Is this what these are supposed to look like?

Every so often, I engage in the aspirational hobby of perusing recipe books and websites. I dream of what could be. Bean cassoulet with biscuits? Pumpkin chipotle chili? Seitan simmered in mole sauce? I look, I read, and I savor—with my mind’s tongue, that is.

A few days ago, I thought to myself, isn’t it a shame I haven’t ever cooked my way through a recipe book. It wasn’t a question; it was a predicament I found myself in. And so I picked up the only physical cookbook I own, from which everything I have ever made has been fantastic: Veganomicon by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.

Now, a little backstory. I’ve had the book for going on a decade, and I started with high hopes that I would cook my way through it. I even placed a dainty dot beside each recipe I tried, convinced that my zest for domesticity would find me opening the crisp pages of the hardback to a dot beside every recipe title in The Contents. Mind you, there are about 250 recipes in the book, and no amount of zest can carry you through that much cooking from one place… It takes discipline, but that wasn’t what I thought.

So I fingered through the pages a few days ago looking for something I could make then and there, and I was lucky enough to find a recipe called Chewy Oatmeal-Raisin Cookies in the dessert section.

Et voila! I got to work.

I had almost every single ingredient. I had to replace half of the oatmeal with whole wheat flour because I only had half the amount necessary around the house.

The cookies turned out absolutely delicious, but I’d had no doubts about that. A lot more raisins than I had expected, but you know what, it turns out this is how I prefer oatmeal raisin cookies. My one “wish” for these is that they’d expanded quite a bit more: I’d formed the dough into little balls before chucking my cookie tray in the oven, and finally, when they wouldn’t flatten, I had to pick up a spatula and flatten them into cookie shapes.

Now there’s a dot beside the recipe title. Am I back on my swing? Stay tuned, and you might just find out for yourself.

p.s. One batch from the recipe would have made far more cookies than I wanted. I formed the batter into individual, cookie-sized balls and froze them.