A balanced diet is an OATMEAL CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE in each hand.
Posted by Cat Messman on Friday, May 6, 2011
Over the past 7 months as an AmeriCorps volunteer with Cooking Matters Los Angeles, I have become smitten with quite a few Cooking Matters recipes and have even gone so far as to make them at home and text pictures of my handiwork to our program coordinator, Catherine Luu*. Tortilla Lasagna, Mini Pizzas, Mango Salsa with Homemade Tortilla Chips—to name a few. However, there is one recipe in particular that will always bring back vivid memories from various classes: Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies.
My love of this recipe is two-fold. First, I love dark chocolate which is, conveniently, the “healthy” chocolate and, therefore, typically one of the optional ingredients used in the cookies we bake in class. Second, this is a recipe reserved for our graduation classes—a celebration of the successes of our participants and, of course, always a fun class with memorable moments, such as in one of our kids classes, pictured at right.
The first time I made this recipe was in our Cooking Matters for Adults graduation class at Prototypes, a unique agency that provides residential and out-patient treatment for a variety of conditions or situations such as alcohol abuse, drug addiction, mental illness, and domestic violence. Jeanetta, a mother of two in her late 20s, volunteered to make the cookies with a couple of other eager participants and Catherine, who was leading the cookie group. A couple of ladies in the class were diabetic so we decided in advance to substitute applesauce for the granulated sugar called for in the recipe. Jeanetta and the cookie crew implemented the changes to the recipe, combined the ingredients in a large bowl, and prepped the cookie dough without hesitation. It was time to form the dough into balls to be put on the baking sheet.
Jeanetta began putting unusually large mounds of un-formed cookie dough on the baking sheet without leaving enough room between the mounds. If someone had asked me what she was doing, I would have been inclined to say that she was deliberately trying to create one large “cookie cake”. There was a brief exchange of puzzled looks with Catherine, wondering what on Earth Jeanetta was doing, and Jeanetta, wondering why Catherine wasn’t explaining what she needed to do. After asking Jeanetta about her mysterious method, we discovered that she had never baked cookies before. I was stunned, partly by the realization that she had never baked cookies but also because, without even realizing it, we had all assumed that Jeanetta knew how to make cookies. After a few verbal instructions and watching Catherine model how to form the cookie dough and where to place it on the sheet, Jeanetta was back on track. I am happy to say that, in addition to our other class accomplishments, Jeanetta successfully learned how to make cookies in our last class—and DELICIOUS cookies at that. The only difficulty with the Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies that day was encouraging portion control after they came out of the oven!
In fact, the cookies were such a fantastic success that they were soon after featured by Chef Barbie, our Prototypes Chef Instructor, and Catherine Luu in the “Fab Food” webisode, below.
*There are two Catherines at Cooking Matters LA—I am not actually talking about myself in the 3rd person!
Download the recipe for Chunky Oatmeal Cookies here.
May 6, 2011 | 2 comment(s) | Tags: AmeriCorps, Cooking Matters
Comments
2 reader comments so far.
I LOVE this! Not only the charming story about cookie-making, and the ease with which sugar can be replaced w/ applesauce, but the grace and humor with which you relate what could have been a most embarrassing and perhaps contentious moment of discovery! How easy it is for each of us to assume that the everyone else has enjoyed the same seemingly "baseline" experiences of growing up in America. These discoveries enrich and inform our service, even as they shock us into deeper understanding of why childhood hunger --indeed, hunger--is so often invisible in our country, so rich with resources.
Thanks for sharing. Now, where can I find that recipe?
Posted by Cate on May 6, 2011
Yes, please, where can I find that recipe?
Posted by Linda Miller-Smith on May 9, 2011
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