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Chocolate Chip Cookies



Last week I found myself making a triple batch of homemade chocolate chip cookie dough...how is THIS cooking under quarantine? It sounds extravagant, and maybe just wasteful...let me back up and explain. 

I live alone in a small town in Iowa where I spend the majority of my time either at work teaching high schoolers or hanging out with friends. As soon as the pandemic starting, I decided to pack up and go stay with family in Michigan so this extrovert wouldn’t completely lose her mind. A little over a week ago, I found out that three sisters I have taught lost their dad to COVID-19.

  I’m a helper...sometimes to a fault. I have been slowly learning when to jump in and when to sit back and not fix things. My first instinct was to jump in my car and drive all the way back to Iowa just so I could be there, so baking cookies was actually a pretty good compromise. This particular recipe is one of my favorites from childhood and is my go-to for comfort baking. Two of the three girls have eaten my cookies on a pretty regular basis, and so it just seemed right.

 So I set to work in a kitchen that isn't my own. I didn't have my usual recipe card I pull out, I didn't have my bowls or spoons or mixer or oven, but it felt good to be physically doing something in response to the helplessness I was feeling. This really was just as much for me as for them. It felt extravagant to use so many ingredients that are limited in so many places but I needed this. I needed to do something. And so I made a double-batch of chocolate chip cookies. Pouring each ingredient with purpose and longing to do more, only to find that the recipe I googled was not the beloved recipe of mu childhood. It had too much salt. The irony of the saltiness and this season of life we are in did not go unnoticed by me. I sighed and laughed and took a deep breath, and then I put the dough away and contemplated what to do. I stubbornly refused to send sub-par cookies to these girls. Partly because they deserve the best and only the best and have had enough salt in their lives lately and do not deserve to have any more, and partly because of pride. They’ve had my cookies before and now I have a reputation to uphold, dang it!

So I stepped away for a day or two and came back to the kitchen with a new idea. I measured out each ingredient carefully, and made a third batch of cookies, this time without any salt. I took the dough from the fridge and mixed it in, hoping the flavors would even out, and they did! I now had three batches of pretty dang good -if I do say so for myself- chocolate chip cookies. 

The experience was not perfect (I maybe dropped an egg while making the third batch), it was not frugal, and I’m still not sure if I did it more for me or more for them. As an English teacher, I am a big believer that there are life lessons to be found in almost any story. As a follower of Jesus, I am a firm believer that God’s grace and love can be seen reflected in the ordinary. I do not think this experience is an exception. 

 If you have made it to the end of this and all you got out of it was a recipe for chocolate chip cookies (see below), that’s ok! But I hope you also walk away feeling permission to love others, and yourself, extravagantly; even in a time where we feel like we have to pace our emotional and physical resources. So go bake some cookies, whatever that may look like for you. 

 Here's the ACTUAL recipe!
Ingredients:
2 1/2 C. flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 C. Butter
3/4 C. white sugar
3/4 C. brown sugar
2 eggs 
1 tsp. vanilla
2 C. chocolate chip (dark chocolate is best but you do you)

Directions:
Set the oven for 350 degrees
Mix dry ingredients together in a bowl 
Cream butter, sugars, eggs, and vanilla ina bowl
Mix dry ingredients until smooth
Stir in chocolate chips 
Form cookie dough into balls and bake for 9-11 minutes (I like mine chewy)


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