Jared Harris: You know, the guy? From Mad Men?

By Mike Lesiuk | Published: August 19, 2010

Two things blew my mind today.

Up until this morning I basically knew Jared Harris as that guy who plays Lane Pryce on AMC’s Mad Men, and as that guy who played that villain on Fringe during season one. I didn’t even know Harris’ name; I just recognized the face and knew that I liked his characters.

Here is Lane Pryce:

Picture 2Here is that villain from Fringe (”David Robert Jones”):

280px-RobertJones

The two characters aren’t played all that differently. They’re both reserved, dignified and very competent at what they do. Yes, one’s a mysterious villain on a science fiction series and the other is an accountant on an historical drama series, but you know what I mean. If you watch the two shows, it will be immediately obvious that it’s the same actor doing kind of a similar thing.

In my mind, this is who Jared Harris was. He’s the guy you go to for dignified, reserved, and on top of things.

But apparently not.

It turns out that this is also Jared Harris:

captain-mike

It’s a crazy drunk tugboat captain from WWII! That guy’s not dignified and reserved! (Though I guess he’s pretty on top of things when it comes to tugboating.)

Pictured above is the tugboat skipper (”Captain Mike”) from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). I had seen that movie three times and never made the connection. Maybe I’m just jaded by too many otherwise excellent actors playing the same character over and over again (”Johnny Depp plays a slightly silly and quirky BLANK in Tim Burton’s new movie BLANK”), but I was very impressed to find out that the guy who is Lane Pryce was also a drunken tugboat captain.

In a really good A.V. Club interview, Harris relates one of his own friends being amused by the difference.

JH: I was drinking with a friend of mine. He said “Isn’t it weird that the year before, you were this sort of rollicking drunk, drinking, whoring Irish tugboat captain [in Benjamin Button], and this year, you’re everyone’s favorite corporate asshole?”

I wouldn’t call Lane Pryce a corporate asshole (that’s only how he was very initially introduced on Mad Men) but he is easily my favourite character on the show. n

Oh, and I also learned that Jared Harris is the son of Richard Harris, whom you may also know for being an actor quite good at his job. Richard Harris had a very long and successful career, though I know him mostly from his later roles: as English Bob in Unforgiven (1992), Abbé Faria in The Count of Monte Cristo (2002), and Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator (2000).

So I have to say that I’m now quite interested in Jared Harris’ work.

–

Anyways, the other thing that surprised me today was that Roger Ebert gave Salt (2010), that new thriller with Angelina Jolie, four stars. His review can probably be summed up by these three quotes:

It does all the things I can’t stand in bad movies, and does them in a good one.

[Salt] makes it look as though “Run Lola Run” was about walking.

At one point in the movie, Evelyn is chained to a concrete floor in a North Korean dungeon while a rubber hose is charmingly stuck into her mouth and gasoline is poured in.

The previews weren’t enough to sell me on the movie, but now I actually want to see it.

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The laziest movie pitch

By Mike Lesiuk | Published: August 1, 2010

Alright, so picture this: a kid gets his face eaten and then there’s a big investigation.

And… uh, well that’s it.

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Confessions of a Sleazy English Professor

