We’re riding out Tropical Storm Hanna, so it’s been a quiet day, with lots of curling up and reading and listening to the rain thrum on every surface.  A pot of tea became inevitable, and with it, a craving for cookies.  These cookies, to be specific:

These are my mother’s recipe for oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (though John prefers his with abominations instead of chocolate.  He doesn’t like chocolate – which is fine: more for me).  Of course, by the time I had made them, the tea was gone, so we just had them with milk.

I’m no foodblogger, but these are too good not to share with anyone who might be interested (Fair warning: I’ve given myself blisters mixing these with a wooden spoon.  A stand mixer is your friend here, or a hand mixer if you don’t have a stand model):

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients :
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup shortening
2 eggs
2 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups flour
3 cups oatmeal
1 package chocolate chips (or abominations, if you really must.  Raisins or nuts can also be added if preferred)

Directions :
Cream sugar and shortening.  Add eggs, water, and vanilla and mix.  Sift together soda, salt, and flour and add to the mix.  Add oatmeal and chocolate chips (I add oatmeal first, then split the batch and set aside half to accommodate the chocolate/vile thing preferences in our household).  Use a teaspoon to drop rounded lumps of cookie dough (a bit smaller than golf-ball size) onto greased cookie sheet and bake at 375 for approximately ten minutes.  They tend to be fragile when they’re just out of the oven, so I let them cool for a couple of minutes on the cookie sheet before breaking out the spatula and shoveling them on to a cooling rack.

Try to contain yourself for a few minutes while they go from molten to merely hot.  No, really – try.

Enjoy.