You CAN'T recapture the past: but you can try. School cookies

But sometimes you can get a little piece of it. The end of the week was difficult for me. Every year, there's a ceremony, up at my undergraduate institution, celebrating my old, best bud Oscar. This year , more than any other, was quite traumatic. I think I realized, for the first time, that Oscar is NOT coming back, there will NOT BE another Oscar, and that while it will never be the right time to let go of Oscar, it IS time to let go of the idea that someone will come along and replace him. Right now, objectively, I'm trying to get my arms around the unreasonable position I have put people in, consciously or unconciously, as I labeled them "the new Oscar." But until I can get my "emotional" arms around the fact that it IS time to let go, I can't really get to the objective part. This is very much like the opera "die Tode Stadt" in many ways, except Paul had someone to help him. I'm doing this alone. It ain't easy. Oh well...

But with thoughts of the past in mind, I went into the kitchen to try to make myself a bit happy and to recapture a bit of it. I have written about my lack of enthusiasm about chocolate chip cookies, but how it's important to be able to make them, because they DO seem to be everyone's favorites.

Maybe that's changing. I have a number of friends who have told me that gingersnaps are theirs, and I make REALLY good gingersnaps. And if I remember school correctly, the cookie we WERE allowed to take, as part of lunch, was the oatmeal cookie. And I have always loved them.

I think that, perhaps, whomever took care of your food needs when you were young, had bought into the advertising campaigns that Quaker had mounted for their oatmeal (I'm told that this was the first mass market advertising campaign for a food product. Perhaps). So, with the campaign working, and people buying oats, there had to be something to do with them. And oaks do bake well. Scots use oats in just about all of the baked products, for a very simple reason: that's what grows in Scotland. Wheat has to be imported and it's expensive. So oats is what it was. Scones, or more properly, "bannocks," were first made with oats. Sweet, soft cakes that sometimes have some richness from fat added to them, bannocks are very tasty. Well, given American ingenuity, out came the oatmeal cookie. I like them better.

So we had all these mothers, for the most part, trying to get nutrition into their kids, and thinking "well an oatmeal cookie is good for him/her. I can get some oats and some fruit into them." So we all got them in our lunchbox. Is that why we love them? Who knows. The fact is, we do.

There are a tremendous number of variants on oatmeal cookies. But they mostly break down into the soft and crispy variety. I like the crispy ones better, and that's the recipe I'm going to give you here.

This recipe, which is from King Arthur Flour, makes 48 or so cookies. They are small cookies, but they are rich. You can leave out the raisins, or the nut, or both. But if you do, you'll get a smaller yield.

You'll also see that I add shortening (Crisco) to the cookies. I'm not happy about this, but yes, you need it for a crispy cookie. So look the other way, and go for it. Again, this is something you'll be glad you know how to make, and so will your friends.

You start with 3/4 cup each of brown sugar, and white sugar. And you also need a stick of unsalted butter, and also 1/2 cup of that shortening (sigh). Get this all stirred together. I use my mixer, but this is easy enough to do with a spoon, by hand. Then add a teaspoon of baking powder, and a teaspoon of salt. Now, you add some spices, if you like. In traditional "oatmeal school cookies" you will leave this out, but for adults, put in a nice big teaspoon of whatever spices you like. For me, that's half cinnamon and half allspice. Nutmeg is good too, as is clove. Ginger might be nice, and would make things brighter. Maybe even cardamom if you're feeling frisky. Mix that in with the stuff you have already, and then add one egg, and a tablespoon of vanilla and combine that. Now, stir in three full cups of oats and feel noble about it. Add a cup of flour too, and then a cup each of raisins, and chopped nuts. Walnuts or pecans seem inevitable. I would like to try it sometime with sesame seeds.

You need to preheat your oven to 325. This is a slow bake, and a long one for cookies, and that's usual with crispy ones. I line my baking sheets with parchment, and then put out scant tablespoons of the dough. You can get about a dozen, maybe more, on the sheet, because these cookies do not spread very much. If you want a flatter cookie, you have to press the dough down before you bake it. Otherwise, you'll get a fat little ball of a guy, which is fine with me.

I bake them two sheets at a time, and I rotate the top and bottom trays after ten minutes. Then I bake for another full ten minutes, and let the guys cool completely before I put them in a tin.

You'll get 48 cookies or so, from this, like I said. If you want to (and I don't know why you would), you can dip them in chocolate, or frost them. There is something about an oatmeal cookie that says "leave me alone and enjoy me the way I am." Hmmmm. Could that be why I like them so much?

Are they good for you? Wellll..... No. Each cookie is 115 calories. Try to eat less than four. And of that 115 calories, 54 come from fat, and there's a whopping one gram of fiber in each cookie.

Well, what can I tell you? After all, they ARe cookies, and we're all entitled to that taste of a simpler time, when things like trying to recapture the past , or counting calories, were not part of our everyday lives and anxieties.

Make up a batch. I think you'll see, it's really very easy. And you may even convert a chocolate chip lover along the way.

Me? I have to try to release the ghosts of the past. Just another simple project