Cookbookaholic

My Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe: Bourbonated Chocolate Chip Cookies with Maple, Oatmeal and Pecans

Bourbonated Chocolate Chip Cookies with Maple, Oatmeal and Pecans 

by Angela Snider

1 ½ Cup all-purpose flour

½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

2 sticks of butter, softened

¾ cup lightly packed brown sugar

1/3 cup granulated sugar

1 tsp vanilla butter nut flavor

1 large egg

2 Tbsp whole milk

1 Tbsp Pappy & Company Bourbon Barrel-Aged Pure Maple Syrup

23 oz bag milk chocolate chips

3 maple & brown sugar instant oatmeal packets (sifted, only use the oats; discard the filler)

½ cup pecans, chipped

In a bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Set aside.

Cream the butter in a mixer on medium/high speed. Add in brown sugar, granulated sugar, vanilla/butter/nut extract. Mix on medium until creamy.

Add in egg.

Add in a portion of the flour mixture, about a fourth.

Add in 1 Tbsp of whole milk

Add in another portion of the flour mixture.

Add in the tablespoon of bourbon barrel-aged maple syrup.

Add in another portion of the flour mixture.

Add in the last tablespoon of whole milk.

Add in the last of the flour to the mix.

Remove the bowl from the mixer, scrape down the sides and fully mix together with a spatula.

Gently stir in the oatmeal, chipped pecans and milk chocolate chips.

Refrigerate the mixing bowl of cookie dough while oven preheats.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Using a small ice cream/cookie dough scoop with a 1 ½ inch in diameter, place rounded dough on to baking sheets lined with parchment paper.

Be sure to return the bowl of dough to the refrigerator while a set of cookies bakes in the oven. 

Bake for 10 minutes, until the edges begin to brown. (If using a larger amount of dough per cookie, increase baking time up to 13 minutes)

Remove from oven and allow the cookies to rest on the baking sheets until firm enough to move to a wire rack (about 2 minutes) and then allow cookies to cool completely. Something magical happens if you wait and try them the next day. They’re absolutely addictive and beyond delicious…

Using the 1 ½ inch cookie dough scooper, this recipe makes approximately 5 dozen small cookies.

Quarantine Banana Bread

Everyone’s baking banana bread during this Covid-19 Quarantine.

Do I happen to have a Banana Bread recipe? Of course I do!

You’re welcome.

Quarantine Banana Bread Recipe

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Prep a loaf pan with butter/flour or comparable spray. I use Baker’s Joy.

 

Ingredients

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened

1 Cup of lightly packed light brown sugar

1 Tbls granulated sugar

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

 

2 large eggs, beaten

3 ripe bananas, smooshed

 

1 ½ Cup of All-Purpose Flour

1 tsp. baking soda

½ tsp salt

1 tsp Cruzan Blackstrap rum

¼ cup of chopped pecans, optional

Directions:

With a mixer, cream the butter on medium speed. Then add in the sugars and cinnamon. Mix on medium until blended.

Add in beaten eggs and bananas.

Slow the mixer to medium-low

Add the flour mixture in small increments, until completely mixed.

(Be sure to periodically stop and scrape down the sides of the bowl.)

With the mixer still on low, add in the rum.

Remove bowl from mixing stand and fold in pecans.

Pour the batter into the prepped loaf pan.

Bake for 55 minutes at 350 degrees.

After 45 minutes of baking, cover loaf pan with aluminum foil to prevent overcooked edges.

Continue baking for the remaining 10 minutes.

Remove from oven, let stand for a few minutes. Turn baked loaf onto a cooling rack to cool completely.

Slice and serve.

This is an excellent breakfast when sliced, toasted and topped with peanut butter.

 

Birthday from the Boss

I may have mentioned a couple of times that the new boss has been great. 

By the time my birthday rolled around last year, she’d only been there a few months. Which made it so impressive that she gifted these two cookbooks to me:

Make It! Take It from Taste of Home and 201 Recipes You’ll Make Forever from Taste of Home. 

Nice!

Secluded Friday Sale

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been to an estate sale. But the new boss is great and I’m working from home on this Friday. I have my eye on this one sale that is pretty early in the morning; so, if I can get in and out with some great finds, then it’ll be a great way to start the day.

This sale, which mentioned cookbooks in the description, is on the south side of Charlotte. As I drive into the neighborhood, it becomes more and more secluded. It’s definitely an older neighborhood because the homes aren’t right next to each other. I even saw deer on the side of the road!

