Oatmeal isn't health food in this house.

One of my favorite, simple, everyday cookie recipes is an adaptation from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters, one of my regular kitchen references that I highly recommend. The recipe is her Oatmeal Currant Cookies, a grainy, crispy cookie with, I imagine, chewy, wet currants to set off the texture. Probably. But I've never actually made the recipe as it's set down on paper - partly because I've never had dried currants around, and partly because the minute I made it with semisweet/bittersweet chocolate chips (just no milk chocolate please) in place of the currants I realized that I'd found the ideal oatmeal chocolate chip cookie.

 

The trick to getting that oatmeal flavor without the chewy, dense chunks of oatmeal that so many people (although not me!) eschew is simple: Waters puts the oats in a blender to make a grainy oat flour.

But that isn't the only think that makes these cookies the perfect vehicle for chocolate chips. Blending the oats allows Waters to make a crispy oatmeal cookie by mixing baking soda with boiling water in equal proportions to act as a leavening agent. I'm rather deficient in my knowledge of food chemistry, but somehow it's this step that results in the extreme crispiness of the cookie.

There's probably a lot of debate in kitchens, internet forums, and playgrounds everywhere over whether chocolate chip cookies should be crispy or chewy, but I'll always side with the crisp in nearly any dessert, and especially a chocolate chip cookie. The balance of crunchy cookie and melted chocolate is pure baking zen.

And the dough is such a lovely, textured, grainy brown.

I made these cookies for the first monthly soup club (spearheaded by Dan) as a basic, easy, no-supermarket-trip-necessary contribution. Digging around the shelves of my kitchen to figure out what I had on hand turned up a jar of sour cherries, bought in a moment of grief and desperation last year after Purim, when I'd so much wanted to make hamantaschen with sour cherry filling and hadn't been able to find any form of the fruits, and then a month later come across a jar in a Polish market I happened to be eating kielbasa in. The jar had sat through the summer months when fresh sour cherries had made a big show at the farmers' markets, and, with Purim coming around again soon, its presence in my cupboard was tickling at the back of my mind. Plus it's huge and takes up a lot of room.

So, since I'd never made the original currant cookie, I decided I might as well add some cherries to the recipe.

And they were fine. Not dried, as the currants are, so the flavor didn't come through the cookie very strongly (note to self: find dried sour cherries before Purim) and the wetness of the fruit made the cookies behave a little strangely: they spread more and the texture was a little off. So I think in the future I'll stick with using just chocolate chips.

But they did all get eaten.