Karma Kookies
my 40-year chocolate chip cookie recipe
Even if, in a given moment, we cannot touch deep well-being, perhaps we can increase our happiness by five or ten percent.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
Karma and Kookie
In an unpublished essay entitled “The Cookie vs the Long Winter,” I talked about care of self and others using the lens of chocolate chip cookies. The cookies you get brought when you’re in a bad way, the cookies you bring others when they’re in a bad way, and the cookies you tinker with over forty years, including times when they are the only thing you can reliably improve about your life.
The search for the “perfect” cookie is just code for the recipe that starts out good and then, through trial and error, gets better, then a little better still, and then even…. It’s Thich Nhat Hanh’s 5-10% happiness upgrade. That’s why I’ve called them Karma Kookies. I don’t believe in karma in the cosmic justice sense, Hitler getting reborn as a cockroach and so forth. Karma for me is the practical everyday fact of each moment being born from all the moments before it, like the ripples that both come from a pond and create a new pond. If you can send out ripples that are 5% more beneficent, that’s good karma.
And as to “kookies”—how could a certain history avoid that pun?
I began with the Toll House cookie recipe, some version of which everyone knows. Job 1 was to reduce the sugar. Sugar is what I mostly taste with every kind of cookie, and a sugar rush is the last thing my already-prone-to-speeding brain needs. Down it went, in stages, from the cup the recipe called for, to 3/4 cup, then 2/3, then 1/2, then 1/4—finally, down to the 2 tbsp you see below. They are still plenty sweet, courtesy of the mashed bananas and the extra-large serving of chocolate chips. The forward tastes are chocolate and peanut butter and banana, not Redpath. The peanut butter was another early move, borrowing an element from another classic cookie.
Other experiments followed. Types of flour, in various ratios—whole wheat, cake & pastry, spelt, almond, coconut. Almond extract instead of vanilla. Almond-vanilla combos. Rolled oats soaked in hot water instead of quick-cook. Various kinds of nuts, in various proportions. Other additives: coconut (flaked or shredded), raisins, dried cranberries. Yogurt, honey, molasses, maple syrup. Different baking times. …. Most of these trials had something to recommend them, even if I later decided to go another route. They might suggest starting points for your own adjustments.
A good friend recently joined me for dinner and asked for the recipe of the cookies I served for dessert.
Here they are—for her, or anyone.
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Karma Kookies
2/3 cup butter
2 large dollops unsweetened peanut butter
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 cup flour
1/2 cup quick-cook oats
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1-2 ripe bananas
1 egg
1½ tsp vanilla
1½ cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
Optional: nuts (peanuts, walnuts, pecans), either whole or ground into bits
In mixing bowl blend well softened butter and peanut butter.
Blend in brown sugar.
If possible, let the butter soften several hours so it blends well with the peanut butter. Maybe this doesn’t matter so much if you’re using a blender, but I mix everything by hand. I use all-natural peanut butter. I grew up on Skippy and Jif, both heavily sweetened; but now I would not dream of smothering the noble peanut with sugar.
3. Add dry ingredients, mixing well.
Sometimes I bump up the quick-cook oats to 2/3 cup. I like the extra texture they give. I stir the dry ingredients together well with a fork before adding them. Tasting tiny pockets of trapped baking soda taught me this.
4. In separate bowl mash bananas, stir beaten egg into them, add vanilla; blend well and mix into batter.
I use the measuring cup instead of dirtying a new bowl. I like washing dishes and was once employed as a dishwasher for two years, but there’s no reason to make the pile bigger than it needs to be. One banana works fine, but these days I usually bump it up to 2.
5. Add chocolate chips (and nuts if desired), mixing well.
I’ll confess I sometimes bump up the chipits to nearly 2 cups, close to double what the original Toll House calls for. Good quality chipits really help and are worth paying a little more for. When I ran out recently and had to buy a cheaper brand, it was a noticeable downgrade. I’ve thrown in other kinds of chocolate too at times, such as Baker’s Pure Unsweetened in small chunks and shavings to up the chocolate quotient. With a softer nut, like the pecans used here, I use a rolling pin to break them up in a bag so you have a mix of pecan bits and pecan dust which disperses for a nice nutty undertaste throughout.
6. Bake on cookie sheet with parchment paper in 375° oven for 10 min. Remove while still soft. Let settle for a few minutes, then cool on rack.
7. Adjust this recipe to taste, and enjoy!
These cookies freeze well. In fact, to keep myself to my allotted 2 per evening, I take out 2 at a time to thaw on a plate for an hour or so. The cookie jar is a lovely concept, but I learned the hard way that I am unable to handle that level of responsibility. For the same reason, I have not owned a TV in 20 years. I can’t trust myself with a constantly refilled jar of visual cookies.