I’m there extra early but there are already a few cars there. I list my name on the sign in sheet and if the line gets longer, I should still be able to get inside with the first group.

I head back to my car to wait until it’s time to line up and go inside. As I’m walking, I really take in the scenery. It’s hard to believe that I’m in south Charlotte. The entrance to this neighborhood is near a busy road and yet I feel like I’m in the mountains.

There’s even a deer that jumps over the fence to walk around the yard in front of me. Whoa…

When the sale finally starts, I get inside the house and I find the cookbooks up some really, awkwardly steep steps. I find a ton...of really, really amazing cookbooks. This is really exciting!

There are so many that I have to grab one of those linen organizing “boxes” to help contain my haul.

Now, here’s the hard part. Now, I’ve got to get a very tall and heavy stack of cookbooks back down the awkwardly steep steps. And I’m not confident that I can lift the stack and get them down the stairs without hurting my back and/or tumbling head over feet.

There’s a gentleman sitting in a chair near the top of the stairs. I ask if he can watch my stack while I take them downstairs in smaller, more manageable handfulls. He says yes and as I make my way to the bottom floor, there’s an older gentleman (his dad, maybe?) who asks if he can help. That’s exactly what I needed!

I hand him the first stack and ask him to start a stack on the checkout table because I’ll be bringing out more cookbooks. I open the door for him and then I’m back up the steep stairs for the next batch. Then, I’m able to grab the last stack in the linen box and head outside.

After adding up all the cookbooks, I get a discounted rate for my “bulk” buy. That was great, because it gives me a little left over.

Back in the car, I’m ready to head home, start my workday and wrap up my week. What a great way to start the day…I actually feel recharged!

The White House Cook Book

Got a new addition to the collection: The White House Cook Book.

It was written/compiled by Mrs. F.L. Gillette and Hugo Ziemman. She was a seasoned cook and Ziemman served in the White House as a chef. It’s a very thick book with about 500 or so recipes, cooking techniques, household cleaning tips, etiquette as well as recipes from some First Ladies of the time. 

It’s very comprehensive and, even though it’s as thick as an encyclopedia, it became a hot seller. Which is why it’s interesting to me that these are considered so “rare” and hard to find. A lot of people had a copy of this one back in the day.

Having said that: online, these tend to be a bit pricey; but, the closer you get to an original printing, the better.

I’ve been at an estate sale when someone has asked if a White House cookbook was available. (It wasn’t.) 

So I’ve never really had an interest in getting one, unless it was a) Old and b) cheap.

Not too long ago, I came across on online auction that had one. It didn’t have a lot of info. The seller just had a picture of it in his hand and just a quick note that it was an interesting old cookbook. Oh, and that he’d be willing to ship it.

This seemed like an out-of-the-way auction so I registered for the sale, saved the info and went back to it as the lot went up for sale. The opening bid was $20 and I ended up getting some competition. But after a slight bidding war, I ended up winning it for a little over $30.

Now, getting it shipped was another story. The auctioneer dropped off about two tons of items at the shipping company and it took them a little over a week to get in touch with me. They shipped it to me via Media Mail (thank you USPS for an affordable shipping option!)

About a week later, it finally arrived!

It’s definitely old, nice to learn that this is a third printing from 1899.

And look at this page with names of the previous owners written on it. What lovely handwriting!

Elizabeth Irene Dollenger and Blanche T. Chaney? Charrey?

ReStore with Dunc

A few months back, Dunc was home for a break and wanted to hit the thrift stores and look for a bookshelf to help better organize his game room. Since he was looking for furniture, I suggested we drive up to Mooresville and check out the ReStore.

When we made it inside, I took a quick side trip over to their book section. Over in the corner, I found some nice selections of cookbooks:

SLAR: 2008, The Cake Bible (Rose Levy Beranbaum), Cooking Up a Storm (edited by Marcelle Bienvenu and Judy Walker), Burgers & Sliders (Miranda Ballard) and Pecans (a Savor the South cookbook by Kathleen Purvis).

I remember Cooking Up a Storm from way back at the beginning of my blog. The two editors compiled recipes that residents had been searching for in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Amazing! 

And I’m thrilled to finally get Pecans from local food author, Kathleen Purvis. I think she also wrote a book on bourbon…need to look for that one next.

