In My Mother's Kitchen: Chocolate Chip Cookies
My mother cooked almost every night, and baked bread regularly. However, as someone who was more than usually nutrition conscious it didn't feel like she fed us a lot of desserts. We ate ice cream with some regularity, because everyone in my family loves ice cream. There very occasionally chocolate bars and other store bought desserts, but even then it was in severely limited quantities. For example, you know those Hershey's candy bars that come in segments that are easy to break apart? We'd have desserts where four of us split a candy bar over two nights. After Halloween while other kids were eating everything in a day or two, we got to have a single piece of candy per day, which meant our Halloween candy often lasted until nearly Christmas.
My mother also made dessert. There were cakes for birthdays, and special desserts for holidays like hamantaschen. My sister recalls there being pans of brownies with Andes mint candies melted on top, which I frankly don't remember in the slightest. All of those were somewhat rare events. The only dessert that was made with regularity was my mother's chocolate chip cookie recipe, to the point where there is probably some part of my brain that associates the scent of baking chocolate cookies with "home".
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Take
- 2 sticks margarine
- 2/3 cup white sugar
- 2/3 cup brown sugar
Mix well.
Take
- 2 eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
Mix with previous ingredients until well blended.
Take
- 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
- 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
Mix with previous ingredients until well blended.
Take
- 2 cups chocolate chips
Mix with previous ingredients until well blended.
Put into refrigerator until cold (at least three hours).
Bake at 350 degrees for about ten minutes.
Cool on wire after baking.
One batch makes about two trays of 24 cookies.
Double all ingredients to make a double batch.
I have no idea where my mother first got this recipe, but I suspect she tweaked it to include whole wheat flour, which is not often seen in desserts. She'd also vary the chocolate chips from batch to batch, sometimes using white chips, mint chips or mini chips. She would make double batches of dough at once, sometimes freezing one batch for later baking.
All of the cookies would end up in a giant red porcelain turkey shaped cookie jar that was in the corner of the kitchen counter. Apparently some long ago friend of hers made it in a class and gave it to her as a gift back before I was born. It got heavy use for years. Overflow cookies went into a metal can that was in the cupboard, but frankly this didn't usually happen for long because I ate all the cookies all the time. For some reason, my mother who carefully partitioned out other desserts pretty much let me eat as many chocolate chip cookies as I wanted. In retrospect, this blows my mind. It's one thing to let me eat as much fruit as I wanted, but cookies? Still, it definitely happened - a double batch of chocolate chip cookies in our house had a lifespan measured in days, not weeks. That's nearly one hundred small cookies, assuming that I didn't eat any of the cookie dough before it was baked, which I pretty much always did.
My mother still makes the occasional batch of chocolate chip cookies for my father, but she stores the cookies in a different container now. When my folks were clearing their house out in preparation for retirement they asked my sister and I if we wanted anything specific from their home. The number one item on my very short list was the turkey shaped cookie jar, which my mother was happy to turn over to my custody.
I still make these cookies, although much more rarely than I did when I was growing up. This is pretty much the only recipe I make that requires sticks of margarine. In college I would sometimes bake up a batch or two in the kitchen of my fraternity house. In college few things make you as welcome as saying "hey, I baked cookies". I even paid off the occasional debt with them.
Now when I make cookies I often bring them into work instead of eating them all myself, which I guess is some kind of maturity. I have to say that other people don't seem to like them as much as I do, probably because they aren't nearly as sweet as most other cookies whether store bought or home made. That's ok; more for me!
My mother also made dessert. There were cakes for birthdays, and special desserts for holidays like hamantaschen. My sister recalls there being pans of brownies with Andes mint candies melted on top, which I frankly don't remember in the slightest. All of those were somewhat rare events. The only dessert that was made with regularity was my mother's chocolate chip cookie recipe, to the point where there is probably some part of my brain that associates the scent of baking chocolate cookies with "home".
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Take
- 2 sticks margarine
- 2/3 cup white sugar
- 2/3 cup brown sugar
Mix well.
Take
- 2 eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
Mix with previous ingredients until well blended.
Take
- 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
- 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
Mix with previous ingredients until well blended.
Take
- 2 cups chocolate chips
Mix with previous ingredients until well blended.
Put into refrigerator until cold (at least three hours).
Bake at 350 degrees for about ten minutes.
Cool on wire after baking.
One batch makes about two trays of 24 cookies.
Double all ingredients to make a double batch.
I have no idea where my mother first got this recipe, but I suspect she tweaked it to include whole wheat flour, which is not often seen in desserts. She'd also vary the chocolate chips from batch to batch, sometimes using white chips, mint chips or mini chips. She would make double batches of dough at once, sometimes freezing one batch for later baking.
All of the cookies would end up in a giant red porcelain turkey shaped cookie jar that was in the corner of the kitchen counter. Apparently some long ago friend of hers made it in a class and gave it to her as a gift back before I was born. It got heavy use for years. Overflow cookies went into a metal can that was in the cupboard, but frankly this didn't usually happen for long because I ate all the cookies all the time. For some reason, my mother who carefully partitioned out other desserts pretty much let me eat as many chocolate chip cookies as I wanted. In retrospect, this blows my mind. It's one thing to let me eat as much fruit as I wanted, but cookies? Still, it definitely happened - a double batch of chocolate chip cookies in our house had a lifespan measured in days, not weeks. That's nearly one hundred small cookies, assuming that I didn't eat any of the cookie dough before it was baked, which I pretty much always did.
My mother still makes the occasional batch of chocolate chip cookies for my father, but she stores the cookies in a different container now. When my folks were clearing their house out in preparation for retirement they asked my sister and I if we wanted anything specific from their home. The number one item on my very short list was the turkey shaped cookie jar, which my mother was happy to turn over to my custody.
I still make these cookies, although much more rarely than I did when I was growing up. This is pretty much the only recipe I make that requires sticks of margarine. In college I would sometimes bake up a batch or two in the kitchen of my fraternity house. In college few things make you as welcome as saying "hey, I baked cookies". I even paid off the occasional debt with them.
Now when I make cookies I often bring them into work instead of eating them all myself, which I guess is some kind of maturity. I have to say that other people don't seem to like them as much as I do, probably because they aren't nearly as sweet as most other cookies whether store bought or home made. That's ok; more for me!