Cowboy Cookies with Peanut Butter Chips

Ninth grade was a time of transition. I never have been good at transition. In middle school – sixth through eight grades – I was profoundly awkward. Now, every supermodel and high functioning grown-up will insist that she was a gawky tween, and I’m sure this is true in their hearts. But I really was an adolescent mess: Sally Jesse glasses. A bad perm, which is just redundant. Sprayed up bangs. Pimples. Too smart to be cool, and too self-conscious to be completely invested in schoolwork. In my seventh grade class photo, I wore a paisley vest from J.C. Penny over a puffy white shirt. Sometimes, classmates would leave dog treats under my chair and throw things at me on the bus. I had a lot of stomach aches those years.

But I also was a dancer and cheerleader and made my friends crack up with silly impressions and the ability to coin new words. I discovered a wicked gift for mean girlishness, because I could suss out exactly what was odd about our rivals. I was the one who ghost wrote the notes and drafted the petitions we circulated. I spread gossip and exaggerated the truth. It was self-preservation, I rationalized. We were all just trying to survive. The boys I liked never noticed me. I cheered for them from the basketball sidelines and slow danced all seventy-four minutes of Stairway to Heaven with the kid who lived in the motel next to Stop ‘n Shop because I felt sorry for him. And when the lights came up in the gymnasium, he walked back to his friends and made barking noises as I slipped into my turquoise windbreaker and went out to look for my mom’s Caravan.

The fall of ’92 arrived, and so did I. Taller and well-proportioned, with better skin and contact lenses. A classic ugly duckling story. But I didn’t feel like fitting in. I couldn’t understand why the older boys who used to tease me suddenly wanted to take me out. Cliques were torn apart, as classes were stratified by level. We sorted and resorted our social alliances, and started reading Dante in English. “Abandon all hope ye who enter here,” was written over my homeroom door. Freshman year was circles of Hell even more confusing than the purgatory of terrible middle school. I took my lunch alone in the last rows of the auditorium, where I could think and cry and read. Every day I had a bottle of water, because I was on a diet, and a package of three crispy chocolate chip cookies, because I was sad. Such is the logic of a 13-year-old.

Fall always makes me think of that period of flux, when innocence to experience happened overnight. It’s been twenty years since I was that crying girl. I wish I could time travel back and give her a hug and these homemade cookies, instead of the crummy ones I bought from the school cafeteria. I’d tell her that transition never gets any easier, but never to give up hope, which is an infinite resource that never diminishes, like the Hanukkah oil or Everlasting Gobstoppers. Gah, what a bummer of a story for a Friday. Sorry.Yay weekend! Make cookies! These are awesome and packed full of chunks and chocolate and oatmeal and nuts and are so, so good with coffee.

Cowboy Cookies with Peanut Butter Chips
Adapted from a recipe by Laura Bush

Ingredients:

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking soda
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
• 1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 tablespoon vanilla
• 3 cups old fashioned rolled oats
• 2 cups chopped pecans
• 1 1/2 cups peanut butter chips
• 1 1/2 cups chocolate chips
• 1 cup shaved bittersweet chocolate

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt. In the bowl of a stand mixer beat butter until smooth and creamy, about 2 minutes. Gradually beat in sugars, eggs, one at a time, and vanilla. Slowly incorporate dry ingredients. With a wooden spoon or rubber spatula fold in oats, pecans, chips, and chocolate. Drop onto a cookie sheet and bake 12-15 minutes. Let cookies cool on the cookie sheet.

Tagged as: chocolate, cookies, nuts, peanut butter

About the Author: Jillian Bedell

Jillian grew up in Connecticut, went to university in Boston, college in New Haven, did some post-grad soul searching in New York, exiled herself to Mexico, married her longtime sweetheart, and lived in a house on the ocean. She suspected Maine might be the perfect place to raise a family, so she came back home to New England two years ago. Now a mom to Violet Maeve and living in Rockland, where she hopes to settle for a good, long while, Jillian reads, writes, walks, and practices Nia, when not watching Malcolm photograph sandwiches.