And when Dunc and I got to looking for his bookshelf, we ended up with a great wood bookshelf with a cabinet on the bottom (to hide the printer) as well as two super skinny bookshelves to showcase his collection of Funko Pops. The downside? For the cookbooks, no downside—they fit nicely in the floorboard of the back seat. For me and Dunc? All three bookshelves are tall—which means they maxxed out the back of my SUV plus a few more inches. And it was quite a site to see me driving back home on 77 South with about 5 inches between me and the steering wheel! That was tight!

Porch Pick Up

I haven’t been hitting the yard sales like I used to a few years ago. Lately, I’ve been browsing the cookbooks that are listed on Facebook Marketplace.  

If you can get to the seller first, that’s the challenge. I’ve lost out on a few because I wasn’t the first to reach out!

Anyways, I found Garden & Gun magazine’s The Southerner’s Cookbook and was lucky enough to be the first to ping the seller. I paid through the Marketplace app (how convenient!) and set out for a long drive down to Rock Hill.  And then imagine driving to the last house…on the last street…in a long and winding neighborhood. Honestly, I needed the GPS to get me back out of the development…

Check out the cover! That's foil...somebody paid some insane money for that snazzy look.

Diana Kennedy Cookbooks

Recently, I read an article about cookbook author Diana Kennedy. In the piece, it discussed how she had decided to donate all of the hand-written notebooks she used as she learned about the Mexican cuisine and its varied techniques.

Apparently, she spent decades travelling through Mexico learning about the dishes by reading old cookbooks (see, she gets it) as well as learning one-on-one from helpful cooks across the country. She was able to capture the different shifts that dishes, ingredients and techniques took from region to region across Mexico. She had several notebooks that she used as foundations for the many cookbooks she’s written. 

Her work in Mexican cuisine…let me back up to say her work in bringing authentic Mexican cuisine to an audience was groundbreaking and encyclopedic.  

I just hope that the team that now holds her notebooks take great care of them! What an amazing legacy to have. It’s so forward-thinking of her to pass them along now. I bet it was an amazingly hard thing to do.

Anyways, that article inspired me to start looking around to start getting a few Diana Kennedy cookbooks for my collection. Here are the first two:

The Cuisines of Mexico. No dust cover…boo.

The Tortilla Book. Paperback, but I definitely would like to find it in a hardback!

There are more of her cookbooks out there, but I thought these two were the first ones and good ones to get.

Up-Country

I forget how I came across The Carolina Up-Country Cook Book. I’ve been searching for an affordable copy for a while now.

Sure, there are several available on amazon. But, I just didn’t want to pay the higher prices these sellers listed. Plus, if at all possible, I’d like a first edition/first printing; and a couple of the sellers had their copies listed as third editions. 

This one popped up on eBay a little while ago while I was doing a search and I snapped it up. Turns out that it’s a first printing from 1961!

The cover is really unique with the greenish grey and the patch of red showing the Christ Church of Greenville insignia.

And now that brings us to the title: The Carolina Up-Country Cook Book. Up-Country?

Being from South Carolina, I don’t recall the upper portion of the state being called anything other than The Piedmont. But, I guess if you’re coming up the road from Charleston, then Greenville would be up-country….

The intro talks about how this particular congregation became a melting pot ranging from a descendant of John Rutledge as well as other Charlestonians and “Low-Countrymen of English Ancestry,” to a New Englander, Virginian, Mississippian, and the de Choiseuls, of the French nobility (of course!).

And as a cookbook of a certain period of time, it doesn’t disappoint with recipes for Tuna Mold, Congealed Corn Beef Salad (note from the recipe: “This is a man’s congealed salad.”) and one Jellied Asparagus Salad…

Etsy Finds?

Etsy?

Yep, I’ve been able to uncover a couple of interesting finds on Etsy of all places. 

Sure, I’ve also found a floral display for the front door, monogrammed shirts, and shaving kits for the boys—but this has become an unexpected resource for cookbooks.

Found this Moravian cookbook and even though it’s from outside of North Carolina…I found it at a very reasonable price:

“Served with Grace” from the Graceham Moravian Church in Graceham, Maryland. 

Then I found “A Dame’s Cookbook” by Chick Anderson.

The person selling it was a neighbor of Mrs. Anderson and was able to find and purchase a box of them during an estate sale. This book is from 1973 and is in perfect condition. Now, I did end up paying more than I usually would for a cookbook. Just after I made the purchase, I found much more affordable options on ebay…