Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Growing up there was pretty much just a handful of cookies that we (as in the royal ‘we’ that would pretty much just be ‘me’) would make at home to satisfy the old sweet tooth. No Bake Cookies, Sugar Cookies and Snickerdoodles were all part of the arsenal. But none got as much action as this recipe did in my teenage cookie craving days.

I’m pretty surprised it’s taken me this long to pull this recipe out of the proverbial hat and post on the blog. But in reality, I’ve been giving this recipe the cold shoulder while I’ve been on the search for the ‘perfect’ chocolate chip cookie. You know, the one that makes me weak in the knees, the one that has me reaching for a glass of the coldest mug of dunkable milk.

After making these babies again for the first time in several years, I’m convinced I was looking in all the wrong places, and that like so many things in life, I had the ‘perfect’ formula in front of me all along.

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This recipe came from my mom’s friend Annette and was the only chocolate chip cookie I made until the age of about 26 since it was the only chocolate chip cookie recipe I could fathom to exist. Until the afore-mentioned quest led me astray. Until I FINALLY experienced for myself that the grass is not always greener.

Oh jeez. Such vivid memories of me in my mom’s kitchen, packing the brown sugar into a measuring cup straight from the old blue tupperware container with a slice of bread atop to keep the sugar soft. The old, browned cookie sheets that I recently discovered my mom STILL has (I’m pretty sure she still has the blue tupperware too) and the old yellow Oster hand mixer that would barely churn through the dough once the oatmeal was added so that I always ended up mixing with the wooden spoon at the end instead.

The unique thing about this recipe, so far as I can tell, is the instruction to dissolve the baking soda in water before adding it to the mix. I’ve seen a lot of recipes for cookies (thank you Maria) and this is one technique I haven’t seen before. But I always did it because the recipe said so. I think now it must help get a head start on activating the soda. If anyone has insight, please share so I can sleep at night.

My favorite part of the recipe? How chewy and soft these honey childs are thanks to the 4 cups of oatmeal and the crunch of pecans. They’re almost more like what healthified granola bars only wish they could become when they grown up.

All of us are grown up now, including that old hand mixer that’s been replaced with a slick KitchenAid variety, a favorite of my mom’s for mashed potatoes instead of cookies these days.

And now you have your chance to win your own KitchenAid Artisan 5-Quart Stand Mixer thanks to a group of bloggers who think you need to help your kitchen grow up a little as well and put on it’s big girl appliances.

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