Garbage Cookies

Enticing, right?

Well this is as seen on one of those Food Network shows where the celebirty chef personality goes around to local shops and talks about how great they are. One of the shops made what they called "garbage cookies". They took their extra cookie doughs and added them to a basic cookie recipe along with all of the leftover fixin's from their kitchen. They were throwing everything from licorice chunks to potato chips into that giant industrial sized mixer. It looked glorious.

And then this morning I was thinking about how I needed to used up the peanut butter cookie dough in my fridge and I wanted to get rid of the coconut that is starting to go stale and I remembered the show and decided to give it a shot.

I started with my own cookie dough base. Its a little like the recipe on the chocolate chip bag, only with my own twists and turns. If you don't have your own cookie recipe, start with the nestle toll house recipe. To make it softer, shift to a little less brown sugar and a little more white. (Only if you trust yourself though. Brown sugar adds a lot of flavor, and since you are going to dump all sorts of extras in there, you might want a little more bland base.)

Ok, when your base is ready, go to town. Clean out your cupboard. I threw in the end of the oatmeal container, the rest of the peanut butter cookie dough from the fridge, the rest of the coconut leftover from the holidays, two half-bags of chocolate chips (one milk chocolate, one semi-sweet) and several handfuls of pretzels that I crunched just a little as I threw them in. Oh. And a couple of chopped up fun sized candy bars.

Guys.

Yum.

I might make pretzels in the chocolate chip cookies my rule from now on.

And all I was doing was cleaning out my cupboards.

Here's the deal. How many times do you want to make cookies but there are no chocolate chips in the house? I know it happens to me more often than I like to admit. (Tangent: I don't know what I'm more ashamed of, the frequency with which I like to make cookies, or the fact that I don't have chocolate chips in my cupboard.)

I don't know why this never occured to me before. We all have stashes of some sort of junk food or another, and its likely there for use in "emergencies" because we don't ever really feel like eating that particular thing. Seriously. Try throwing it in the cookie dough!

That is all the wisdom I have to expound for the day. I need to refill my mug of milk.