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oatmeal cookies
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all-purpose flour       450   g
instant nonfat dry milk  60   g
baking soda               1/2 tbsp
baking powder             1/2 tbsp
cinnamon                1 3/4 tsp
unsweetened cocoa       2     tbsp
salt                    a ceremonial amount

butter                  2 1/4 cup (4 1/2 sticks)
brown sugar             185   g
granulated sugar        290   g

large eggs              3
vanilla                 2     tsp

oats                    400   g
walnuts                 1 1/2 cup
M&Ms                    400   g

Allow the butter to soften so it's easy to mix in the sugars. My favorite method is to take your largest mixing bowl, the one you'll be using for the cookie dough. Remove the sticks (and the half stick) from their wrappers and place them in the bowl. Place this bowl in the oven and fire up the oven for about two minutes, or whatever works for you. Then turn off the oven and let the butter sit for a few hours. Depending on ambient temperature of the kitchen, sometimes I goose the butter with another minute of oven heat, once or twice durin those hours.
Mix dry ingredients together. Set aside.

Whip the vanilla into the butter. Mix in the sugars.

Into that, mix the eggs. Then mix in the dry ingredients.

Grind the oats with a miniature food processor. Once upon a time, I tried using store-bought oat flour instead. But after baking, cookie texture was all wrong.

Moment of truth. Do you mix in the oats with the hand mixer, or with your hands? I've found several hand mixers whose packaging announced that they were strong enough for oatmeal cookies. Lies, most of the time. Try it and see. Mix in the oats with your hand mixer if you dare. I've ruined a couple of hand mixers this way. Or, you can use your fingers.

But. I finally (2024) bought a Braun Multimix 5 hand mixer. This 350 watt puppy is equal to the task.

After adding the oats, definitely abandon the hand mixer and go with your fingers.

Mix in the walnuts. Break them into pieces as small as your fingers can make them. Or go cheap and buy the walnuts bits instead of halves, if you can find them in the store. Either way works. Don't use a food processor; it grinds them too fine. You want some texture here.

Mix in the M&Ms. For esthetic reasons, be a sport and pick out the blue ones, because their color clashes with the cookies. Get rid of those blue guys. Contrary to the latest scientific findings, a little chocolate won't hurt the dawg none.

350 degrees, maybe about 15 minutes. Your kilometerage, and oven, may vary. The recipe yields enough that I have to bake in three shifts. I found that the second shift required somewhat less baking time than the third shift, which in turn required less baking time than the first shift. Be alert to this possibility.

NOTES:

Salt or no salt? Your choice. Salted butter or unsalted butter? Your choice. I prefer no salt at all in these cookies.

I like to open the eggs into a separate, very small bowl rather than straight into the dough. That makes it easier to fish out tiny bits of eggshell.

If a bit of eggshell is in the small bowl, you can chase it out by scraping it up the side of the bowl with the side of an ordinary table-style teaspoon.

I find that I get more control over the mixing process if I use just one beater in the hand mixer, not both of them. If you do this, use a rubber mat or something under the bowl so it doesn't start turning in unison with the beater when you add the oatmeal!

I grease the cookie sheets with a "pencil" (a stick, with the wrapper still around it) of frozen margarine. If it's not frozen, you'll get too much margarine on the cookie sheet. (Butter will probably work as well.)

For placing the cookies on the cookie sheet, I use a 1 1/2 tablespoon ice cream scoop, the kind with a curved blade inside the scoop to release the content easily. But do what makes you comfortable.

Mon Jan 29 19:34:02 PST 2024