Colossal Oatmeal Cookies with Chocolate Chips

This is my mother's recipe:

1 cup butter (salted butter works best for this recipe)
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs beaten
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour (1 cup white, 1 cup whole wheat)
2 1/2 cups oatmeal
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 bag Ghiradelli chocolate chips (note: the recipe actually calls for 1 1/2 cups raisins, but we always use chocolate chips instead)

Cream the butter and the sugar.
Add eggs and vanilla.
Combine the dry ingredients (Dylan is working hard to do this with his whisk)


Mix dry ingredients into creamed mixture. Add raisins (or in our case - chocolate chips)

Dylan carefully poured in the chocolate chips.

These are supposed to be "colossal" cookies - very large and baked for 15 - 20 minutes at 350. We baked them in my Thermador oven set for convection at 350. We made the cookies about 1 1/2 inch balls and baked them for about 10 minutes.


Although this is not a freezer cookie, my mother freezes this dough all the time. So we rolled most of the dough into 2 inch diameter rolls and wrapped them in waxed paper, bagged them in a ziploc with baking instructions. They are in my downstairs freezer, waiting to be baked the week of the wedding in April.

Maple Oatmeal Bread - Part Two

Continuing the recipe:

1. Turn the bread out of the rising bowl and cut it into two pieces. A bench knife does a great job for this. You can make two round loaves or put the dough into two greased loaf pans (this is what I did).
   
2. Allow the bread to rise for about 45 more minutes. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 375.

• Bake at 375 for about 35 - 40 minutes.
  

The loaves turned out really pretty and smelled so good (wish I could convey that on a blog!)



I love this Hensperger cookbook. My copy is literally falling apart at the seams as you can see below, but I continue to use it over and over.



I made homemade pimento cheese and had a pimento cheese sandwich for supper on this delicious bread.



If you are interested, I use my mother's method to make pimento cheese -

• You grate a lot of cheese (this was about 3/4 pound). I used my food processor with the grating wheel to grate the cheese. I use good cheese: Cabot sharp cheddar which was on sale this week at Whole Foods
  
• I bought a jar of roasted peppers and chopped them into smaller pieces - you can see the jar in the back left of the picture.
• I poured the cut pimentos and the juice from their jar into the cheese.
• Then I grind pepper over the mix until it looks right (probably about 1/8 tsp).
• I shake a little salt,
• Worcestershire sauce - about 1/4 tsp, if that
  
• a few drops of Tabasco,
• a pinch of sugar and
• just enough mayonnaise to make it spreadable....
  

And there it is - done and delicious.

Maple Oatmeal Bread - Part One

Today I made Maple Oatmeal Bread from one of my favorite cookbooks by Beth Hensperger: Baking Bread: Old and New Traditions.

One of the keys to good bread is good ingredients. I used the ingredients above in this recipe. If you shop at Whole Foods, you'll recognize the brands and that most are organic.

The whole wheat flour in the upper right is some flour that I ground myself at a shop in Charleston, SC. It was so much fun - they had the wheat and I put it in the flour grinder and turned it into flour! I felt like the Little Red Hen!


I didn't have the wheat bran called for in the original recipe so I substituted ground flax seed. Here's what is in this bread:

• 2 T active dry yeast
• 1/2 cup pure maple syrup
• 1 1/2 cups warm water
• 1 cup warm milk
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 2 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/3 cup wheat bran (I used ground flax seed instead)
• 1/2 cup oat bran
• 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 1/2 cups rolled oats
• 4 1/2 - 5 cups unbleached bread flour

1. First you proof the yeast in 1/2 cup of the warm water mixed with 1 tsp of the maple syrup.
2. Then in the work bowl of the mixer, combine the rest of the water, the maple syrup, milk, oil, salt, brans, whole wheat flour, oats and 1 cup bread flour.
   
3. Add the yeast. Beat for about a minute.
   
4. Then add the remaining flour 1/2 cup at a time. The dough should still be moist when you are through so that the brans and the oatmeal can continue to absorb moisture as the dough rises.
5. Knead the bread and then put it in a greased bowl to rise for about 1 1/2 - 2 hours. (Continued in next post)

Buttermilk Oatmeal Bread - Part One

I love to bake bread. I try to bake every Friday. My grandson and I baked every Friday of his first two years until he moved to Virginia. When I visit him we still bake together.

In my family growing up, my mother would always appear to "follow the recipe," but I discovered that in actuality, she made many improvements to the recipe. We all call that "mothering" the recipe. She bakes bread as well but mostly she bakes the same kind - why change a winning recipe?

I will report here any "mothering" that I do to recipes that I find and I'll share the recipes I've found and use with you. I'm not an invent-your-own-recipe baker - one of my daughters says that baking is a science; cooking is an art. I am much more of an artist than a scientist, so I generally follow the scientific approach (the recipe) to bake bread.

I visited my daughter's family in Virginia for Thanksgiving where my grandson Dylan and I baked Buttermilk Oatmeal Bread. We found the recipe here.

Ingredients (varied from the original recipe as indicated below with blue type):
2 cups water
1 cup regular oatmeal
2 T butter
1/2 tsp white sugar
1 pkg active dry yeast
1 cup buttermilk
1 T salt
1/4 cup brown sugar
5 - 6 cups bread flour

Put 1/2 cup of warm water into a small bowl that has been warmed by filling it with warm water and then pouring the water out and drying the bowl. Stir in 1/2 tsp of white sugar and the yeast. Allow to proof for about 10 minutes. The mixture looks like this as it proofs:

Put 1 1/2 cups of water and the oatmeal in a saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat. (This allows the oatmeal to get really tender and makes the pan much easier to wash than if you bring the water to a boil and then add the oatmeal.) When oatmeal thickens, remove from heat, stir in butter and pour into your mixing bowl.