Recipe: Monkey Nut Cookies

These are probably the nicest looking cookies I've ever baked. And I actually made the full 48 cookies!

As one of my snow day traditions, I like to bake when I'm cooped up at home during a storm. I had a very ripe banana (I wasn't even sure it would last another day), so I looked online for recipes that only called for one banana (most banana breads call for two or three, etc.). So when I came across this recipe by Joseph Feiertag on Snapguide, I thought it was perfect.

The way this recipe is presented is very annoying: nowhere are the directions in one place. They are all spread out, step-by-step, with pictures to match (with his own commentary sprinkled in). So you have to keep scrolling between the long pages of steps just to get to the bottom to see the list of ingredients; I like to double-check my measurements before I put any ingredients into the batter, and it's more helpful to have the ingredients and instructions all on one page. I guess this is just how Snapguide does things.

So to make it easy for YOU, I have written them all in one place here (along with my own commentary):

Ingredients

1	Cup Butter
¾	Cups Brown sugar
¾	Cups Granulated sugar
2	Eggs
1	Tablespoon Pure Vanilla extract
1	Small, ripe banana
2½	Cups all-purpose flour
3	Tablespoons Cornstarch
1	Teaspoon Coarse salt
1	Teaspoon Baking soda
1	Cup White chocolate chips
1	Cup Milk chocolate chips
1	Cup Walnuts or any other kind you prefer

Directions

1. Gather ingredients (My commentary: Brilliant, genius.)
2. In the mixing bowl: butter, brown sugar, granulated sugar, and vanilla.
3. Cream together. (Does this need to be a separate step? Shouldn't it be with #2?)
4. Add eggs one at a time and mix until we'll [sic] blended (Nice apostrophe, dude.)
5. Add the other egg and blend (Again, this is a bit redundant from #4.)
6. Slice the bananas.
7. Add bananas and blend until somewhat smooth ("Somewhat" is clearly a technical term.)
8. Add the dry ingredients; flour, cornstarch, salt and baking soda.
9. Mix just until the flour is almost in blended in. (In, in,inininin....)
10. Add the white chocolate, milk chocolate chips and the walnuts.
11. Scoop cookies onto parchment or onto non-stick cookie sheets. (Well, we're actually scooping cookie dough, since they aren't quite cookies yet...)
12. Bake at 350f for 12-15 minutes until golden brown.

Perhaps this was his first time actually writing a recipe down, but he made a few mistakes:

1. He never says to preheat the oven. You don't even know what temperature to heat the oven until you reach the end of the recipe. Rookie move!

2. He says to "slice the bananas," as in plural. But the recipe only calls for one banana. Would it be that difficult to proofread and remove the s? And he uses semicolons instead of colons. It's confusing.

3. When he says to add the dry ingredients, he left out the step to actually mix those together in a separate bowl beforehand. As an experienced baker, I know to do this, but what if I were a beginner?

4. He never explains how to cool the cookies. Do you immediately remove them from the cookie sheet? Do you let them rest a few minutes before moving them to a cooling rack? Do you even use a cooling rack?

Here are some things I did differently:

- I didn't use walnuts. A lot of people don't like nuts in desserts, so I didn't bother. I also used a little more than a cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips, and just under a cup of white chocolate chips. (That's what I had in the house!)

- I keep my butter in the freezer, which can make it really hard to mix into a batter. So I melted it first. Most recipes don't call for you to do that, but it makes the mixing a lot easier (but does make the batter wetter). 

- I DID preheat the oven, and as for cooling, I left the cookies on the baking sheets for a few minutes before transferring them to a rack to cool completely.

These cookies are VERY yummy, and while they are golden on the outside, they're soft on the inside. I think these might be a new favorite!

Review: Broadway's Anastasia

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When I saw that the musical of Anastasia was coming to the Kennedy Center, I was definitely interested; I have such fond memories of the cartoon movie. Unfortunately tickets were a little expensive, so I thought I'd just have to pass. But then I found a great deal for discounted tickets, and I got to sit right in the middle of the center orchestra for $35! I swear it was the best seat I have ever had in the Opera House. I was so excited that I didn't have to miss this show, because it was AMAZING!

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The show starts out in wintertime in the palace of the Romanovs. It felt very much like the Nutcracker ballet: snow falling in the background, families dancing inside a beautiful, grandiose hall, a little girl dressed in pink who receives a gift... Nice parallels for two Russian stories!

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I loved the costumes (designed by Linda Cho; lindacho.com), especially for the royal family in the beginning. They are so elegant and opulent! And the tsarina's tiara: I NEED that.

