My Fascinating New Hobby
Yes, I've taken up a new hobby. It's occupied my nights with labor and it's filled my days with giddy anticipation. For the last three weeks I've been dabbling in pastry-chefery. Specifically, I've been cooking different varieties of oatmeal cookies. It's gone far better than I'd even imagined and I'm GREATLY looking forward to cooking up another batch this week. It's gonna be awesome.
Oats are really good for you, right? Right. And i dig oatmeal for breakfast, so combine that with my unnatural attraction to cookies and you have a recipe for disaster. These cookies are supposed to be lower-calorie too, but I've developed a confounding problem. I bake dozens of cookies, i Eat dozens of cookies. All by myself. It's terrible.
The first week i made just regular oatmeal cookies. Oats and brown sugar -they were delicious (even though I'd cut the sugar content Way down). The second week i made CHOCOLATE oatmeal cookies. They too were delicious. Last week i made oatmeal cookies with apple and cranberries. Nice. Very nice. Oh, and I'd added whey powder for protein, so they're triply good for me not just for dessert, but also as a nutricious between-meal snack. I'm eating them as fast as i can. Those dozens aren't even gone yet though and I'm already thinking about the next batch (Oatmeal Cookie 4.0). One word:
PEANUT BUTTER.
i Highly encourage you to walk on the wild side yourself. The very basic recipe you'll find on almost any cannister of oatmeal is pretty much as follows...
Ingredients
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened [i go 3/4c or 1.5 stix]
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar [i don't pack firmly]
½ cup granulated sugar [i skip this entirely]
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1½ cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
3 cups of Quaker Oats (quick cook)
Directions
Preheat oven to 350° F. Beat together butter and sugars until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla extract; beat well. Add combined flour, baking soda; mix well. Slowly stir in oats. Drop by rounded tablespoon onto an ungreased cookie sheets. Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown. Cool 1 minute on sheet, remove to wire rack.
Unfortunately there are alotta people out there who've heard someone talking about something somewhere and then passed it along sometime later without giving it the cautious skepticism that "bold and fresh" statements require. There're buzzwords in that hearsay -and I daresay we've heard them all. I presume you yourself are smart enough not to believe the hype, but alotta your teabagging friends might not be. It is because of Them that I'm reminded of the following quip: "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'Atlas Shrugged'. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."