Peanut Butter Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

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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!

Peanut Butter Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp course salt
3 cups oats (see notes)
1/2-1 cup chocolate chips (semi-sweet or milk, your choice!)
3/4 cup peanut butter, melted

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 F or just below 200 C and line baking sheet with foil, parchment or grease
2. Mix together the butter and sugars until well combined and add in the vanilla and eggs
3. Stir in the flour, soda and salt and mix until just combined 
4. Add the oats and chocolate chips, making sure everything is well coated - the mixture will be fairly wet, but that's okay, the oats will soak it up! 
5. Melt the peanut butter and pour over top of the dough mixture, stir until coated
6. Drop by spoonfuls onto prepared baking sheet and bake in the oven for 5-6 minutes or until the edges are lightly browned - keep an eye on them, our oven is very small and things bake up quickly, you may or may not need the extra minute
7. Remove from oven, allow to cool on the sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack
8. Enjoy!

Notes:

• I can't tell you if the oats are quick cooking or rolled, the packaging is entirely in Chinese, but my best guess is quick cooking
• You could mix the peanut butter in the same time as the eggs and vanilla (as long as it's not too hot), but I forgot about it until just before baking, so it went in at the last second!
• This recipe can be made by hand - no mixer required! Unless otherwise noted, all recipes from kitchen are hand stirred because I don't own a mixer!