By Mike Lesiuk | Published: June 15, 2010
  • I’ve had tenure for awhile now, but I’ve only recently found the courage to teach graphic novels. And by “graphic novels” I mean a couple old issues of Amazing Spider-Man where Spider-Man fights the Hulk, and then they team up.
  • One time I told a student that I would give him a letter of reference, but all I sent was a drawing of a stick man with his head on fire.
  • If a student essay has a pun in the title, I’ll give it an A without even reading it.
  • Sometimes when I’m lecturing I pretend to go back to my laptop to check my notes, but it’s really just playing old episodes of Seinfield with the sound off and subtitles turned on.
  • If a student I don’t like tries to use literary theory, no matter what they say, and no matter how insightful it is, I will just tell them something like, “Actually, Marx never quite said that. I think you need to re-read the Manifesto.” The thing is, most of the time I haven’t read whatever text I’m talking about either, and I’m just bullshitting. But who’s going to question me?
  • At a bar one time this med student was talking about her heavy workload, so I said, wistfully, “Ah, if we had but world enough and time.” And she was like, “Oh, is that Jane Austen?” And I was like, “Uh, yeah, sure, baby. Can I buy you a drink?”
  • One time a student asked me for help understanding “The Death of the Author.” I didn’t feel like getting into it, so I just said, “Oh, he was just talking about Dickens. So Charles Dickens, the author, is dead. That’s all you need to know.” He said, “What? How does that help? I thought this was an important essay.” And I replied, “Well, jeez, kid. Just keep it in mind next time you read Hard Times.”
  • I have mastered the art of asking “leading questions” whenever I don’t know the material well enough to kill 50 minutes with lecture. Sometimes I’ll just start talking about some book I’ve recently read, and pretend like I “meant” to put it on the syllabus.
  • The thing about proper MLA style and formatting is that first year undergrads never get it completely right. So I can dock basically as many points as I want for improper style, depending on how much I like a particular student.
  • I also dock participation points if anyone comes to my office hours when I’m in the middle of one of my soaps. I’ve pirated every episode of Days of Our Lives. So, to be honest, I’ve never not been interrupted.
  • Speaking of participation marks: I don’t keep track. Everybody gets an A, except for the jerks who annoy me. Oh, and people who wear a yellow shirt at any point during the term. And people who part their hair in a way I don’t like. Why? I don’t know. Why not?
  • I routinely go to book clubs and offer really messed up but convincing interpretations of whatever book was assigned that week.
  • One time I realized that I basically had three quarters of the varsity football team in my Intro to English Lit class. I failed all of them so that they were ineligible to play in the championship game. Obviously, this was after I bet $20,000 on the other team.
  • I switched the focus of my research to the nineteenth-century novel because I’m cheap and pretty much every nineteenth-century novel worth studying is available for free from Project Gutenberg.
  • My favourite book is still the novelization of Star Wars: Episode III. It’s like a Shakespearian tragedy and a medieval romance, all in one. Except it’s in space, and the swords are made of lasers. I tried explaining that to Harold Bloom once, but I don’t think he was paying attention.
  • One easy way to I like to use to kill class time: I assign a really easy, enjoyable novel, but then I tell the class that what it’s really about is the author’s unconscious obsession with bestiality. Then I open things up for debate.
  • I go to conferences basically so I can get shit-faced in hotel rooms and have sex with other scholars whom I’ll only see a few weekends a year. Oh, and I go for the free books.
  • I always write positive reviews for other scholarly books because I want people to like me.
  • My favourite class of the year is always the discussion seminar where I assign a random John Donne poem and say, “Okay, now let’s find all the sex jokes.” I don’t have to pay attention, because no matter what people find, I just say, “Haha, yeah. No, but really, there’s more.”
  • For $95,000 I ghost-wrote Clive Cussler’s last three novels.
  • Old Marty Spellman’s wife told me that she was tired of being married to an English professor. That’s why I told her I was an astronaut before I tried to get her to sleep with me.
  • Yeah, of course I’ve read War and Peace. But I sure as hell don’t remember the character names or what happened. Denisov something something Russia blah blah.
  • None of my colleagues know this, but I’ve written a six-volume analysis of the Battlestar Galactica TV show remake. I haven’t published it because I don’t want anyone to think I’m crazy. The sixth volume is pretty much just a rant about how much the fourth season sucked.
  • The last book I published was only 120 pages and the only edition available costs $87.00. It sold eight copies… until I worked out a deal with a friend in California in which we both assign each other’s textbooks. Now my book makes me a pretty nice chunk of change, but all its reviews on Amazon are really angry rants from students who couldn’t afford the book in the first place.
  • I convinced the government to give me $38,000 to spend next summer in England researching Sir Walter Scott’s private letters and manuscripts. All the materials I mentioned in my grant proposal are available for free online, but the government doesn’t know that.
  • I once wrote an epic social realist novel about class struggle, except that on the last page the narrator reveals that all the characters are bugs, and when they “talk” they’re really just communicating through the hive mind.
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Bright Star by Jane Campion

By Mike Lesiuk | Published: May 2, 2010

“A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in the lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do no work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothens and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.” (Keats to Fanny in a lesson on poetry.)

