Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies ... with nuts!

Thanks to this lovely app I have on my iPhone, "Epicurious," I can browse thousands of recipes for any kind of food without having to flip through multiple cookbooks. I love it because most recipes are rated and reviewed, and by looking at the percentage of people who say they would make it again, along with the number of people who actually voted, you can easily determine which recipes are winners. With 91% of 79 people saying they would make this oatmeal chocolate chip cookie again, I figured the chance that the cookies would come out unsatisfying was small. Some reviews tell of their slight revisions of the recipe, but when I followed the exact instructions and used the exact ingredient amounts, they came out pretty much perfect. So here's me sharing this yummy recipe for ya'll!


"Chocolate Chip Cookies with Oatmeal and Pecans"


Ingredients
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 cup packed dark brown sugar
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons all purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 cups quick-cooking oats
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips (about 12 ounces)
1 cup chopped pecans


Preparation
Preheat oven to 350 F. Lightly grease 2 heavy large baking sheets. Beat butter and both sugars in large bowl until fluffy and well blended. Beat in eggs 1 at a time, the vanilla. Sift flour, baking soda, and salt over butter mixture and stir to blend. Mix in oats, the chocolate chips, and pecans.


Working in batches, drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls onto prepared sheets. Bake cookies until golden brown, about 14 minutes. Transfer cookies to racks and cool completely. (Can be prepared 1 week ahead. Store cookies airtight at room temperature.)


Bon Appetit, December 1996

Ok so I guess I kinda lied about changing the recipe. I normally don't have unsalted butter on hand, so I used the regular salted kind that we had, and left out the extra salt the recipe calls for. When using this technique I've never found my cookies to be too salty, so it must be working. Also, my brown sugar was not "dark brown" sugar, just regular ... brown ... sugar. And it worked fine. 

The cookies came out looking gorgeous, as you can see, and it really makes me appreciate the ice cream scooper I've started to use for baking. It truly does make nicely rounded cookies more efficiently and with less mess on your fingers. You know what I'm talking about - the thing where you squeeze the handle and it plops out the dough for you? Sometimes I'm wary of all the kitchen gadgetry on the shelves these days, but this nifty tool actually has some use.

I feel like I've been praising so many things in this one post! If you take anything away from it, I hope you either check out the Epicurious app, bake these awesome cookies, or even invest in a cookie dough scooper (find a good one at pampered chef). Otherwise I will at least have another well-made recipe documented for my own sake. Ha!