I love this blue dress. I actually dressed up as Anastasia for a sorority rush party once: beaded dress, white gloves, tiara, etc. Image found here

Along with the costumes, the set was also spectacular. The only permanent part of the set were two columns toward the sides of the stage. The majority of the backdrop was actually created with digital images/videos on a screen (designed by Aaron Rhyne; aaronrhyne.com). It was incredible! Of course a screen can show you a million things, and it also creates depth-perception in a way traditional sets can't. You could see snow falling, clouds rolling in, and twilight's arrival. But the screen wasn't just used to show the weather. You could...

See ghosts dancing along with Anya's memory of her music box (just like in the cartoon!):

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Or watch the landscape fly by as the characters ride the train:

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Or view the entire cityscape of Paris at once:

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With the screen, a roaring 1920's bar...

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Can transform into a garden seamlessly:

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Of course I didn't see the musical for the backdrop (as stunning as it all was). I was there for the music! These are some of my favorites from the cartoon movie:

Once Upon a December

Learn to Do It

Journey to the Past

Paris Holds the Key to Your Heart

*I had forgotten that the characters transformed in Paris just like they did in the musical!

From street rats in St. Petersburg...

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to this!

Flashmob and all! Image found here

I will say I was disappointed that the song "At the Beginning" was not featured in the musical. Even though this song plays during the credits of the cartoon version, it has always stuck with me:

Now onto the actors themselves:

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Lila Coogan, Anastasia: While not traditionally beautiful with her masculine jaw and thick eyebrows (although those are all the rage these days), she really did a wonderful job, especially singing. She has such a powerful voice! I was blown away. And after listening to the videos from the cartoon, Coogan is definitely a stronger singer than that!

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Stephen Brower, Dmitry: He is very cute and has good energy onstage, but his voice wasn't nearly as strong as Coogan's. Between the "couple," I was much more impressed by her.

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Edward Staudenmayer, Vlad: I had totally forgotten about this character entirely! But he was so funny, with great stage presence, physical comedy, and singing. I think he may have been my favorite in the entire production!

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Tari Kelly, Countess Lily: I don't really remember this character from the movie. But the way Countess Lily is played in the musical, she is a CHARACTER rather than a person. She is just SO over-the-top, like the comedy relief that you can't get relief from. Everything is too loud, too much, joke-after-joke... The other characters could indeed be real people, but Countess Lily was a clown. I can't blame Kelly for that: I guess it's how the character was written. And in that case, she did a great job: she was very funny, especially regarding her slapstick comedy.

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Jason Michael Evans, Gleb: Gleb is the bad guy in the musical; this version actually has no Rasputin (or Bartok) at all! I was a bit disappointed by that, but then again, I figure the story is about Anya finding out who she really is, rather than about a good vs. evil storyline. BUT that meant that the Gleb character wasn't really all that important. He'd show up on stage every once in a while and threaten to hurt (or even kill) Anastasia, but he never does any of that. So again, Evans does a good job doing what he was hired to do; his character was just kinda lame.

Sorry, guys. Image found here

Another major divergence from the movie is the story of how Anya and Dmitry meet. In the movie, it is revealed that Dmitry actually helped Anya escape during the attack on the Romanov palace. But in the musical, they met eyes during a parade. Hear the story in the song, "In a Crowd of Thousands" :

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Sorry for the non-sequitur, but... There was also a ballet within the musical, so that was a little meta. There was a miniature dance ensemble, and when the ballet was "over," the crowd applauded as if they had just watched the real thing, not a mini-ballet inside of a musical. (PS: When Von Rothbart, the bad guy in the ballet, came onto the stage, Gleb also arrived for the show, which was clever symmetry).

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Claire Rathbun was playing Odette from Swan Lake (another Russian ballet with music composed by Tchaikovsky). She is so beautiful, like a mix of Lacey Rogers from ANTM and The Tudors' Natalie Dormer. I actually think she has a Russian face! She LOOKS more like an Anastasia than Coogan, but while she can dance, I bet she can't sing like Coogan can!

The most touching part of the performance for me was when Anya reunited with her grandmother and they both realize she is indeed Anastasia. I was crying, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one!

Even if there were parts missing that I liked from the movie, or if some of the cast was not how I had imagined, I really can't say enough good things about this production. It is just THAT good. If you can, buy a ticket. You've still got about a month to see it, so buy your tickets and GO!

PPS: Before the show, I actually arrived in time to catch some of the performance at Millennium Stage (they have free shows there every night). I saw the Capitol Bones, a trombone big band group. The singer Christal Rheams also joined them, and they performed a few songs in honor of Aretha Franklin. I was glad I got to see them; it was like seeing two shows in one night but for one low price!

