Feb 4

Feb 4 Regression Therapy Oatmeal Cookies

As a child my mother made me cookies. Chocolate chip ones. Here’s all the nostalgic childhood sights and smells these pastries put in my brain. The buttered sugar scent of the big bowl of dough. The semi-rough grain of the wooden spoon when I licked the spoon at the end. That gummy, delicious, uncooked dough sticking to my teeth. Three baking sheets lined with perfect rows of dough balls. Staring into the oven window as they rise. Watching the clock for ten minutes until they were finally done. Five minutes of cooling on those stainless steel racks we never used for anything else. The cookies I ate, often a dozen a sitting. Dunked in whole milk, riding the edge of saturation before the milk-soaked cookie collapsed into my glass.

I now know the truth about these cookies. They were the cookies of appeasement. A forcefield of happy, glowing, TV-commercial memories to envelop my trauma, block it from my memory and leave me with cookies in their place. Or, perhaps in her wildest hopes, to not only block but substitute cookies for my real experiences. Erase the past and fill it with sugar, flour, and chocolate.

It almost worked. If not for psychotherapy I may never have remembered all the terrible things she did and said. Like when she told me we didn’t have enough money to buy an Optimus Prime action figure, and would have to settle for one of the cheaper, shittier Transformers like Seaspray or Ratchet. We had cookies that night. Or when she made me spend the weekend with my grandparents who always took me to church on Sundays and didn’t own any video games. Or when she had three glasses of wine with dinner on May 8th, 1993. I have so many cookie-coated repressions I can’t list them all here. I should and then force her to read this blog entry and admit what she’s done, but my therapist assures me that keeping the full list private (for now) is a better long-term strategy to overcoming my anguish.

Because of my negative associations with cookies I haven’t eaten one in over two years. I decided, with the help of my therapist (Dr. Greenleaf, if you live in Portland and fear you also had an abusive childhood your family may have forced you to repress), that I needed to reclaim cookies for myself. Yesterday I set about making some. In order to truly overcome my issues I couldn’t just make the cookies of my childhood, for fear that that nostalgia might force all these bad memories back into their recesses. I had to take what my mother tainted, that delicious factory-farmed Toll House nonsense, and imbue it with my contemporary self. Instead of plain milk chocolate chip cookies, I would make organic dark chocolate oatmeal cranberry pecan cookies.

My first attempt was a disaster. I took a recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction and they turned out like disgusting cake cookies. Not crispy. Too tall. They tasted like a bad muffin top. They looked nothing like the pictures on the website. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of my cookies and the ones Sally advertises:

Quite a difference aren’t they?

I can’t tell you how discouraging this was. I thought I’d found my cookie catharsis, but all I got was a dry mouth and yet another woman added to the list of people who have wronged me. So I spent 5 hours online researching the best ways to cook cookies. I thought for sure I found the formula. I made them. I have pictures below. They turned out like cookies. I ate them. They weren’t like my mother’s. They did nothing to overwhelm the nostalgia lurking in my heart. I want my mom’s cookies and I don’t care why she made them. I want to forget again. I’ll have to talk about this tomorrow in therapy.

Organic Dark Chocolate Oatmeal Cranberry Cookies:

Ingredients:

1/2 cup organic butter, softened to room temperature (most recipes recommend unsalted butter but I didn’t have any on hand and used salted butter and they turned out fine)
1/2 cup packed organic dark brown sugar
2 tablespoons organic granulated sugar
1 organic large egg, at room temperature
1/2 Tablespoon pure organic vanilla extract
1/2 Tablespoon organic molasses
3/4 cup organic all-purpose flour (leveled)
1/2 teaspoon organic baking soda
1/2 teaspoon organic baking powder
1/2 teaspoon organic ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon organic salt (halve this if you use salted butter)
1.5 cups organic whole rolled oats
1/2 cup organic dark chocolate chunks (or a bar roughly chopped)
1/2 cup organic dried cranberries
1/2 cup organic pecans (roughly chopped)

With a hand mixer (or stand mixer if you’re fancy) cream the softened butter and both sugars together on medium speed until smooth, about 2 minutes. Add the eggs and mix on high until combined (about a minute).

Add the vanilla and molasses and mix on high until combined. Set aside.

In a separate bowl whisk the flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt together. Add to the wet ingredients and mix on low until combined.

Beat in the oats, chocolate, cranberries, and pecans on low speed.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line two large baking sheets with parchment paper.

Use a tablespoon to dollop dough on the baking sheets, roughly eight cookies per tray. This recipe makes about 16 cookies if sized properly (and if you resist the temptation to eat a lot of raw dough, something I can never do).