What's in Grandma's Recipe Tin? -Oatmeal Cookies

Welcome to my newest food blog project! I have been trying to think of a good project idea for a while, but nothing really jumped out of me as a fun idea. My grandmother is currently preparing to move out of her apartment and bequeathed to me three large containers full of newspaper clippings and recipe cards that she had collected over the years, with the words "You'll probably throw them away, but if you wanted to look through them..." So I took them with me and spent an entire day looking through all of them. I narrowed it down to one tin-worth of recipe cards and newspaper clippings to try out, and was thinking of the best time to try them and it hit me: blog project! "What's in Grandma's Recipe Tin?" is the perfect title for this project.

The inaugural recipe for this project is Oatmeal Cookies.

Oatmeal cookies are delicious, but they're not that exciting. They're pretty basic. So why did I choose it this time? Because look at the recipe-there's no flour in the ingredient list. I thought at first that maybe it was a missed ingredient, but then I noticed there are no eggs in there either, another standard for most oatmeal cookie recipes. That made me start thinking it was written this way on purpose after all, and therefore, was much more interesting as a recipe. I mean, no flour, no eggs, how was this cookie supposed to hold its shape? How would the butter and sugar not just melt out of it, leaving a mess of caramel and oats on the sheet pan? I had to see how it would work out. And if it worked out, it's a viable gluten-free cookie recipe and for people who need that, what an exciting thought!

 

I made these Friday night and they weren't very hard to make. First step was mixing the oats with the brown sugar. I used old-fashioned oats, not the quick-cooking kind. 

 

 

After those were blended together, I added the butter, cut into cubes, and mixed it really well until it was blended.

(Sorry the font is different for this, the picture wouldn't let me add a space and freaked out and only let me add a caption instead...)

 

At this stage, it was almost like a shortbread dough in texture. It doesn't say to, but I refrigerated it at this point for a while to help it stay firm. A while later, I used a small cookie dough scoop to make uniform-size cookies. Some cookies need to be shaped delicately, but since these are so precarious, they actually do better by being rolled tightly into a ball. Don't be afraid to squeeze them into a ball, they'll retain a better shape when they bake.

The wet fork is really an important step because the dough would just crumble if you pressed it with a dry fork. The ones that were pressed down less held their shapes better. I recommend just a gentle pressing down, maybe to about 1/4" thick or so.

The ones with the browner edges were more delicate and crumbly, but the thicker ones held their shape better. Those ones were chewier. Both were delicious, but the crumbly ones are SUPER crumbly. Like, make sure to eat them over a plate or the sink or something cuz you'll end up with crumbs everywhere if you don't!

This recipe made about 5 dozen cookies with the size of the scoop I used. The texture held up the next day when I took them to my family gathering where my father proceeded to gobble them up and then commandeered the rest of the bag. Luckily I have another bag set aside to take to work tomorrow to share with my coworkers.

This was a simple cookie, a delicious gluten-free option for somebody who can't eat gluten and really misses traditional cookies. This was a great inaugural recipe for this project. I get to share them with my friends and family. And hopefully over the course of this project, I'll get to share a lot more delicious food with my friends and family, especially my grandmother, who will be reading along with the blog posts. Grandma, when you read this, know the recipe turned out great! Thank you for passing the recipes on to me!