Bright Star asks us to luxuriate, through our senses, in the experience of being in the film. The philosophy of accepting mystery and enjoying our time while we are “inside” the poem is reminiscent of John Keats’ actual theory of negative capability, but also to his “Ode to a Nightingale,” which Keats composes and narrates at one point about halfway through the movie. In “Ode to a Nightingale” the poet uses his imagination and the “wings of Poesy” (33) to temporarily enjoy being in a world of something better, higher, something not of our regular earthly existence, where “youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” (26). Later on in his experience, the word “Forlorn” brings the poet back to his more earthly senses, and the poem ends.

This betBright Starter, higher world is the one inhabited and embodied by Keats in Bright Star, and our experience with him is only brief. At the beginning of the film, we are concerned with the death of Keats’ brother (the youth in the Ode who “grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”). Briefly, we experience the courtship between Keats and Fanny, and their somewhat idealized love. Keats, attempting to describe his feelings to Fanny, says, “I want a brighter word than bright, fairer word than fair.” The end of the film brings us back to reality: Keats is often abroad, unreachable, while Fanny is forlorn. Keats grows sick and dies.

Fellow poet Brown recognizes that Keats is the better writer. But Keats is also a better man, who lives up to a higher ideal. While Keats refuses to breach the walls of propriety with Fanny, Brown impregnates a maid. “With what ease you help yourself,” Keats notes, not angry, but genuinely perplexed. Later in the film, Brown too will realize that the difference between the two men goes beyond their skill in poetry.

The film touches only briefly on the agony and depression that Keats suffered, and their effects upon his mental health. Its focus is on the beauty of his life. The imagery is often of the English countryside; gentles breezes coming in through open windows cause white curtains to flutter carelessly, like the butterflies that Fanny and her sisters start collecting. The soundtrack makes you want to close your eyes and luxuriate in the music, as Keats does when he listens to the singing nightingale and composes his ode.

Keats died at the age of 25 (a horrible, long suffering death), yet he became one of the great English poets, on only a small body of work. Keats wrote “Bright Star” about Fanny, but the title of the film might equally apply to either Fanny or Keats, or simply to their experience together. Percy Shelley’s famous elegy for Keats ends: “The soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are” (495-496). We look back on the short life of Keats, and see in him the embodiment of a Romantic ideal, a bright star. Whether that is at all fair to the man that Keats really was, I’m not sure.

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Serious Chocolate Chip Cookies with Walnuts

By Mike Lesiuk | Published: March 30, 2010

Walnut Chocolate Chip CookiesThis is a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, I guess, but it’s a really fancy recipe and takes a lot of time to do. You have to brown a bunch of butter, and toast a bunch of walnuts, and refrigerate the dough, and blah blah blah.

But it’s all worth it, though, because these cookies could shame a bakery. They could drive a world-renowned physicist to insanity. They could make an angel weep. The recipe makes a lot of cookies, and each one is really big and really dense, so they should last you awhile. And you can taste the fact that these took a long time to make.

These cookies come from here at Sugar Plum and they were featured on Savour. (They are very classy cookies.) They are similar to Levain Bakery copycat recipes floating around, but a fair bit more dense. There is quite a contrast between the “crispiness” of the outside and the chewiness of the inside… though the cookies are much chewier than they are crispy. In terms of changes, all I did was add a bit more chocolate and reduced the bake time a bit, because soft cookies are the bomb. If you want to live up to the classiness and seriousness of these cookies, you should only use very fancy and very expensive ingredients. I did not, because I am a poor grad student, and I buy whatever is on sale at Metro.

Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe

Ingredients:

  • 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
  • 1/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground sea salt
  • 1.5 cups coarsely chopped walnuts
  • 1 cup unsalted butter (two sticks)
  • 4.5 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2.5 teaspoons baking soda
  • 2 teaspoons ground sea salt, plus additional for sprinkling
  • 1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened (1 stick)
  • 2 cups firmly packed brown sugar
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 4 large eggs
  • 4 tsp vanilla extract
  • 16 oz coarsely chopped semisweet chocolate or chocolate chips

Directions:

  • Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • Melt 2 tbsp butter in a small sauce pan on medium heat. Stir in 1/4 cup sugar and 1/2 tsp sea salt, and bring it all to a boil. Whisk frequently until golden brown. Stir in all of the walnuts until they are well coated. Spread the walnuts out onto a greased or buttered cookie sheet and place in the oven for 3-5 minutes, to lightly toast them. (Don’t forget about your walnuts if you move on to the next steps.)
  • Melt 1 cup butter (2 sticks) in a small sauce pan on medium heat. Keep whisking, let it boil and start to foam and brown a bit. Remove sauce pan from heat, set it aside.
  • Sift together flour, baking soda, and 2 tsp sea salt in a medium-sized bowl, and set it aside.
  • In a large mixing bowl and using an electronic mixer, beat 1/2 cup (1 stick) of softened butter with the 2 cups of brown sugar and the 1 cup of granulated sugar until it’s all well combined. (It’ll be grainy; not completely smooth.) Beat in the 1 cup of browned butter you recently heated up. Now beat in the 4 large eggs and the 4 tsp of vanilla. Add the sifted dry mixture (flour, baking soda, sea salt) to your wet mixture, and slowly beat until just combined. Stir in the chopped chocolate and the walnuts until thoroughly mixed. Chill the dough in the refrigerator for at least an hour.
  • Drop large giant clumps of dough (at least 1/4 cup each) onto your cookie sheet. They won’t spread too much, so they don’t have to be too far apart, and you should flatten them a bit, with your palms or a fork. Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 11-13 minutes, or until the edges are just starting to turn golden brown. Remove from oven, let ‘em cool for a minute or two, then transfer the cookies to wire racks.
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Banana Bread with Streusel Topping

By Mike Lesiuk | Published: March 10, 2010

Banana Bread with cinnamon streusel toppingThe recipe is an amalgamation of two recipes. The banana bread recipe comes from here at Recipe Zaar. It uses sour cream. I already had another banana bread recipe, but I wanted to try something new. I adapted the recipe a bit to include chocolate chips. And because there were a lot of nuts in the streusel topping I was going to add to it, I reduced the chopped nuts from 1/2 to 1/3 cup.

The streusel topping is from The Pioneer Woman Cooks! If you go to check out her recipe, you’ll see that The Pioneer Woman also knows how to take a darn good looking photo. I cut her recipe in half – and that’s what I have here – but I still found it was just a bit too much streusel, and I didn’t use all of it. However, in retrospect, when I added the streusel to the top of the bread I really could have pushed it down further into the bread mixture and thus added more, OR I could have made a centre “layer” of streusel in the middle of the bread. I regret not doing this extra layer. I have put it as an “optional” step in this recipe, but I really would recommend it. If you do add this middle layer, you may want to reduce the chocolate chips in the bread. Or use cinnamon chips. Or anything else you can think of!

I also modified the streusel recipe by replacing some of the flour with ground up walnuts, and I replaced the pecans with walnuts, just because for a banana bread I think walnuts go better than pecans. The bread was delicious. I used it to make banana bread french toast. (Which was also fantastic.)

Banana Bread with Streusel Topping Recipe

Banana Bread

  • 1 stick butter
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 1.5 cups flour
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 cup mashed banana (about three medium ones)
  • 1/3 cup chopped walnuts
  • 1/2 cup sour cream
  • 2/3 cup chocolate chips

1. Grease a large loaf pan.
2. Cream butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla.
3. Add dry ingredients to the wet mixture, then bananas, then nuts and sour cream. Mix until well combined.
4. Add the bread dough/mixture to the loaf pan.
5. Add the streusel topping (see below). Don’t be afraid to push it down a fair bit into the bread, since the recipe here gives you plenty of streusel.
6. Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour.

Optional Middle Layer: When adding the bread mixture to the loaf pan, only pour in half at first, then add some of the streusel topping to this first half of the mixture, not quite letting the streusel reach to the edges of the pan. Now pour the other half of the bread mixture on top of this, and then finally the rest of the streusel.

Streusel Topping Recipe

  • 1/2 stick butter (1/4 cup) (melted)
  • 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
  • 5 tbsp white sugar
  • 6 tbsp brown sugar
  • 1/4 tsp cinnamon
  • 1/4 cup walnuts, ch0pped
  • 1/4 cup walnuts, ground up

1. Combine all the dry ingredients. Melt the butter.
2. Add the butter a little at a time to the dry ingredients, mixing it in each time until small clumps form.
3. Add the streusel to the top of the banana bread in the pan (or to the centre, too) as per above. Using a fork, mix up the very top of the banana bread with the streusel, just so that not all the streusel falls off loose when the bread is done.

