One of the greatest gifts you can give your family is cooking a meal for them. It’s an investment of time and love, but it’s all worth it once you sit down together to enjoy a delightful dinner or delicious dessert.
Good food has a way of bringing families together. Plus, you’re creating family history every day just by preparing food and eating it together. You’re creating a tradition that you’ll one share with the child you adopt.
You might remember that a few weeks ago, we shared adoptive mom Amanda’s delicious recipe for Upside-Down Hot Fudge Sundae Pie. In today’s installment of Lifetime’s blog series “What’s Cooking in Your Kitchen?”, we share Mary’s wildly popular recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies.
Hopeful adoptive parents Mary and Stephen
Mary says, “I’m definitely known for these cookies, and they all came out okay because I had no idea one cup of butter is two sticks. Didn’t know for years. People always asked what the difference was…never knew! These yummy cookies are always soft because I use half the normal amount of butter.”
Mary’s Chocolate Chip Cookies
Makes 30 cookies
(can easily be adapted to be gluten-free)
Ingredients
- 1 stick (half a cup) of butter at room temp or melted
- ¾ cup sugar
- ¾ cup brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- ½ teaspoon water
- 2 eggs
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 2 ¼ cup flour (this can be substituted with Cup4Cup or 1 to 1 Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free flour and it works well!)
- 2 cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips
Directions
- Heat oven to 375° F
- Cream together butter, brown sugar, sugar, vanilla and water until well-blended.
- Add eggs in and incorporate.
- Add in salt, baking soda and flour until all well mixed together.
- Add in chocolate chips (stir with a spoon or spatula, stop using mixer at this point)
- Scoop 1 tablespoon (or a heaping teaspoon) of mixture for each cookie two inches apart on a baking sheet (non-stick or add parchment paper)
- Bake in a preheated oven for 9-12 until lightly browned on top.
(Adapted from Nestle’s recipe)
Share Your Favorite Recipe
So now, we want to know — what’s cooking in your kitchen? It’s time to open up those family recipe boxes and dig out your favorite recipe. Anything goes; it could be your mom’s best pasta salad, Great Grandma’s sugar cookies, or the New York Cheesecake you make every year from The Joy of Cooking. The only rule is that it be a recipe that you love.
You can email your recipe to Lifetime Adoption. We’re interested in where the recipe came from, how long it’s been in your family, and any stories behind it. Please let us know if it’s from a cookbook, blog, or another source. Feel free to share a pic of your food if you have one!
We can’t wait to try your recipes – thanks for taking the time to send them in!
Heidi Keefer is a Content Creator for Lifetime Adoption and has over 15 years of experience in the field of adoption. An author of thousands of articles and social media posts over the years, Heidi enjoys finding new ways to educate and captivate Lifetime’s ever-growing list of subscribers.
Heidi has a keen eye for misplaced apostrophes, comma splices, and well-turned sentences, which she has put to good use as a contributor to Lifetime’s award-winning blogs. She has written and published hundreds of adoption articles which explore the various facets of domestic infant adoption today.
It was always special when my mom would bake us sour cream coffee cake. The process and bake time would take two hours so she would have to plan for it and get up early. My sisters and I loved the moistness and the cinnamon sugar. We would laugh about how each of us ate it differently. My oldest sister, Rebekah, would eat it eat it “normally”, bite by bite. But not Amy and I. Amy would wat the entire outside first so as to leave the inside for last. I was opposite her. My favorite part was the crust so I would carefully carve out the inside first and save the crust for last!