I have this recent obsession with celebrating national holidays. Obviously I celebrate the big days such as July 4th, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, my birthday (yep, it’s national), Valentine’s Day (with myself), and St. Patrick’s Day, but recently the food day celebrations have been showing up on my radar and I love it. A day dedicated to guacamole? September 16. A day dedicated to chocolate covered anything? December 16. A day dedicated to peanut butter? January 24th…can’t wait for that one. Anyway, the list goes on and on. This past week was a great food celebration week, as Tuesday was National Chocolate Day.
I told myself I definitely wanted to make something instead of going out to buy something, so I took inventory of what I had in the pantry and came up with peanut butter, dark chocolate chips, oats, brown sugar, and pumpkin. Enter in the creation of Dark Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Pumpkin Oatmeal Cookies. I don’t know how to make that name any shorter, because each item is of equal importance and deserves a place in the spotlight ;).
Despite being in a Nature of Foods course this semester, I’m still not the BEST food scientist, so I turned to Pinterest to find a recipe that would incorporate the ingredients I had without having to go out and buy butter or sugar. I came across this SUPER SIMPLE recipe from Taste of Home. Seriously, it has 5 ingredients. My kind of recipe. I decided to add in pumpkin for no other reason than because its fall and it was in my pantry. Ready for the recipe??
Dark Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter & Pumpkin Oatmeal Cookies
servings: 12 cookies
total time: 20-25 minutes
Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups quick cook oats
1/2 cup canned pure pumpkin
1 egg
1/2 cup crunchy peanut butter
1/2 tablespoon light brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/3 cup dark chocolate chips or morsels
1) Preheat oven to 350*F.
2) Combine oats, pumpkin, egg, peanut butter, light brown sugar, and baking soda together in a large bowl. Mix until all ingredients are well incorporated with each other. If you want, you can add dark chocolate chips into the batter now!
3) Drop batter onto greased cookie sheet by slightly larger than tablespoonfuls. Flatten each drop down and place dark chocolate chip morsels on top.
4) Bake for 10-12 minutes, or until cookies are set.
5) Remove from oven and allow to cool. Or eat them hot with a nice glass of cold milk!
So easy! Minimal effort! Delicious!
I obviously used dark chocolate chips, but you can incorporate any kind that you want! I found that the addition of the pumpkin to the batter pushed the bake time up compared to the recipe I based mine off of, but they turned out well! Let me know if you try these, I’d love to see your pictures!!
Ciao Down,
Clara