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Don’t change your printer’s toner when it tells you to

By Mike Lesiuk | Published: February 18, 2010

Two months ago my printer (an HP-2170W Laser Printer) told me it refused to print anymore pages. It told me I was out of toner and I had to replace the cartridge. But it was lying to me - there was plenty of toner left.

In fact, since that time, I have printed hundreds and hundreds more pages. All I had to do was trick my printer into believing that it had more toner than it thought. A bit of Googling told me about this trick, which works on a bunch of printers, not just the 2170W.

First, I opened up the printer to take out the toner and its cartridge.

Printer

I pressed down the little green thing to release the toner (left) from its cartridge (right). I found the little window that the printer “looks” into to check the toner levels:

Window

I put a piece of duct tape over the window and used a sharpie to darken it.

Duct Tape Over Window

I put the toner back in its cartridge:

Putting the toner back in its cartridge

After putting the toner and its cartridge back in the printer, I was done.

I print out a lot of paper (sorry, Earth) because I find reading academic articles on my computer screen to be extremely painful. I practically doubled the amount of printed pages I was able to get out of this one toner cartridge, and only just recently had to shell out the $50 for more toner.

Even after my printed pages started getting visibly grayer, I got an extra hundred and fifty or so pages by shaking up the toner and its cartridge before I printed things.

There is something very satisfying about tricking technology and saving money at the same time.

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Soft and Chewy Oreo Cookie Cookies

By Mike Lesiuk | Published: February 6, 2010

Oreo Cookie CookiesA long time ago I came across this Chocolate Chip Oreo Cookie Recipe at Two Peas and Their Pod. The recipe was good, but it was mostly a chocolate chip cookie with a few chunks of Oreos in each cookie (which, indeed, is a perfectly fine idea for a cookie). But I wanted an entire cookie that had a kind of Oreo taste, yet maintained the chewiness of a regular chocolate chip cookie throughout. I find the chunks of hard Oreos (a relatively dry cookie) don’t fit well with an otherwise soft and chewy cookie.

It occurred to me that one way to create my chewy Oreo cookie would be to grind up the Oreos and add them to the batter. The result is this recipe. I also added some cocoa. And as for the Oreo filling, I found that if you separated the filling from the cookies, put it in the fridge awhile, you could then cut it up and shape the pieces into chip-sized… chips.

The recipe worked; the cookies were delicious, and did indeed taste kind of like big, soft, chewy Oreos. My girlfriend thought they were just a bit sweet. Next time I might drop a bit of the sugar.

Oreo Cookies on an Oreo Tin Soft and Chey Oreos

Soft and Chewy Oreo Cookie Cookies

  • 1 stick butter
  • 6 tbsp sugar
  • 6 tbsp brown sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 1.25 cups flour
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 2 tbsp cocoa
  • 6 Oreos
  • 1/3 cup white chocolate chips
  • 1/3 cup chocolate chips

1. Separate the Oreo halves and the Oreo filling. Grind up the cookie portion of the Oreos, and put the filling in the fridge. Set the Oreo crumbs aside.

2. Beat butter and sugars until creamy. Add egg and vanilla.

3. Sift together flour, baking soda, salt, Oreo crumbs and cocoa. Add this to wet mixture. Fold in chocolate and white chocolate chips. Put the dough in the fridge.

4. Take the Oreo filling out of the fridge and cut it up or shape it (whatever way works for you) into a bunch of little chip-sized chunks.

5. Take the dough out of the fridge, and drop tablespoon-sized cookies onto bake pans or sheets. Add the filling “chips” to the tops of the cookies.*

6. Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 8-11 minutes.

* shaping the filling into little chip-sized chunks isn’t that easy. Next time, I might consider just mixing the filling in with the dough, and adding more white chocolate chips.

Row of Oreo Cookie Cookies Oreo Cookie Cookies

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Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Cookies (thin and buttery)

By Mike Lesiuk | Published: January 25, 2010

Oatmeal CookiesIt took me a surprisingly long time to find an oatmeal cookie recipe that I wanted to try (like, 10 minutes on Google). I just wanted plain, thin, and buttery oatmeal cookies. I finally adapted a Chewy Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies recipe from All Recipes, and in the end it worked pretty well.

I ended up baking them one tray at a time. The first tray is what you see pictured. The cookies spread out a bunch (’til they touched each other) and were very flat. While the first tray was in the oven I put the remaining dough in the fridge to cool. When I dropped the chilled cookie dough onto the next tray I also used smaller portions, and the result was a batch of slightly thicker cookies. So if you want thicker cookies, chill the dough first. And don’t flatten the cookies with your fork. I prefer the thin versions, however; you just have to be careful to let them cool before you lift them off the tray, else they’ll fall apart. Anyways, these are great if you like your oatmeal cookies thin and buttery.

In other news, my Ph.D. applications are finally all done, and I just sent the last three (of six) application packages off this morning using Xpresspost. It’s odd that of the schools I applied to, the advantages that each one has varies quite a bit. One has a professor with research interests more similar to my own than any other. Another is the home of one of my favourite journals. Another is one of the few schools doing research into digital media and new literary mediums. Then there’s the one with the crazy library resources. We’ll see what happens, I suppose.

Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Cookies Plain Oatmeal Cookie Pile
Plain Oatmeal Cookies Recipe

  • 2 sticks (1 cup) butter, softened
  • 1 cup packed light brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1.25 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 3 cups quick-cooking oats

1. Cream butter and sugars until smooth.
2. Add eggs and vanilla. Beat until smooth.
3. Mix flour, baking soda, and salt in a separate bowl, then add this to the wet mixture. Fold in the oatmeal.
4. Bake at 325 degrees Fahrenheit for 11-13 minutes. Let cool on the pan for awhile, unless you want them to fall apart on you (especially if they are very thin).

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Simple Blondies

By Mike Lesiuk | Published: January 20, 2010

BlondiesI mentioned in my Simple Brownies post that I was more of a blondie man than a brownie man. Thus, a blondie recipe.

This blondie recipe is simple and pretty much impossible to screw up. I don’t really try other blondie recipes (much), because this is all you need. It’s from Smitten Kitchen’s blondies. If you check out the URL there, you can see “blondies-for-a-blondie,” which is what I used to type into Google whenever I wanted the recipe.

I’ve tried many things, but my standby with this recipe is to just throw in a bunch of chocolate chips or chopped up semi-sweet milk chocolate. In the pictures for this post, you can see I used chopped up chocolate – those smaller specks are the tinier bits I didn’t bother to throw out.

The blondie recipe is very fast and very easy. It tastes like a chocolate chip cookie and a brownie in one. You can also use these blondies, with some ice cream, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce to imitate Moxie’s White Chocolate Brownie dessert. I usually just dip my blondies in milk, like a chocolate chip cookie, because that’s how dreams are made. They’re basically gooier chocolate chip cookies.

Blondie Pile Blondie Blondie
Blondies Recipe

  • 1 stick butter (melted)
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 1 pinch salt
  • 1 cup  flour
  • 1/2 cup chocolate chips or chopped chocolate

Directions

  1. Mix melted butter and brown sugar. You don’t need an electronic mixer; use a fork and stir until smooth.
  2. Add the egg and vanilla and mix.
  3. Sift salt and flour together, then add this to the wet mixture. Throw in the chocolate chips or whatever ingredient you’d like.
  4. Pour the batter into an 8×8 square bake pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes. Err on the the side of underbaked. I pretty much take them out right at 20-21 minutes. (Though you have to add more time if you’re using a glass bake pan.)

Substitutions / Additions:

  • Add 1/2 cup of walnuts, pecans, white chocolate chips, or anything, really, either in addition to or in place of the chocolate chips.
  • Add in a mashed banana (and some walnuts).
  • Add in a few tablespoons of peanut butter and some peanuts.
  • Add a streusal topping.
  • Throw on some mini chocolate chips and demerara sugar on top.

These blondies are pretty much a blank slate for anything you want to try. But I like ‘em simple.

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