The bake

Whenever I bake oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, it reminds me of being a kid and baking with Mom. I enjoyed making cookies almost as much as I did eating them. So it’s not really a surprise that making (and eating) them now gives me a sense of nostalgia and comfort.

This time, I used a recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction (as you may have noticed, I seem to get a lot of my recipes from Sally’s website these days). I omitted the cinnamon and molasses because that’s how I prefer my oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. (For the record, I do love cinnamon, but I like these cookies to be more vanilla-y. I would use cinnamon if I was making oatmeal raisin cookies for sure.) This cookies turned out really well–soft and chewy with the perfect amount of chocolate chips. But, of course, they didn’t stand a chance at topping how I remember Mom’s.

The book

I read a lot more fiction than non-fiction, but every once in a while a non-fiction book comes along that I just have to read, that calls to me more than any fiction title on my teetering TBR pile. That was the case with Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe, a book about the family behind OxyContin, the drug that created a public health crisis.

I don’t know that this book would have been on my radar if I hadn’t already read Keefe’s earlier book, Say Nothing, as that one blew me away. My boyfriend recently read (and loved) Empire of Pain, and, knowing I was also interested in it, he left his copy with me for whenever I got to it. I didn’t think I would get to it for a little while. But after starting a couple of fiction titles that just weren’t speaking to me, I picked it up. I am only about 50 pages in, but Keefe’s talent for creating an engaging narrative has me hooked.