Oatmeal Cookies

A lot has happened in the past two weeks, which is why I haven't been around much. Here's a quick rundown:

• I got a new job, and am working full-time for the first time since December. It's a good feeling, but I'm exhausted.

• We went to Liverpool to visit my friend Andrew, then brought him back to Scotland to stay with us in Edinburgh for a few days, so we've been doing the tourist thing in our own town, hanging out and having fun on the Royal Mile.

• I got a cold, but couldn't skip work at my brand-new job, so I've been sleeping every moment that I'm not at work.

• Judson got a stomach bug.

• Another friend came into town from London, Judson's boss quit, and a bunch of other smallish-things happened that have taken up most of my time and kept me away from the kitchen... and thus the computer.

I'm gonna start ending my sentences with (Lola), it's a great punctuation, don't you think?

But now I'm back, at least for this evening. And as I applaud myself for this new busy schedule (one of the perks of moving to a new country is that your schedule pretty much empties, so this whole “being busy” thing has become a bit of a non-issue for me), I'm reminded of the fact that Eleanor made yearly trips to visit friends and family all over the East Coast, was a member of a bowling league and a church, played weekly bingo, and had untold other “obligations,” even after she was widowed and retired... and then I feel like a bit of a loser for complaining about my two busy weeks in a row.

So, in honour of changes, being busy, and trying to capture a moment of peace when life's throwing you a lot of excitement, here's a recipe for the best oatmeal cookies I've ever eaten.

You're being so nice to put up with my lack of cookie photos on a post about cookies, that I'll throw you this bone: Eleanor (I think) on her graduation from middle school.

These are easy, but they require some forethought because the dough chills overnight. Now that I'm back on the 9-5 schedule, I actually find this really great: if you can remember that you need cookies two days in advance, it's a quick activity to assemble the dough one night, and then a quick job to cook them the next night. This is great because surely I can't be the only one who has ever thought that making cookies/baking cookies/washing dishes seemed like WAY too much work for a single night... but if you split it up, you're in the clear.

So busy was I, however, that I completely forgot to take any pictures of the cookies the second day... you know, after they were actually baked. So you'll have to trust me when I say that these are the perfect mix of chewy and crisp, with a great toasty flavour and a texture that's just to die for. I'm thinking it's because the oats sit in the raw dough overnight, so they soak up all the liquid from the mixture and the texture becomes less “oats sitting in sugar/butter mixture” and more of this perfectly moist but still crumbly golden crispy-chewy cookie. I'm already plotting on how to make them again and stuff them with filling, Little Debbie style.

update: 

I found a picture of the cookies! Turns out in my exhaustion, I'm actually way more productive than I thought... I just forgot to download the photos from my camera to my laptop! Enjoy!

The verdict:

5 spoons out of five. These blow your average oatmeal cookie out of the water... and I have to say, I think I'd prefer this to a chocolate chip cookie any day... and if you know me, you know that's saying something. Bonus points: we somehow held onto some of these for a full week (because of the aforementioned trip to Liverpool), and they never went stale OR soggy. Any cookie that's just as good on day 7 as it is on day 1 is a winner in my book!

The recipe:

Oatmeal Cookies

THE DIRECTIONS:

Cream brown sugar, white sugar, shortening, and egg until thoroughly mixed.
Sift flour, soda, and salt together, then add to creamed mixture.
Add oats, nuts, and vanilla.
Roll into a log shape (might need to roll into two logs) and wrap tightly in wax paper or parchment.
Refrigerate overnight.
The next day, preheat oven to 176C/350F.
Slice dough as thin as you can, approximately ¼ inch thick. Dough will be crumbly, so press it back together if it falls apart too much.
Bake 9 minutes until golden-brown but still slightly sticky in the middle.

Yields approximately 30 cookies, which is why you'll notice I cut it in half from what the recipe card lists.

the ingredients:

½ c brown sugar, firmly packed
½ c sugar
½ c shortening or Stork
½ tsp salt
1 egg
¾ c flour
½ tsp baking soda
1 ½ c quick cook oats
½ tsp vanilla
¼ c walnuts, chopped smallish

 

Chicken in Chicken Sauce

I don't know how Eleanor felt about April Fool's Day, though I know my grandpa Wilbur, the inventor of Dad Jokes, probably loved it. I don't have any joke recipes to share with you today, but I do have this: a recipe I was a fool to think would taste good.

