Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year everyone!
I hope you are enjoying The Most Wonderful Time of the year. Late December is for sure my favorite time of the year. I love seeing the Christmas lights and the trees everywhere. Even though many people here do not celebrate Christmas, we still decorate the tree for the New Years Eve.
I decorated our tree a little bit late this year. With projects, exams and many other stuff, I was able to put up our tree in mid December, which is pretty late because I usually have the tree ready and decorated in the first week of December. However late is better than never.
This year here in Istanbul, the weather is extremely unusual, it is warm and therefore no snow :( It seems like we won't have a white New Year's Eve this year. But still, I am looking forward to our annual family dinner.
Taking a bite from a spicy and cinnamon flavoured cookie in the chilly winter days is definitely the cure as a mood booster. I have been extremely stressful with all the school work and testa. I find it almost impossible to cook. But I also believe that cooking and especially baking are stress relieving activities. Winter is the most wonderful time of the year to bake. That is why I have been baking recently rather than cooking.
As a person who does not love sweet things very much, I do have some sweet cravings from time to time. One of my favorite sweet foods to snack on are cookies. My ultimate favorite is the Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe which has become a family classic nowadays. After baking the chocolate chip recipe for many years, I was eventually bored after a certain time. When I was going through my recipe book in order to find something new and different to bake, I bumped into a recipe from 4-5 years ago.
This recipe is from my 6th grande English teacher. She is an amazing person and she was an inspiration to me. I was interested cooking before 6th grade but I started the real deal that year. Our English teacher used to bring cookies to our class that were very different from the cookies that my mom used to bake. They were soft and chewy and I fell in love with them since most of the cookies that my mom baked were crunchy and hard.
I waited to get a bite from my English teacher's various types of cookies every time she walked into the class with a large box. And every single one of those cookies were beyond amazing. They were not traditional cookies that we have here in Turkey and that is why I found them very interesting and unique. I had those types of cookies in Starbucks and in some cafés but being able to cook them at my own oven was fantastic.
This oatmeal cookie recipe is delicious and has a very important significance to me. Every time I bake these cookies, I remember 6th grade and our English lessons with cookies. That is why I want to thank my English teacher for the recipes and for being an inspiration to me that made me start cooking and baking for real.
Here is the recipe for the Oatmeal Cookies, I hope you'll enjoy:
