A while ago I read an article from an author who was remembering all the wonderful foods from her childhood. Unfortunately none of the recipes were passed down. Her mother and aunts considered them a secret. Yep, so secret that now the actual recipes & techniques were lost.

To prevent this happening with my mother-in-law, I watched her one day and wrote down how she made the galumkies, the chili, the zucchini bread.

My mom, though, had no such reservations. We have all our childhood recipes. I have been reluctant to share though, since, everyone compliments the chocolate chip cookies as delicious and different….so I have kept the recipe secret.

Until now – my Christmas gift to you is my mom’s Toll house cookies.

It’s not even all that different from what’s on the bag, but they do come out differently. Each cookie puffs up a little while baking, then settles back down as it cools.

In one step she always mixed the baking soda with hot water and then added it into the batter. I suppose this activates the baking soda better than mixing it in dry.

And she made the batter very stiff – really using more flour than the recipes calls for. She was not a stir-the-flour-and-lightly-spoon into the measuring cup. Nope, she bought flour in 20 pound bags, dumped into a big container, and would just dive in with the cup.

So though the recipe calls for 2.5 cups of flour, I use closer to 3 cups to get them to come out right.

One last thing – my mom always cooled her cookies on newspaper. Sometime paper bags, but usually newspaper. I guess it’s just what we had. The paper does something – soaks up a bit of the grease that oozes from the bottom I suppose. Anyway they aren’t the same without doing this. So I leave the cooking racks in the cupboard cabinet for these.

The only thing I do differently from Mom is bake them on parchment paper. I don’t want to scrub cookies sheets!