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Here’s the peanut butter cookie recipe I use. For the cashew butter cookies, I just subbed cashew butter for the peanut butter. If you get it at Fresh Market, the smaller plastic tub is one cup of cashew butter.

1 cup shortening

1 cup sugar

1 cup packed brown sugar

1 cup peanut butter

2 eggs

3 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 375°. Cream the shortening and sugars. Add the peanut butter and mix. Add the eggs and mix well. Add the flour, baking soda, salt, and vanilla and mix well. Roll into balls or use a medium cookie scoop and put on cookie sheet. Using a fork, make a criss cross pattern on top of the cookies, flattening slightly. Bake for 10 minutes. Allow to cool on cookie sheet for 5 minutes before moving to cooling rack to cool completely.

There ya go guys. I can’t remember if I have made you guys peanut butter cookies before, but if I did, that is the recipe I used. They are good as is or you can dip them in chocolate to make them yummier.

Yes I know that Christmas was months ago, but I never posted what turned out and what didn’t.  The maple fudge turned out well. It was popular with Carl’s coworkers so it will definitely be made again next year. I used Pioneer Woman’s sugar cookie recipe. It always turns out well for me, but the regular recipe makes a small amount of cookies so I always double it. I also made oreo pops. Take a double stuffed oreo and separate the cookies  and dip a lollipop stick in candy coating then into the oreo stuffing. You don’t want to push it down too much as the cookies may break. Then put the other half back on. You want a good bit of candy coating to make contact with both halves of the cookie. After the candy coating is set, dip the cookie pops into melted chocolate or candy coating. Lay them on parchment paper to set. I also make hot chocolate on a stick. I think I got the recipe from a link on giver’s log, but I’m not sure. I’ll have to look for it again.  The first batch of toffee did not set at all. I think the issue was my candy thermometer. I bought a better one and the second batch turned out great. I did flip it over and add a second layer of chocolate so there was chocolate on the top and bottom.  The chocolate mice turned out pretty well. If anyone in the family has a request for next year, please let me know.

Last year when we got back from vacation, Carl and the boy made me 2 garden boxes. I planted some beans, 2 types of lettuce and spinach. I also planted broccoli. The beans and leafy stuff did really well. The broccoli did ok. I got 3 tiny heads of broccoli that looked more like an individual floret than a head of broccoli. Gardening is always an experiment and the broccoli just wasn’t the best one.

Anyway, I have already started on the Spring garden. I have corn, peas, green beans, 2 types of tomato, anahiem peppers for the girl, zucchini, black tulips, rosemary, chives, and parsley. The girl wants to grow mint so I have a pot ready for that whenever the garden store gets in mint plants.  I also have a cayenne pepper plant to give as a birthday gift. We’re trying out some citronella plants to see how well they work at keeping the mosquitoes away. Those are in pots so we can move them around as needed.

The peas, beans and corn have come up. The tomatoes and peppers are starting to sprout. The zucchini were seedlings I bought so they were already sprouted.

OH! I also put in 4 blueberry bushes. They when in last night. Two of them have some nice green growth on them and they should do ok, but I’m not too sure how the other 2 will do.

It seems to have been a few months since anything was posted.  I’ll have to try to do a better job to post to the website and not let 3 months go by between posts.

Update it to the newest version and then do this:

1. Launch Acrobat or Adobe Reader.
2. Select Edit>Preferences
3. Select the JavaScript Category
4. Uncheck the ‘Enable Acrobat JavaScript’ option
5. Click OK

Howdy Foster Family and Friends! It’s baking day!  There are baking ingredients all over the kitchen today. Chocolate chips, sugar, butter eggs, marshmallows and other assorted ingredients are on the counters and table. The pool table is covered with a tablecloth so it can serve as a cooling rack.

So far there are peanut butter cookies cooling on the table and english toffee that is setting up on the kitchen table. Soon there will be chocolate chip cookies joining hte peanut butter cookies. The cherries for the chocolate mice are sitting on a cooling rack to dry before getting dipped in chocolate. Some of the peanut butter cookies will get dipped in chocolate after I make the mice. I have sugar cookie dough in the fridge waiting to be rolled out. Those will get iced tomorrow. I also plan to make some maple syrup fudge.

“Hey, did you hear there’s a new voice mail from Tiger Woods?”

“What was that recipe for coconut cake?”

“My video isn’t playing properly, do I need new codecs?”

Simple, innocent questions like these can lead to not so innocent results… but why? There’s a term in search technology called Search Engine Optimization or SEO for those with lazy fingers. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results… like Google’s search algorithm, PageRank.

Here’s a quick peek at PageRank:

For a more detailed and explained breakdown:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

But I digress… how does all this turn into a user getting infected?

In recent years, hacker SEO tactics, also called spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines’ terms of service. Some of the tactics include: keyword stuffing, hidden text and links, doorway and cloaked pages, link farming and blog comment spam.

Criminals are using tools such as Google Trends to identify the most popular and current Internet search terms. The same criminals then use new blogs on free hosting sites, such as Windows Live Spaces, Blogspot, and AOL Journals, featuring the same search terms. When an Internet user then makes a search using those popular terms they get multiple links to these hosted blog sites in their search results.

If the user then clicks on the link, thinking it is relevant to their desired search, they are taken to a blog site with an apparent embedded video player. If the user clicks on the video player, they are prompted to load a ‘codec’, which surreptitiously loads malware, including fake anti-virus software that promises to clean non existent viruses from the computer in return for their credit card details.

Our advice is to not blindly trust results from Google searches, and be wary of these kinds of links to hosted blog sites. One simple way to assist in identifying possible bad sites is using the Firefox add-on Web Of Trust. While their primary source of knowledge is ratings from other users, they also take advantage of nearly a hundred carefully chosen trusted sources, such as listings of phishing sites. This provides WOT with a fast, automated and reliable means of protecting their users from new, rapidly spreading online threats.

You can find it here:
http://www.mywot.com/en/download/ff

And as always, if you find yourself the victim of such nefarious techniques, please call IT Security at x44200

Happy Thanksgiving Foster Family and Friends!

today is the boy’s birthday. i asked him a couple of days ago what kind of cake would he like for his birthday. he told me a vanilla cake with blue icing. when i asked what shape he wanted, he said he didn’t care. i offered a computer shaped cake, or round, or square, and he said he didn’t care what shape. so this is what he got.

it’s been awhile since i put in the fall garden and so far it has gone well. i have picked some of the romaine and butter crisp lettuce. both of them were tasty. the spinach is good as well. a couple of the carrots got fat enough to be picked and were good in a taco salad. i have given away some of the lettuce and still have plenty so i think that was a successful crop. i will leave the rest of the carrots to get bigger. i planted the tulip bulbs today. those will bloom in the spring. the broccoli hasn’t produced anything other than leaves so far, but they have grown better than i thought they would.