Would a pocket like a cookie?

Alternate title: The Christening of My New Oven

Thanks mostly to Theresa, I've started reading food blogs, and I am now addicted. To the point where I almost don't have the time or energy to actually get up and leave my reading and ogling long enough to cook anything. But today my stomach was growling just enough (and I had just barely enough staples in the kitchen by now.. going on week two in the new apartment) to do something about it, and I decided to bake. But what to bake? Another thing about food blogs, especially the ones with glossy photos with lots of color and zoomed so the focus is on one item and the background is all fuzzy... you know the ones I'm talking about... is that they all show concoctions in perfect, cute little serving dishes. I don't have tartlet pans, pastry brushes, ramekins, and so on. I don't even have cake pans. So it goes with moving every year or two. One day I will live in my dream house (by house I mean kitchen) with endless cabinets and hanging pot/pan holder things, you know the ones that go on hooks above the cute little island with all the counter space you can dream of, and I will have counter space (and money) to afford a fancy stand mixer, not to mention a blender, food processor, hell maybe even an espresso maker. Ehhh not quite as important but still kinda cool (though I do love my little stovetop one). I digress. What I am trying to say is that I don't have the dishware or know-how to make perfect, photographable, bloggable desserts. Maybe hors d'eourves or soups, but desserts just have to be pretty. And today I was going to bake. So temporarily putting aside my dream of recreating beautiful blog-inspired pastries and the like, I thought about what I had, and what would keep well, and I decided on cookies.

Chocolate was a must. I had cocoa and I had chocolate chips. Oatmeal sounded enticing... and I love cranberries instead of raisins in cookies. But oatmeal-chocolate-cranberry cookies are just a little too standard to write about. Delicious, yes, but not new. I wanted to make something new. And then as I snacked on some dates I just bought at the store, it hit me: people always cook with dates! Why hadn't I thought of this? Well to be honest I didn't even know I liked dates until last summer in Dubai when I tried them for the first time since childhood and I nearly melted with love for the texture and dense but natural sweetness. Even in the last year, though, I have only eaten dates plain, maybe with tea or coffee but never in anything. But hey, I had a whole pound of them in the house, and they were a neat ingredient to think about. I did some recipe hunting and didn't find anything too enticing, but came to the conclusion that chopped dates were really as good as any other dried fruit to put in baked things, so I just played it by ear and made my own recipe, picking parts from others I have used before or found online, and hoping the ratios would all work out.



First, I had to chop the dates. Looking back, I think they actually sell "chopped dates", which may have been easier. It's like the chopped walnuts.. easy and even cheaper than the whole ones, and saves the hassle and mess of chopping them yourself. Lesson learned. But I had whole dates and plenty of time so I chopped them myself. Sticky as they are, they kept sticking to my knife so I threw some flour on the cutting board and the dates to keep the pieces apart. I think it worked out in the end.




I figured I should start with some sort of "recipe" or else I wouldn't be able to tell you what I did. So here's what I came up with:
1/2c butter
1/3c sugar
1/3c brown sugar
1 egg
1/2t vanilla
1 1/2c rolled oats
1/2c flour, plus about 2T mixed with the dates, dried cranberries, and chocolate. I don't know where I came up with this, but once, long ago, someone told me coating mix-ins like chocolate chips and raisins with flour helps them evenly mix into dough. Good advice that I've continued to follow over the years. Now that I think of it it probably came from my mom, and I'm starting to feel slightly guilty for not remembering the precise moment I learned this tidbit...
1/2t baking soda
1/2t salt
1/4t cinnamon
1/2c chopped dates
1/2c semisweet chocolate chips
1/3c dried cranberries

As a side note, most cookie recipes come in the 2 sticks butter/ 2 eggs/ 4-6 dozen output variety. That is a lot of cookies and I always end up halving the recipe, even if I'm baking for a group. But today I was baking for you, and I'm afraid you can't have any, so I halved it with practicality in mind.

As always, I started by creaming the room temp butter with the sugars. By hand, with the only wooden spoon that made it with me during this move. Luckily I do still have my colorful set of stackable mixing bowls from my friend Martey, and the green one is quite nice for this size of cookie batch, by the time you mix everything in. Such a small batch does make for a lonely looking ball of butter/sugar in the early stage, though:

I added the egg and the vanilla, mixing thoroughly. Then the flour, oats, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Everyone says you should mix all the dry ingredients together first, and I understand-- you don't want a big clump of salt or baking soda in your cookie-- but this always seems like a waste of a bowl to me. I enjoy the challenge of lightly stirring the dry ingredients on one side of the main mixing bowl before you mix it all up together. And I'm all about bowl/utensil efficiency, as much as I really do love washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen in general (and I am an avid proponent of the clean-as-you-go policy). So you mix the dry stuff together, sort of, then mix with the wet stuff. Easy. Then I scattered a bit of flour among the cranberries and chocolate chips and threw them in along with the dates, and mixed it all up.

I think I forgot to tell you I set the oven to 350, though to be honest this was a bit arbitrary. I'm really just a big copier, and all cookie recipes seem to be 325-375, so why not start by trying 350. Who knows if my oven is even accurate. I didn't think to put the oven thermometer in until after I baked the cookies and turned the oven off.. but if I ever do remember, and write in here again, I will try to let you know whether my oven's temperature is accurate. Wow I am really good at rambling on endlessly about almost nothing. Hm. So then I made some little dough balls and put them on a couple of cookie trays, and stuck them in the oven. Nothing too magical. They looked like this:


I made about 2 dozen and still had enough dough for another dozen or so, which I put in the freezer for later. I would have put it in the fridge, but then I would have just eaten it all over the next 24 hours, and as it is my jeans are already feeling a little tight. I left them in 14 minutes but I think that may have been a tad too long, because them came out a touch crispy and I personally prefer them a little underdone and chewy. Despite my lack of many kitchen things I consider vital, like pot holders and tongs and a rubber spatula (though I bought a new one of those today), I do have an oven thermometer as mentioned above, and I also have these nifty stacking wire racks that my sister gave me when I moved into my first apartment and needed all sorts of household things.


And then, I ate them. With a beautiful paper towel napkin, sitting at the coffee table in front of the TV.


And then I stored the rest. In what one might call a cookie jar. Sitting peacefully between the paper towels and the toaster. With a lot of counter space that made it into the photo because I am still an amateur. Perhaps one day I will look back on this and see how far I've come in my blogging/photographing skills. Or maybe I will never blog about food again. Either way, this has been quite enjoyable, even if only one other person reads this.


Theresa, please come over and have a cookie or two or three, and then you can even sneak into the cookie jar once I'm asleep and eat more. You can even drink the milk from the container (I do it too.. totally acceptable in my book).