Oatella Cookies

Sometimes – many times, even – the answer is simple, and it’s making cookies. Boredom, celebrations, snow days, really sad days, wanting to thank someone, or show that you care about them – they’re all situations that baking an easy batch of cookies can probably improve. I’m not trying to suggest we can solve the world’s problems with cookies, or that we should all be eating our feelings more often. Instead, I feel like it’s the act of baking cookies – a ritual many of us have been performing alongside our parents or grandparents since we had to stand on a stool to reach the countertop – that brings the most joy and calm and can usually put a smile on my face no matter what.

They’re easy to make. For most recipes, you don’t even need to haul out the stand mixer- your limited upper body strength will do. You need a single bowl. A wooden spoon. Ingredients that are probably already in your pantry. If an ingredient isn’t in your pantry, you might even be able to skip it and with a quick Google come up with a substitute. It’ll probably still taste fine, because cookies are forgiving.

Dividing the batter into cookie balls on a baking sheet gives me such a sense of calm. I let my freak flag fly very high during this portion of the baking process, weighing the batter, dividing it by the yield and then measuring every cookie blob on a scale to ensure they are all the same size. You can make fun of me if you want to, but I think you’ll stop laughing when you see how perfect my cookies look coming out of the oven, clones of one another.

My oven is comically tiny (please do not ask me about the final sale Greenpan roasting pan I just invested in that doesn’t fit inside), and I feel like if I bake two cookies sheets at once they suffer, so it generally takes me quite awhile to bake off a full recipe. When the last batch is in the oven, I like to take the timer to the couch, get out a spatula and really go to town on the remnants of the mixing bowl. I’ll be damned if a couple of raw eggs keep me from doing this, my favorite part of baking. More so than eating the cookies hot out of the oven.

All of this is to say that when the going gets tough, or when the going is great, or when you have some unexpected free time and are looking for an easy little project, cookies are the answer. And here are some nutty, spicy, chewy gems to get you started.