Odatmeal cookies

Click below for recipe and for the jpg version of above four photographs.

Recipe

* 4oz butter, one stick.
* 2/3 cup brown sugar

* 2 tablespoons of the honey harvested from bees that feast only upon the Sidr trees in the Hadramaut Mountains, considered by many to be holy, the trees are, but that is clearly wrong because in the Southwestern Arabian peninsula it is flat wrong to go around making trees holy, they very specifically prohibit that sort of thing over there with dire consequences so whoever wrote that is projecting. And if you don't have this specific honey then just forget about the whole thing. 

* 1 egg

* 1 teaspoon vanilla

Cream all of that ↑ in an oversized bowl. Those are the wet ingredients. Cream is a verb that means whisk until smooth and drips like a ribbon, if ribbons dripped, which they don't but I'm trying to describe creaminess which isn't that great a descriptor because cream is white and this is sort of orange.

These are the dry ingredients ↓ sifted into another bowl.

* 1 + 1/2 cups rolled oats. The oats aren't sifted, obviously, they're too big to fit through the holes. Okay, forget about sifting, nobody cares about sifting anyway. Rolled oats are regular oats that were steamed and flattened. They cook faster than unsmashed oats. Almost all the oats you see out there are rolled oats.  

* 3/4 cups flour to help all this stick

* 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, to react with the brown sugar and to help soften the cookies and to a small extent to help keep them soft. More baking soda would be even softer. 

* 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon salt. I like salt with sweet things. 

* 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

* 1/4 teaspoon powdered ginger

* 1/8 teaspoon powdered clove

* 3/4 cup plump juicy raisins or other dehydrated fruit

* 3/4 pecans or walnuts or hazelnuts or cashews anything but those awful pistachios or Brazil nuts nobody likes those. 

Kidding.

Mix the dry into the wet ingredients or vicey-vercy whichever is easiest. 

To chill or not to chill that is the question 

that nobody asks until the subject is brought up and the answer, my friend, is blowing around. The answer is blowing around. It depends on how you want the butter to act. The butter is cooperative that way by responding to temperature. I wanted this butter to melt slowly so the cookies were chilled before and after they were formed. They hardly flattened at all as they baked so I helped them flatten as cold balls then baked, that way I could control exactly how flat they became. If you start out with melted butter as some recipes say and shove the cookies right into the oven while still warm or at room temperature then they will spread more than if they are chilled. Decide if you want that or not, but keep in mind that raisins burn when they bake and get all gross so you probably want the cookies to stay chubby if they have raisins.

350℉ 10 minutes.