Toll House Pan Cookies

I am a little backed up on content at the moment. We got some bad news about Sherlock a few weeks ago (the first Saturday of March). I am not sure if we are *quite* at the point of it being an “at home hospice” type situation, but, we are likely not far from it.

Because he will be 13 next month (and is generally just a terrible patient) we have decided it isn’t fair to put him through invasive surgery, possible chemo and who knows what else at this stage. I am at peace with our decision to opt out of surgery and keep him comfortable as long as we can but…it all just really sucks.  

(Recent photo of the good boy without a care in the world. Likely dreaming about how to use my elevated emotional state to manipulate me.)

At any rate, I have been an emotional wreck since this news dropped at the beginning of the month. The way that my body reacts to stress/anxiety is that it kills my appetite and wrecks my stomach. Then it pivots and wants ALL the things that are bad for you. We have ordered carryout a lot more than usual these past few weeks and I have not been particularly motivated to cook (or really do much of anything else).

I did, however, decide to make these Toll House pan cookies last weekend while watching basketball. I bought all the ingredients ahead of time but didn’t read through the recipe and once I set out to start making it saw the “1 C. butter, softened.”  I, of course, had not thought to set out butter to soften which threw off my entire plan to make these cookies to enjoy during Duke/UNC round 3 in the ACC tournament.

Instead, I decided to prep these and get them in the oven at halftime. Thus, I can attest to the fact that the prep time on these clocks in at almost exactly 15 minutes.

(These finished cooking with about 8 minutes left in the 2nd half of the game. At this point I was too nervous to do anything except pace around the house. It all worked out in the end though (Go Duke!) and I enjoyed a hot cookie while watching the post game show and basking in the glow of getting the W. )

The recipe makes an entire casserole pan worth of cookies (35 squares is what the official recipe states) so this would be a good one to take to a party. (Danny and I didn’t have trouble finishing off ¾ of the dish ourselves over the course of the week.)

My only note for this one is that I did not add the chopped nuts. Also, I wound up needing to cook this a little longer than 20 minutes. 10/10 will definitely make these again.