Garbage Concert at Lincoln Theatre

My dad and I went to see Garbage for the FIFTH time last week! We had seen them perform at Lincoln Theatre before, and we were excited to check them out at the same venue this time around.

Shirley Manson, the lead singer, seemed to be in an angry or angsty mood that evening. Usually she has a lot of energy and seems excited to be there, but I felt like she was as down as their music is. AND they did not play any songs from their two newest albums (which are the ones I know best), so I barely knew any of the songs they performed. But my dad and I still had a good time. These are the songs they performed that I knew

I Think I'm Paranoid

Cherry Lips

Push It

The World Is Not Enough

Clearly I need to listen to their older albums! If my dad and I are going to claim to be fans, then we should know way more than just a handful of songs from an entire set. I've got some homework to do...

The San Francisco Ballet at The Kennedy Center

Last week I saw the San Francisco Ballet perform at the Kennedy Center. I do not think I had seen this ballet company perform before (or if I have, I never wrote a blog post about it). I was especially excited to see this performance because one of the pieces was choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon*, my favorite choreographer.

We saw three pieces that night, and all were pretty modern (i.e. no tutus or tiaras). I normally don't like modern dance, but I appreciated that they didn't perform what I consider to be "cliché modern dance": epileptic fits, rolling around the floor, waving translucent fabric around, all to the sound of unpleasant music. Modern dance can be beautiful, and I think this company did a pretty good job of it. All of these pieces premiered this past April, so it was exciting to see something really new.

Your Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem

This piece was quite complex because it had multiple parts, each with its own music (All written and performed by Chris Garneau; some of the songs were energetic, and others were slow.). The curtain opens and you see an image of a total solar eclipse. A male soloist (Benjamin Freemantle) starts by dancing on his own, and then he is joined by several other male dancers, all wearing white shirts and khaki capris. The dancing was rather playful: lots of skipping, hopping, running in place, that kind of thing. Most of the men had lithe, sinewy bodies, which I guess is the male body type the company prefers; they weren't the traditionally strong body type. At one point two of the men performed a pas de deux, and I was surprised that it didn't really have a homoerotic feel to it; my friend described it as "benign." Some women joined in later in the piece; WanTing Zhao is so thin that I couldn't help but think that she's the kind of ballerina that gives ballet its reputation for unhealthy women. But Isabella DeVivo and Steven Morse shared a dance together, and they were amazing! The piece ended with Freemantle shirtless and wearing essentially underwear, dancing with a small stool: sitting on it, carrying it, balancing it on his face. I don't like dances that use props; I think it's too literal and takes away from the pure art form. And then everything went black.

Even if I didn't like the stool, Freemantle was really amazing! Image found here.

After watching the piece, I read the notes in the program about it. The piece was inspired by the grandfather of the choreographer, Trey McIntyre. His grandfather died a few years ago, and McIntyre happened to see some old family photos of his grandfather in a football uniform with high-waisted trousers (hence the costumes). The eclipse backdrop was included because of a real eclipse, which McIntyre imagined to be a portal through time. The piece begins and ends with the same male soloist, and it is as if the dancer is the grandfather, and the separate dances are the beginning and end of his life. His grandfather had dementia and actually went out walking in his underwear, so the last part of the piece is a clear representation of that true story. I can appreciate the piece more when I know the background behind it, and I thought the program did a good job of articulating what McIntyre was trying to say and do with it.

Bound To

This piece had no costumes. These are just the dancers' own clothes. Image found here

This piece was all about how attached we are to technology and how it impacts our relationships with other people. This was the one choreographed by Wheeldon*. Unfortunately it was not as romantic as some of his other pieces (those are the ones I LOVE), but there were two pas de deux that were incredibly powerful, and they incorporated his style of having the dancers pretty much always touch each other in some way.

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This piece was also broken up into mini-sections. In the first, like the group photo above, the dancers are all staring into the lights of their phones and not paying attention to each other, even though they are touching. The second part was called "Open Your Eyes," and it was a dance between Dores André and Freemantle (the photo above features two different dancers from the same part). He's obsessed with his phone, and she's trying to pull him away and dance with him. He brushes her off or continues to look at the screen; for a moment he loses the phone and they have a connection, but the piece ends with him ignoring her once again for the sake of his phone. It was so heartbreaking! André did an amazing job portraying a woman in love who cannot get what she needs from the man she wants to be with. 

