Nightmare Flashbacks

Back when I was in Occupational Therapy school (I graduated 4 years ago), it seemed like my professors got joy out of seeing how fast we could spit out a project or paper and I got pretty good at turning one out on demand. Overnight I could have an entire program put together customized to whatever diagnosis you could imagine. Bring it on!

A couple of days ago, I offered to my boss to do an in-service (an informal teaching seminar) to our staff about whatever they felt like they needed education on. I offered to do this for next Friday. She misunderstood and yesterday said, "I'll see you tomorrow!" Clarifying did no good. She said, "do you think you could be ready anyway? no one is available next Friday." um, I don't even have a topic yet and it was 3pm Thursday. I didn't even have 24 hours to put together the whole thing. Back in my school days, it would have been no sweat!

So I buckled down and churned out a pretty darn good in-service on what OT's actually do in the school system and how we do it. We have a lot of assistants who help us who don't know a lot about OT and it's up to the OT's to train them. Plus, I get to use trainings like this for my continuing education credits, which is always a bonus!

So last night at 11:00, I'm making a little treat for the group because that's the way you capture attention...with food. I found a pretty good recipe for Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies in one of my Taste of Home cookbooks. I love those cookbooks - they compile all of the year's magazines into one book. Tried and true real homemade recipes that are usually really great! Here's the recipe (note: these are not great hot - eat cold)

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 cup butter3/4 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 cups flour

1 cup dry oats

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 cup canned pumpkin (not pumpkin pie mix though)

1 1/2 cups milk chocolate chips

In mixing bowl, cream butter & sugars. Beat in egg & vanilla. Add pumpkin slowly during mixing. Combine flour, oats, bkg soda & cinnamon and add to sugar/egg mixture. Fold in chocolate chips. Drop by tablespoonful onto greased baking sheets (I used stonewear because I won't make cookies on anything else anymore...huge difference). bake at 350 for 12-13 minutes (I found 15 minutes was the best or they just don't set up). They need to be pretty firm when you take them out. Makes about 4 dozen.

Nutrition Facts
Serving Size 1
Calories 149
Calories from Fat 66
Total Fat 7.3g
Saturated Fat 3.5g
Cholesterol 23mg
Sodium 92mg
Total Carbohydrates 19.1g
Dietary Fiber 0.8g
Protein 1.8g