raiding the (not so) secret stash

This morning Liam and I had some uninterrupted time together, which hasn't happened much lately. When I asked him what he wanted to do, he suggested we cook something. We decided on our favorite oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. When it was time to add the chips, though, I realized we didn't have any. By this point, we were totally sold on the chocolate; raisins weren't going to cut it.

I started digging around in cabinets and found a Skor bar that had been in my Christmas stocking that I had hid (well!). This gave me an idea. Since Andrew and I both love good chocolate, I figured we might be able to find some remnants of a few bars in some of our hiding places. Liam suggested the coffee table drawers (okay, so we only think we have hiding places), where we dug up a few squares of dark chocloate (mine) and a few squares of milk chocolate with crisp rice (Andrew's). I found one third of a dark chocolate espresso bean bar on the top shelf of another cabinet and a couple Hershey's special dark squares in, um, the drawer of the bedside table. (Emergency stash.)

We chopped up all the bits and pieces and tossed them into the batter. It's probably no surprise, but they were the very best batch of "chocolate chip" cookies we've ever made.

Oatmeal Chocolate Bar Cookies

1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 tablespoons milk
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 cups oatmeal
a bunch of random bits of quality chocolate, chopped

Cream butter and sugars. Beat in eggs, vanilla and milk. Stir together flour, salt, soda and baking powder and gradually mix into butter mixture. Add oatmeal and chocolate. Drop tablespoons of batter on cookie sheet; bake at 350 for 11 minutes.