Here, Have A Cookie

Do you ever have a lone brown banana just sitting around?  You know, you don’t have enough banana to make banana bread or banana cake, but you feel guilty tossing this very brown banana which is beyond edible?  Well, do what I did and make some cookies out of it!

But, before I get to the cookie, I want to share a little…well, maybe kind of a warning for my readers.  Because Tummy Treasure posting for the next few weeks is going to be a bit sporadic, at best.   After months and months of hunting and searching, and much prayer and discussing, the family here at Tummy Treasure has decided to take the plunge and go through a relocation process.  Meaning, we are moving.  In just a few weeks we are going to say goodbye to small town living and tackle city living- and we cannot wait!  It is my biggest desire for this blog that my recent lack of inspiration will be lifted by the sheer abundance of opportunities we will soon have at our very fingertips.  But in the meantime, there is the moving process to tackle, and that doesn’t leave much room for fun or creative cookery.

Please bear with me as we go through this process, the end results will totally be worth it, and we’re so excited about it.

Now, back to this cookie.  Since we’re moving soon, one of the things I decided I needed to do was go through stacks of magazines.  I’m such a magazine hoarder!  When you have all these recipes at your fingertips, it’s hard to let any of them go, you just never know when one will appeal to you!  But go through them I did.  I went through many magazines and actually ripped out the recipes that appealed to me.  Everything else went away, and my large pile of magazines has been reduced.  I still have more to go through, but the bulk of them have been purged.  Yay!

This cookie is from an issue of Cooking Light magazine from last summer.   I don’t think it caught my eye the first time around, but this time, it caught me.  Of course, part of that could be that I happened to have all the ingredients on hand, so making the cookie took just a few minutes.

These are very tasty.  The oatmeal,banana and chocolate chips are a great combination to pop in your mouth from time to time.  They are cakey cookies- meaning they are quite soft, and if you happened to add some walnuts, they could easily be called banana bread cookies.  They were a great way to use up that one lone brown banana, and since they also have oats and chocolate, you can pretend they are good for you.  Oh- and those chocolate chips?  Go with dark chocolate.  Trust me on this- go for the dark chocolate for the perfect little nibble to go with a cup of coffee.

I found the cooking time way too long, but I think I made smaller cookies than called for since I got about 4 dozen of them.  I suggest starting with 12 minutes and seeing where they stand at that point.  Had I left the cookies go to 18 minutes, I would have ended up with several pans of charcoal.

Banana-Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookie

1/2  cup  mashed ripe banana (about 1 medium)

1/2  cup  packed brown sugar

1/4  cup  butter, softened

1/4  cup  granulated sugar

1  teaspoon  vanilla extract

1  large egg

5.6  ounces  all-purpose flour (about 1 1/4 cups)

2  cups  old-fashioned oats

1  teaspoon  baking soda

1/2  teaspoon  salt

1/2  cup  semisweet chocolate chips

Cooking spray

1. Preheat oven to 350°.

2. Combine first 5 ingredients in a large bowl; beat with a mixer at medium speed until smooth. Add egg; beat well.

3. Weigh or lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine flour, oats, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl, stirring with a whisk. Add flour mixture to banana mixture in bowl; beat with a mixer at medium speed until well blended. Stir in chocolate chips.

4. Drop batter by heaping tablespoonfuls 2 inches apart onto baking sheets coated with cooking spray. Bake at 350° for 18 minutes or until golden. Cool on pans 2 minutes. Remove cookies from pans; cool completely on wire racks.