Do you know that joke on Arrested Development where Lindsay is making dinner because the caterers quit, and she tells everyone they're having “chicken in chicken sauce?” That's basically this meal, only slightly less salmonella-ish than hers (which involved cooking the chicken in the water it thawed in).

It's nothing fancy-- just chicken breasts cooked in chicken soup-- but it's bland and boring and I guess if you were sick and just needed the vitamins that chicken soup gives you then maybe it would be good? It wasn't bad: Judson and I ate some of it for dinner last night and I'm going to shred up the rest and try to make it into something more excited tonight-- it just had no flavour beyond basic “chickeniness,” which isn't really positive at all, I think.

The Verdict:

1 spoon out out five. Do not recommend. Thanks a lot, Campbell's.

The recipe:

Quick Bland Chicken in Chicken Sauce

The Ingredients:

1 tbsp vegetable oil
4 boneless chicken breasts
1 10 oz-can Cream of Chicken soup (thinned with ½ c milk if necessary)

THE DIRECTIONS:

Heat oil in a skillet and add chicken breasts.
Cook until browned.
Add soup (and milk, if needed) and heat to a boil.
Cover and cook over low heat 5-10 minutes until done.

Yields 4 tastelessly bland chicken breasts, perfect for... well... I'm not really sure what.

French Pudding, with apologies to the French

Eleanor was superstitious. More superstitious than any person I've ever known, and it wasn't an ironic superstitiousness, either: she was totally sincere. AND I don't mean, like, “broken mirror” superstitions, but weird ones like “if you put your shirt on backwards you have to leave it that way because it's bad luck to turn it around,” and “don't turn the page of your calendar to the new month until the new month has already started.”

So, in honour of Friday the 13th, which would have been Eleanor's least favourite day of this year, I give you my first disaster recipe from the box. It is not a recipe for pudding. Nor is there anything about this recipe that is French, with the possible exception of the inclusion of unsweetened whipped cream, but I think even that's a bit of a stretch. This is sort of like a trifle, but you're supposed to make it in a baking pan, and it includes raw eggs... I guess if I get food poisoning, we'll know today is truly an unlucky day. And for a no-bake recipe, get ready to use all of your dishes again.

I made a couple of substitutions here: I can't get Nilla Wafers anywhere, so I used Digestive Biscuits. Also, I can't find crushed pineapple in this country and I don't know what size “a small can” is, so I used two tiny cans of pineapple rings, which I pulverised way beyond “crushed” in my food processor. 

Anyway, it's way less bad than I thought it would be, but I still think it probably counts as a disaster. Eleanor may have liked it (there's a note in her handwriting that reads “delicious” in the top corner), but I think we're gonna have to agree to disagree on this one. In the 1960s it might have been awesome, but today it's kind of just a mess that reminds me of something that would have been served at a church potluck when I was a kid.

The verdict:

1 spoon out of five. I think it still deserves a single spoon because the recipe clearly worked the way that it was supposed to, it's just that the flavour combination and texture and its general existence are not really appetising. I do, however, feel like this is a fixable recipe: what if the cookie layers were cubed angel food cake? Or there was a layer of white cake, then pineapple filling, then a white cake layer and then the custard/whipped cream combo was the frosting? It's probably possible to fix this up into something edible, but if you make it as listed here, it's probably not going to be great. Unless you just really like canned pineapple, I guess.

The recipe:

French Pudding

The ingredients:

8 oz Nilla Wafers or digestive biscuits, crushed
4 oz butter
1 ¾ c powdered sugar
2 eggs
1 c whipping cream
1 small can crushed pineapple, or 2 small cans pineapple rings, crushed in a blender or food processor
½ c chopped nuts (I used pecans)

THE DIRECTIONS:

Sprinkle half of the cookie crumbs into the bottom of a 9x13 pan, as evenly as possible.
Cream butter, powdered sugar, and eggs until well-mixed, then pour it into the pan on top of the crumbs.
Whip the cream until fluffy, then spoon it evenly over the butter mixture in the pan.
Spoon the crushed pineapple over the whipped cream evenly.
Sprinkle the chopped nuts and the remaining cookie crumbs over the pineapple and press down gently.
Refrigerate until ready to eat, so, basically refrigerate forever.

Yields a 9x13 pan of pudding, and if you could find 35 people who wanted to eat it, I bet it would comfortably feed all of them.