, was a very wonderful thing indeed. I have eaten many wonderful gluten-free foods over the last 6 months, but had not found the perfect GF chocolate chip cookie yet. To me, a chocolate chip cookie is the quintessential cookie. And sometimes, you just want to eat a chocolate chip cookie that tastes like the chocolate chip cookies that you used to eat. And this recipe does that for me. I have finally found it! So, although my day started off rocky, it ended very sweet.
You can get the recipe by clicking on the link here: Alton Brown’s “The Chewy Gluten Free” from foodnetwork.com.