Those cookies are not only Taylor Swift approved, they're KID approved!!!

So - here's a little update.  A couple of my nephews came over to swim this afternoon.  Check out the cool shark toy I picked up this morning.

You can press the little blue button to make the shark open its jaws and eat the fish.  The fish float, so you can go around the pool destroying little fish.  Then you can make the shark spit them out and do it all over again.  It's kind of a morbid toy, actually, but it went over well!

ANYWAY, one of my nephews, who is almost three, is a bona fide cookie monster.  He ate three of the cookies I made yesterday (see previous post).  No "What is this dark chocolate?"  No "What are these little bits of walnuts doing in the cookies?"  Just three cookies.  Gone.  Quickly.  So, they're kid-approved, too!  :)

Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies

So, I made these "Super Yummy Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies" this afternoon.  Notice that I did not include the entire recipe title in my blog post title.  I hate the word "yummy".  If you describe a recipe as such, you've lost me.  I want "effervescent".  I want "transcendent".  I want "astounding".  I want "life-changing" -  maybe even "horrifying".  (I might make a recipe described as horrifying simply out of curiosity.)  

Anyway, why did I make them???  Well, as I was surfing my brain into internet oblivion (and caffeinating it with morning coffee), I found out that none other than Taylor Swift considers this particular recipe "a turning point" in her life.  It's a Food Network recipe from Anne Burrell.  Here's the link:

Anne Burrell's Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies

Now, I can't really consider myself a Taylor Swift fan.  No offense - she's just not my musical cup of tea.  I'm not really an Anne Burrell fan, either.  Again, not my cup of tea.  When it comes to Food Network, I'm more of a Bobby Flay or Gordon Ramsay type of person.  When I watch a cooking show, I need some serious chile action or a bunch of words with four letters in them.  One or the other.  Or BOTH . . .

Anyway . . . Taylor Swift.  At this point, I would think it would take a lot to create a turning point in her life.  That's what intriuged me.

Taylor Swift's Take on These Cookies

I had to know.  Maybe I needed a turning point in my own life . . . I'm not sure.  I got all the ingredients together.

You might notice something that doesn't belong.  See it?  Well, it's a Stone IPA.  It looked so cute that I had to let it be in the picture.  I don't know what to say.  I made this cookies at 5:30 pm.  That's happy hour.  Also, I'm almost forty and I don't explain anything.  And it's MY house.  So - IPA and cookies . . .

I followed the recipe exactly, though I didn't use the standing mixer.  It seemed kind of silly to get my standing mixer dirty for something so easy.  For crying out loud - I mixed cookie dough with a fork when I was six years old and those turned out fine!

I found that they needed a bit less cooking time than the recipe said.  I have a convection oven, though.  It tends to cook things a bit faster than expected.  These cookies took about 10 minutes.  With cookies, the best thing to do is watch them like a hawk for the last few minutes.  When it looks like they're almost done, they're DONE!

So, there you have it.  You can even see the little sea salt sprinkle on top.  Here's a whole plate of them, so you can be extra jealous!

Just in case you think we consume nothing but butter, chocolate, and beer in our house, I am going to post one more picture for you!  I was on a roll, so I made dinner, too.  This is a smoked mahi-mahi filet on a bed of gingered zucchini with a smoky tomato-cinnamon sauce on top.  The recipe is from the cookbook For Cod and Country, which I bought about two years ago at Powell's bookstore in Portland.  I think this is the first time that I have officially used it, and I have decided I should add it to the regular rotation (both the cookbook, and the recipe).  Here's an Amazon link to the cookbook if you want to check it out:



On the side, we have Israeli couscous with shallots, pine nuts, lemon, parsley, and golden raisins.  The recipe is right off the side of the Trader Joe's Israeli couscous box.

It's healthy!  So it was TOTALLY FINE that we each chased our dinner with two of the above-described cookies smothered with Trader Joe's decadent French vanilla ice cream.  O.O.  Yeah.  I'm going to bed now.