Really Good Soft & Chewy Granola Cookies

 

Can’t say much more than the title. There are good cookies and there are “really” good cookies, so good that you’ll allow yourself to half a dozen in one sitting. The type of cookies that allow yourself to indulge in eating pleasures without any post-guilt feelings are worth having in your recipe box. And hopefully, you’ll agree that these cookies deserve to be on that list.

Our continuous quest to find great cookies recipes that have both great texture, flavor and unique qualities is never ending. Often times we’ll search for cookie recipes with high hopes to be blown away by their taste. But sometimes we’ll just be satisfied but not over thrilled. Even a mediocre cookie can be good. Don’t get us wrong, we’re not cookie snobs (hopefully, not) but it’s nice to have your baking efforts rewarded with really great cookies.

These granola cookies came across our radar by chance, thanks to a past shoot we did for Food and Wine. The shoot had many savory dishes, but luckily we had two desserts to style and shoot, one of which were these granola cookies.

Normally during a food shoot, our jobs are not to recipe test. The client sends us finished recipes and we just cook them, style and shoot. So when these granola cookies first came out of the oven, they immediately went to set for the shot. Afterwards, they were shuffled to the side while we continued with the next shot. During break, we grabbed one of the cookies for a quick snack and were all amazed at how wonderful they were!

These cookies are soft and chewy oatmeal cookies with a slightly crispy edge, but with so much more texture and flavor. We’ve made many batches of these cookies and shared them with so many folks. Everyone who has them them fell in love instantly. The original Food and Wine recipe had dried apricots and pecans. But we added more flavors that we love finding in granola: combination of mixed, toasted nuts, different dried fruit, and peanut butter chips.

These are now one more cookie that we now always have to keep the dough on hand in the freezer, part of our emergency cookie craving stash. These cookies along with our snickerdoodles and the chocolate chunk cookies are now required to be on hand at all times. Or at least one or two of them until we can replenish the stash.

Enjoy!

-diane and todd

Many of you have asked how Sierra has been doing since her surgery. Thanks for all the sweet messages and queries. Since her surgery for her torn ACL, she’s been resting and finally gaining some strength back. But it’s 8 weeks of healing so we’re taking it slowly, one day at a time!

And this weekend we were gardening with fierce excitement. We built some new planters for our blueberry plants, harvested a ton of spinach, implemented two new trellis for grape vines and planted 10 heirloom tomatoes. Whew! What a satisfying week. Thus, we rewarded ourselves again with these really good granola cookies!

Yield: 40 Cookies

Total Time: 45 min

Adapted from Food and Wine. These are a wonderfully soft and chewy cookies with slightly crisp edges. We macerate the dried fruit in rum, but if that isn't to your taste, feel free to add the fruit directly into the batter without soaking them. Experiment with your favorite nuts in the recipe as well to find what you like best. This dough freezes very well. We will roll or scoop them into balls, then freeze in freezer bags until ready to bake. For thawing, we will just take out the ones we are going to bake when we first turn on the oven and start it to preheat. By the time the oven is to temperature, the cookies have thawed enough.

1/2 cup (65g) dried Apricots, cut into 1/2" pieces1/2 cup (70g) dried CurrantsRum or Kahlua, enough to cover the dried fruit1/2 cup (50g) Pecans1/2 cup (70g) raw Almonds1 1/4 cups (155g) Flour1 teaspoon (5g) Baking Soda1/2 teaspoon (3g) Kosher or Sea Salt2 cups (180g) Old-Fashioned Oats3/4 cup (170g) unsalted Butter, at room temperature1 1/4 cups (275g) packed Brown Sugar2 Eggs1 teaspoon (5ml) Vanilla Extract3/4 cup (125g) dark Chocolate Chips3/4 cup (125g) Peanut Butter ChipsPreheat the oven to 350°F. Soak the dried fruit in a bowl with enough alcohol to just cover them.Put the nuts on a sheet pan and bake for 8-10 minutes, or until aromatic and toasty. Let the cool for a bit, then coarsely chop.In a bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt. Stir in the oats. Set aside.In a mixer, beat the butter and brown sugar until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Mix in the eggs and vanilla extract, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary.Stir in the oat mixture until nearly combined. With a large spatula or wooden spoon, stir in the chopped nuts and the chocolate and peanut butter chips. Drain the dried fruit and stir them into the batter.Scoop heaping tablespoons full of the dough on parchment lined sheet pans, placing them about 1 1/2" apart. Bake for 14-16 minutes, or until the cookies are lightly browned. Let them cool on the sheet pans for a few minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling.

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When it rains it really, really pours

You'd think that having gone through major surgery, radiation therapy, a burglary, my father's death, and all that kind of thing, my life would be so much easier by now.

But, noooo. It's actually sort of worse. It's now the Attack Of The House.

My kitchen is still in flatpack boxes. The Guy has been sanding and painting the walls, and got the undercoat up, and was getting ready to paint. The cabinets were supposed to go up over the weekend, with the countertop guy coming to measure on Monday, but that's been delayed because...suddenly, all the stuff that we had in storage in Switzerland is being delivered on Monday - because the next possible day would be like a few months from now or something. (We put everything from our old house in storage and became nomads for about a year before finding our current house.) That's a couple of hundred boxes worth of stuff (we didn't keep most of our furniture, thank goodness).

We have to frantically organize stuff here so we have enough room to put the boxes. Then, The Guy has to go back to the kitchen and get the cabs up, while I try to organize the stuff that came from Switzerland.