This move! Image found here

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Another section was called "Remember When." The backdrop showed trees in the background, and the music featured sounds like children playing and birds singing. The dancers in this part were wearing comfortable, light-colored outfits to contrast with the dark ones associated with technology, and they did not have any phones. The connection between the dancers during this part, a step back into the past, was much stronger, and you truly felt friendship in this part. "Take a Deep Breath" was another pas de deux, but there were no phones in that one. Yuan Yuan Tan and Carlo Di Lanno were incredible together, and the lifts were amazing! At times it was like she was floating (see the photos above). The other two parts, called "Speeding Past" and "Trying to Breathe," emphasized how quickly time is going by, especially when we're attached to a screen, and that we can be overwhelmed, suffocated even, by technology but can't get away from it. The entire piece ended with Lonnie Weeks searching, yearning to get out of the mess, and no one would help him because they are consumed by their phones.

Anima Animus

I think this was my favorite piece of the evening. First of all, the costumes are very cool. The stark contrast between the black and white, with the illusion of transparent fabric in the back, was very striking. It almost had a skeletal or structural feel about it. And because of the bright white light behind them, the dancers almost looked like silhouettes.

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The zippers were a bit distracting, though. Image found here

There were lots of lifts in this piece, which I really liked. Also, there were many specific hand movements in the piece, and I appreciated the dancers' perfect form of their fingers. It's those little things that can make a big difference!

The program notes said that this piece highlights "Carl Jung's concepts of animus and anima - the male aspect of the female psyche and the female aspect of the male psyche, respectively." Essentially, the idea is that the female dancers would exude a strength that is usually saved for male roles, and the men would dance moves that are usually for ballerinas. But I actually didn't get that from this piece. I think it's because men were dancing in a somewhat feminine way in some of the earlier pieces of the evening (there were several pas de deux between two men), that it didn't seem out of the ordinary in this last piece. And I thought the women portrayed strong roles throughout the evening, too. Perhaps this specific message of this piece would have been more powerful had it been performed along with more classical ballet pieces.

I really enjoyed this entire performance, and I hope I can see the San Francisco Ballet the next time the company comes to DC!

*One of my previous blog posts highlights two of my favorite Wheeldon pieces (videos included).

Shakespeare Theatre Company - The Comedy of Errors

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A few weeks ago, a friend invited me to see The Comedy of Errors, a Shakespeare play. She has a subscription to see performances by the Shakespeare Theatre Company in DC, and that night happened to be their "Young Prose" night (i.e. targeted towards younger audiences and includes beer and wine), so I was very excited to go.

I had never heard of this play before (or if I had, it was only by name). I had no idea what it was about, so I was glad there was a short synopsis in the program. Essentially, a man and his wife had identical twin baby boys, and they adopted another pair of identical twin boys from a poor woman; those latter boys were to be the servants of the first set of twins. The whole family was on a boat, and in a huge storm they were separated. So one son and his servant grew up with their father, and the other set grew up elsewhere. They are separated for decades, and then one pair visits the town where the other set lives. Because they are identical, the townspeople become very confused, mistaking the identity of all four men throughout the play. Hilarity ensues, but eventually everyone learns the true story and they live happily ever after.

I liked that the program commented on the common thread of mistaken identity throughout many of Shakespeare's plays. I especially saw the connection with A Midsummer Night's Dream, when Puck gets mixed up between the two Athenian men in the forest. I had never thought about it before, but it was like Shakespeare was using the same joke over and over again. My friend said, "Well, if it worked once, why not keep doing it?"

But what is different is that every theater company can interpret the play in their own way and perform it as they wish. My parents actually saw the same play at a different theater in the same week, and we compared notes. For example, the version I saw had some songs in it! Shakespeare did not write this to be a musical, but there were several songs throughout, and even a tap-dancing routine! This was really unexpected, but I liked it! Although I will admit some of it was a bit over-the-top: at one point we are inside a brothel, and Eleasha Gamble, as a courtesan, performs a number called "Porcupine;" she wore a spiky headdress, and there was even a bristly bush attached to her dress around her pubic region! NOT what I think Shakespeare had in mind, but I think he would have appreciated the creativity and gotten a big laugh out of it.

That floral tummy bit flips down to reveal...well, you know. Image found here

The actors with the Shakespeare Theatre Company are AMAZING. I was impressed with all of them. Christian Conn and Gregory Wooddell were the identical sons, and Carson Elrod and Carter Gill were the identical servants. They were all hilarious and played off of each other very well. They even threw in some physical, slapstick comedy, which I thought was perfect for this play; it also helped me understand some of what they were saying, since the old English of Shakespeare can be confusing. I was smiling and laughing during the entire show. I just had such a good time!

This was one of the most memorable parts for me: this guy is describing a woman who is as big as the globe, and he talks about how different parts of her body are certain countries from around the world. Image found here

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They have extended the performances through November 4, so you haven't missed your chance yet to go! AND this is one of Shakespeare's shorter plays, so there isn't even an intermission. It's like watching a movie. You have no excuse NOT to go! Here's a teaser video if you're not convinced: