It’s cookie season! I love cookies. My favorites are oatmeal cookies, but I don’t like raisins. They’re like wasted grapes and just make me sad. I think they’re the only dried fruit I dislike, but it’s tragically hard to get oatmeal cookies without raisins. Here’s a great recipe that replaces those tragic little post-grapes with delicious chocolate chips! You can put raisins in if you’d prefer, though.
And if you’re wondering about all the cute little pictures, you can click them to find the items, or just bounce on over to our store and load up on every tool you need.
Ingredients:
1 1/4 cup butter (I like the big chunks of Amish Butter I get at the food co-op)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt (I usually only have big sea salt, but we recently got a salt grinder. It takes FOREVER to grind 1t, so I generally put in however much I get before I get tired of grinding)
4 teaspoons REAL vanilla extract
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar (brown sugar is key for the yummy chewiness)
2 eggs (best if you can grow them on your own, otherwise, find a cool local farmer and get the good stuff, not those sad little pale yellow store-bought suckers)
1 1/2 cups firmly packed all-purpose flour (unsifted)
10 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate morsels (I just fill a bag at the bulk section and dump in as many as feels right to get the perfect cookie to chocolate ratio.)
3 cups actual oat not the instant or “quick” kind
You can also add:
nuts, almond extract, cinnamon, nutmeg
Kitchen Items:
mixer
(if you use melted butter, you can mix by hand in which case you’ll need a wooden spoon)
measuring cups & spoons
cookie sheet
cooling rack
oven mitts
a great big FLAT spatula
an oven
Directions:
1. Put your oven shelf in the middle of your oven. Be sure to do this BEFORE moving on to step 2.
2. Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
3. If you want flatter cookies, melt the butter in a sauce pan. We have the perfect little pan for this.
If you want them fatter, just throw the butter into the mixer.
4. Add baking soda, salt, vanilla, brown sugar, and eggs and mix on low-medium low until it’s all smooth. You should probably pause to taste it, unless you’re weird about raw eggs. I am not.
5. Put the mixer on low while your add your flour, oats, chocolate morsels, and anything else your little heart desires. If you leave the mixer too fast, you’ll get flour everywhere which makes for a funny scene for a movie but a big mess for those of us without a clean up crew. You may want an apron just in case.
6. Using your mad skillz from youthful clay and playdoh escapades, roll the dough into small balls, 1 – 1 1/2 inches in diameter. You can make them into bigger balls if you want bigger cookies, but you may want to flatten them a bit so you don’t get burned edges and raw centers.
6b. If you don’t want to make all of the cookies now, put whatever cookies balls you don’t need onto a cookie sheet and into the freezer. When they’re hard, you can put them into a container. I like a wide mouth mason jar that I can vacuum seal.
7. Place the cookie balls that have pleased you enough to be eaten immediately on an ungreased, non-stick cookie sheet with at least 2 inches between cookies.
8. Bake the cookies for 7 – 10 minutes, until the edges just start to turn brown. You can spin them mid-way if you don’t think your oven will bake evenly. If you over bake them, they’ll be crispy, which you may like. I prefer my cookies chewy.
9. Carefully remove your cookies from the cookie sheet and put them on the cooling rack thus opening your cookie sheet for the next batch!
10. Share. Or don’t. Either way, be sure all of the cookies are eaten since there’s nothing sadder than wasted cookies.
