Peanut Butter Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Hey friends! I'm here today to share a recipe that I made up on the fly recently.  The goal was these chocolate peanut butter bars, but as I set out to make them, I quickly realized I was missing a few key ingredients....and so a cookie was born!

I'm mostly excited about this recipe because I can easily say it's the first baking recipe I've ever developed myself.  Cooking dinner rarely sees me with a cookbook because I find it much easier to adapt those foods, and while I grew up in a household with the mantra "baking is not an exact science" I was still aware that it was a science, and so while I'm comfortable adapting recipes and making some fairly grand substitutions/additions, I've never been fully comfortable just throwing the book out and going at it from scratch. But sometimes necessity dictates our actions, and on this day cookies were a necessity.

This cookie comes together quickly, is highly adaptable and bakes up in no time at all.  The combination of oats, peanut butter and chocolate chips creates a substantial chewy gooey goodness cookie that is slightly more addictive than is healthy, but totally worth every bite. It's all I can do to not sit on the couch and eat them all one by one while simultaneously feeding my new found "The Mindy Project" addiction.  It's good times folks.

Let's get to it!

Wide Angle: Vol. 9 - Back Again

While I've been getting into the routine of being back at work, and back in China, I also seem to have been getting into the routine of ignoring this wee lil blog.  That's not my goal. My goal is actually to make the very best of this year, use my knowledge of the city/country/school to it's fullest and maximise my fun time... and then share it all with you!

That's the goal. I'm still working on it. So while I work on that, you take a look at the last couple weeks of my life as told by my iPhone.

1. and 2. This time of year Shenzhen is hot (like HOT!!!! hot) and sunny, and everything looks a little more positive. Looking up on my walk home had the instant payoff of this beautiful view, and stepping outside my classroom was also a bit of a reward.

3.  One MAJOR improvement over last year is getting my very own oven - obviously celebratory chocolate chip cookies were in order.

4. Another improvement? A bigger apartment, off campus and 2 bathrooms! whoa!? 2? I've never had that before. And so slightly less obviously, but still awesomely, some robot stickers were in order.  Here we can see our guest bathroom.  I really want people to know what to expect from us... I think this does the trick perfectly

5. and 6. Nights out in Shenzhen (for us) mean sushi. Lots and lots of sushi. Followed by a walk home past rollerblading lessons... this was a particularly good one.

7. and 8. Another goal of mine is to do a lot more exploring of Shenzhen ... you never know what you're going to find. One day it's directions to a juice bar, the next it's jewellery at a craft fair. Win!