Yay! I was concerned, when we first planned our big move, that I wouldn’t be able to find all the ingredients. Flour, eggs, sugar, sure, sure, those are the easy ones. But I did have a hard time finding chocolate chips, and milk isn’t so easy to come by here in sleepy San Marcos (but that’s just for dunking). Butter, salt, baking powder, these were all pretty easy. The one thing I still haven’t gotten is vanilla.Nonetheless I whipped up my first batch of cookies, oatmeal raisin chocolate chip with pecans. The raisins are the size of your fist here! Not really. But at first I thought, “Uh oh, did I get prunes?” but no, they’re just really big, juicy delicious raisins. To find chocolate chips we went to the gringo store, Pana Super, in Panajachel. Gringo store, gringo prices (that means it was expensive). But they had a HUGE bag (6 cups) of Ghiradelli chocolate chips! I usually get milk chocolate and these were semisweet, but that’s fine. I need to start weaning myself onto dark chocolate - with the amount of chocolate I eat.
But I made some awesome cookies. I added peanut butter at the last minute and regretted it (I almost always do). I love the peanut butter flavor, but it changes the consistency too much. Makes them all crumbly, and that kind of makes my mouth pucker. It’s okay when they’re dunked in milk.
No recipe (I know it by heart by now anyway) and there weren’t any measuring cups, so I had to do my best with guesswork and how it feels in the palm of my hand. I like baking like that. Being as I’ve made cookies about a thousand times in my life, I know what the consistency should be like. It all started with the recipe on the Nestle Tollhouse bag, of all the cookie recipes I’ve ever used (and that’s a lot) – that one is THE ONE and it is forever imprinted on a gilded recipe card in my heart.
I always say I’m at home and comfortable so long as I can walk into my kitchen and make cookies any time I feel like it. So... I'm home.
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