="Relatively" Healthy Oatmeal Raisin Pecan Cookies=

"Relatively" Healthy Oatmeal Raisin Pecan Cookies

***Like eating a bowl of oatmeal in the form of a cookie (sorta)

First, using an electric hand-blender, I mix 6 tablespoons of melted butter, a half-cup of brown sugar, and an egg in a bowl. I use a little less butter and sugar than one might conventionally use in most recipes because I don’t like the cookies to be so fattening and so overly sweet. These are “adult” cookies. I add a teaspoon of vanilla extract, which is more than usually recommended, because things that taste like vanilla are good!

In a separate bowl I pour 2 cups of uncooked rolled oats, add a half-teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of baking soda, and about a cup and a half of flour. I use more oats and less flour than the usual recipes call for philosophical reasons, ie. these are OATMEAL cookies, not sugar cookies with some oatmeal in them. I use extra baking soda because I like the cookies to come out puffy and softer, rather than crispier and more “fried” tasting. Last but not least, I shake lots and lots of cinnamon into the bowl. In my experience, no recipe that calls for cinnamon ever has enough cinnamon in it to have any appreciable value whatsoever. So, to quote Goethe on his deathbed, which, regrettably, you all-too-seldom get a chance to do in the middle of an oatmeal cookie recipe—"More cinnamon! More cinnamon!" 

Then I mix the dry ingredients into the wet.

I pour lots of raisins into the mix and chop up a whole mess of pecans. As Blake wrote, "You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough." Sometimes I use walnuts. You then stir this whole brainy goop together. Now if the mixture is a little dry because you held back on the melted butter like I did you can throw in three or so gloppy tablespoons of applesauce. That should do the trick; it should be good and wet now. Once it’s all nice and sticky, form it up into a big ball, wrap the ball in saran wrap and plop it in the fridge for an hour or more.

When you're ready for cookies (or, more accurately, when the cookie dough is ready for you), preheat the oven to 375. Use a spoon and gouge out a rough ball of dough to the desired size of your eventual cookie, place the ball on a greased (or parchment-lined) cookie sheet, flatten down, and pop the sheet into the oven for 8-10 minutes. I usually split the difference and go for 9. The cookies aren’t as hard that way.

Leave the cooked cookies on the sheet for an additional five minutes to firm up. Inevitably, a few disappear, prey to hungry husbands and other stray marauders who suddenly start wandering through the kitchen. You can get a dozen or more cookies from this recipe, depending on the size of the cookies.