Did I mention that the rest of the house is also still unpainted, and that our absent construction guy comes back next week to resume work half-undone? We still have to go and pick up the paint tomorrow.

And my surgery wound still hasn't closed, and I'm still feeling so tired all the time?

And my eyes are really, really bothering me? (Nothing wrong with them except apparently some side effects of all the illnesses I've been having, plus I finally seem to be needing reading glasses. Ugh.)

The only 'cooking' I've been doing is boiling water for tea and making ramen and stuff. The Guy has continued to gamely try to make dinner and things (mainly pasta) with one rickety hotplate and a tiny toaster oven, and doing dishes in the bathroom sink (still our only water source) but I think for the next few days we are doing fast food. (Which tends to make me feel really awful, but it'll only be for a few days....hopefully.)

So, all kinds of h*ll and sh*t and other four-letter words are breaking out at the moment. Please bear with me and my lack of updates, yet again. Maybe one day I'll get to experience 'normal life' again. -_0

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Many-flavored Japanese Kit Kats: not really

I am a major proponent of all kinds of Japanese food, from the highest of haute cuisine from Kyoto ryotei to the humble fare available at a konbini (convenience store). Over the years, I've tried to introduce you all to all kinds of Japanese flavors on these pages, from the traditional to the new.

One great thing about Japan for food lovers that you can get interesting and tasty things to eat at all price levels. For instance, here in France you can of course get terrific food at the high end, and pretty good food in the mid-end. Some staples, like bread, are usually terrific. But mass-produced supermarket-level stuff tends to get very iffy. Japan has its share of supermarkets and convenience stores and icky mass-produced food too of course, but you can still get a lot of great things at the lower end of the price spectrum.

Japanese candy tends to taste really good, at least to me. Everytime I'm back in Japan, I stock up on my favorites and try some new things. My secret forbidden stash of candy is about 90% Japanese*. The Japanese market tends to be quite adventurous when it comes to rather unusual flavors, so you get things like rose-flavored gum and hard candy that tastes like beef, not to mention cherry-blossom flavored ice cream (in the spring) or sweet potato flavored puddings. All a lot of fun.

Which brings me to the Japanese candy product with unusual flavors that gets the most attention overseas: flavored Kit Kats. I suppose they get so much attention mainly because they're an international brand (originally produced by Rowntree's in the UK, now owned by international confectionery behemouth Nestlé). Business publications in particular seem to be fascinated by them; when NPR did a story about them, it was by focusing on the business and marketing aspects (though the accompanying story has the staff sampling various Kit Kat flavors). They're one of the things that a lot of people interested in Things Japanese (especially the anime and manga set) seem to want to try.

If you can't make it to Japan, you can buy flavored Kit Kats from various mailorder places that sell Japanese products - at a premium of course. But, are they worth it?

Well, no. Flavored Kit Kats are really all about the novelty value, and the packaging, and the strange urge that takes over some people to Collect Stuff.

Let's look at one of the more fun flavored Kit Kats that came out last year. The box is shaped like Fuji-san (Mount Fuji), the most iconic mountain (actually an active volcano) in Japan. This was a special limited edition that was only available for sale in the areas around Mt. Fuji, namely Hakone. If I recall correctly, it costs a whopping 800 yen. But it was so cute I couldn't resist.

The packaging proclaimed that the Kit Kats within were Blueberry Cheesecake flavored. Now, having tried other flavored Kit Kats in the past I was quite skeptical. Still...who could resist that packaging? Inside the volcano, I mean, box, were 9 mini-sized Kit Kats.

Here's how most flavored Kit Kats look. The base for these flavored offerings is usually white chocolate, since it's more neutral than milk or dark chocolate. The white chocolate is sometimes dyed to match the purported flavor (green for matcha tea, yellow for banana, etc.) but in this case they didn't dye the Blueberry Cheesecake Kit Kits blue. Phew.

So...how do they taste? To be frank, disgusting. And that's really not surprising, if you think about it. Flavored Kit Kats are based on cheap, nasty white chocolate, with cheap, nasty artificial flavors and colorings**. With the constant pressure (I presume) to produce new flavors, the quality control may not be quite there. Plus, most of these flavored Kit Kats are limited-editions, so if people are particularly grossed out by a particular flavor no problem - it's just not made any more.

There's a whole market in Japan for something called shokugan, which means "food toys". Shokugan aren't edible toys, or toys shaped like food (necessarily) - it means the extra thing that you get with food. The 'surprise' in a box of Crackerjacks or a box of kids' cereal is a shokugan. In some cases, the surprise itself has become so major that the candy is an afterthought. The Re-ment company, for example, makes very detailed shokugan toys and other things, that come with a nominal piece of candy or gum. (Previous Re-Ment.) Clearly the draw is not the edible part, but the shokugan.

In a way, flavored Kit Kats are bordering on shokugan - they're sheer novelty items. If you expect them to taste good, be forewarned that they emphatically they don't. Of course, they do make great gag gifts for the folks back home, especially if the are not food people per se.

[* I especially stock up on yummy anti-sore throat candy in Japan, which comes in flavors like yuzu and umeboshi with shiso. However, my favorite sore-throat candy is Ricola's Elderflower (Holunderblüten in German; fleurs de sureau in French) flavor, which also has the advantage of being sugar-free.]

[** I'm not a total anti-white chocolate person. In the summer months, several chocolate makers in Switzerland - including Nestlé - make delicious fruit or spice flavored white chocolate bars. But then the chocolate they're using, and the flavorings, are on another level, though the bars themselves are not expensive.]

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