Love, Harp Guitars, Oatmeal Scotchies…and back again to love.
February is the love month.
You know, the 14th is St Valentine’s Day and all of that.
In our family, holiday celebrations often last longer than the actual 24-hour day. Hence, here it is a few days after the 14th and yes, hubby and I are still enjoying the love month.
What’s that got to do with harp guitars and cookies? Bear with me. I’m in one of those ‘everything’s interconnected’ type of mind right now.
I remember when I saw my first harp guitar.
It was hanging on a wall at McCabe’s in Santa Monica, CA.
The same time and place where I strummed that special resonator hubby encouraged me to get, but I declined.
McCabe’s is a wonderous place. Museum-like with vintage stringed instruments hanging on walls in rooms filled with bookcases of sheet music and racks of pick-me-up-and-try-me instruments for sale. Bustling with the local musician community of both the vintage and newbie type, too.
Scroll up to 2020/2021.
I found an orchestra made up entirely of harp guitars playing The Water Is Wide in a virtual performance on-line.
It touched me deeply while in the midst of ‘lockdown’.
A folk song of Scottish origin…
…which brings me to the oatmeal scotchies.
Get it? 🙂
Every so often, I get a hankering for something butterscotchey. Simply popping a Werther’s wasn’t going to satisfy this time around. So, the handful of butterscotch baking chips I had leftover from who knows how long ago, got baked up recently in a batch of oatmeal scotchies.
The recipe (on the back of the chip package) calls for 1 2/3 cup of those chips, but I had to supplement them with leftover choco chips and walnuts to come to the 1 2/3 cup requirement. Along with my normal adjustments on commercial cookie recipes – replacing the flour, baking powder/soda and some of the salt with self-rising flour and swapping out ½ cup of the 1 cup of butter with ½ cup of Crisco – I also decided to continue adjusting the recipe by replacing ½ t of the 1 t vanilla with ½ t orange extract.
Yeah, that’s how I follow a recipe.
However, believe me, those cookies turned out fresher & brighter because of that vanilla-orange combo.
The water is wide I cannot get over
chorus from ‘The WAter is Wide’
Neither have I wings to fly
Give me a boat that can carry two
And both shall row, my love and I