“Clocks were invented to warn us. Tick (time is passing). Tock (time has passed).”
― Kamand Kojouri
It is quiet in the house, almost too quiet. The lump I felt in my throat as the big yellow school bus drove away has since dissolved into tears, which then slowly (albeit temporarily) dried up. The morning sun is streaming through the windows, doing its early-September thing where it slants in at a slightly lower angle and illuminates the kitchen table just so. Today it shines brightly, yet inconsiderately, onto the latest drawing project of my 6-year-old: a collection of crayon-sketched portraits of the top 100 NFL players of the past season. (After a flurry of drawing this summer, he is almost halfway through his list.) The only sound is the clock ticking, seemingly louder than usual. Tick. Tock. I turn on the TV, hoping that Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie will distract me from the deafening silence, but alas, they are largely unhelpful, as Savannah speaks excitedly about her pregnancy and the upcoming birth of her second child. Wasn’t it just yesterday that I, too, was in Savannah’s shoes (and I couldn’t fit my swollen third-trimester feet into any of my own shoes)? But now, here I am, with my “baby” starting first grade and my first-born son starting sixth grade. For the first time, both boys are in school ALL DAY! How did this happen?
Tick. Tock.
In those early days and weeks of new motherhood, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll ever sleep again, that you’ll ever feel fully awake again, that you’ll ever have time to read a book or take a long shower or drink your coffee hot again, that you’ll ever feel like yourself again…. The days can be an endless blur of feedings and diapers and naptimes and tears (the baby’s tears and your own), and when you’re deep in the trenches of the infant stage, it’s nearly impossible to envision what the future stages of motherhood will look like. The day when your baby starts walking, or when he starts talking, or when he sleeps through the night, or when he uses the bathroom by himself, or when he starts school—all these milestones, all these stages seem so far away when you’re fully entrenched in your current stage. Until suddenly, they’re not. In the blink of an eye, you’re in the next phase: Your babies are in school full-time, and you’re wondering how you got here so quickly.
Those first few years of motherhood were hard, much harder than I could have ever imagined. I thought (I hoped!) it would get easier, and in some ways it has, but mostly it’s just different—different responsibilities, different challenges, different worries…. And herein lies the paradox of motherhood: Even when well-meaning moms of older children tell you to “enjoy this stage, because it will be gone in a flash,” or they reassure you that “this, too, shall pass,” although you know these things to be true, you almost can’t fully understand and appreciate these truths until you are safely out of one stage and into the next. And then, in some strange way, you find yourself missing the earlier days of motherhood, even the exhausting and overwhelming days, as you remember mostly the flashes of delight amidst the chaos: that new-baby smell, those newborn cuddles, the middle-of-the-night rocking-chair sessions…. As time goes by and these moments are replaced with sports practices and homework sessions and tough conversations and growing independence, sometimes you wish you could turn back time and experience those first moments again, those moments that you are now seeing with fresh eyes peering through rose-colored glasses. The passage of time is both a nostalgic reminder of its precious fleetingness and a cautionary tale to savor it.
Tick. Tock.
Since becoming a mom, I’ve felt this inexplicable need to mark the passage of time with rituals. I didn’t fully understand why, perhaps because I never really gave it much thought. But a few weeks ago, I was flipping through Jenny Rosenstrach’s book Dinner: A Love Story and came across this passage:
“Maybe my instinct to ritualize everything is an attempt to convince myself that I have some measure of control over how fast everything is moving, that if I can manage to connect all these small happy moments to the larger narrative of our lives—if I make a conscious effort to stop and celebrate as much as possible—then maybe, just maybe, my daughters’ childhoods can last forever?”
Ah… yes, of course! When I can stop and celebrate the moments that I want to cherish and remember forever—the first birthday, the first lost tooth, the first day of school—I feel like I can almost freeze time. And in these brief moments, time doesn’t feel so fleeting and so far out of my control.
Tick. Tock.
That day in early September when the boys headed off to school caught me off guard. It seemed like one of those endless days again, but in a different way. Sure, there was a part of me that was eager, excited even, to have some quiet time to myself. It’s funny when I think about it now: how I yearned for some “me” time when I was a new mom, and yet, now that I had some, I kept checking the clock, thinking about my boys at school, anxiously waiting for 3:30 p.m. when the school bus would drop them off and I could hear all about their first days. Until then, I tried to distract myself: I had a long phone conversation with a dear friend. I watched an episode of my favorite soap opera while enjoying my (hot!) coffee. I wrote. I did laundry. Things were moving too slowly, and yet, at the same time, they were moving too quickly. I needed to mark this moment in time, and I needed the comfort of a ritual. As usual, this ritual came in the form of food—in this case, homemade cookies.
The plan, of course, was to have the cookies coming out of the oven just as they walked in the door. But as I should know by now, with motherhood few things go as planned, and my tendency to underestimate how much time most tasks require led to this reality: The boys were walking in the door, throwing their backpacks on the floor; their excited voices and the piercing beeeep of the oven timer were slicing through the quiet; and I was hastily trying to rotate the cookie sheets in the oven while simultaneously expressing how happy I was to see their faces. But a few minutes (okay, 30 minutes) later, we were sitting around the kitchen counter, enjoying warm, gooey cookies, talking about our days. It wasn’t quiet anymore, and that lump in my throat returned as I realized that this is my life now: My babies aren’t babies anymore. I had made it through—another day, another year, another milestone, another stage. And as I sat in the kitchen with my growing boys, laughing and chatting and eating cookies, for just a moment, time stood still.
I’ve adapted this recipe from the bakers at Ovenly, a bakery in New York City, who shared the recipe in their cookbook of the same name. Although I’ve altered the ingredient list slightly, the method is essentially the same, and it’s important to follow it closely and carefully for best results.
Yield: Approximately 24 to 30 cookies.
- • 2 cups white whole-wheat flour * or all-purpose flour (or some combination of these flours to equal 2 cups total)
- • 1 teaspoon baking powder
- • ¾ teaspoon baking soda
- • ½ teaspoon kosher salt
- • 1½ cups bittersweet (or semi-sweet) chocolate chips ** (I like to use chocolate with at least 60% cocoa content.)
- • ½ cup natural cane sugar
- • ½ cup packed light brown sugar (Be sure the brown sugar is fresh and soft, not hard or clumpy! If there are any clumps, break them up first with the back of a spoon.)
- • ½ cup plus 1 tablespoon light-tasting olive oil ***, or canola, grapeseed, or any other neutral-flavored oil
- • ¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon water
- • 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
- • Coarse-grained or flaky sea salt, for garnish (optional) ****
- In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add the chocolate chips to the flour mixture and toss to coat.
- In another large bowl, vigorously whisk together the sugars with the oil, water, and vanilla until smooth and fully combined, about 2 minutes. (I like to use a large glass bowl with a plastic lid for this step. Then after I add the flour mixture to the sugar mixture in the next step, I can simply pop the lid onto the bowl before refrigerating the dough.)
- Add the flour mixture to the sugar mixture, then stir with a rubber spatula until just combined and no flour is visible. (Do not overmix!)
- Cover the bowl with plastic wrap (or a lid if your bowl has one). Refrigerate the dough for at least 12 hours and up to 24 hours. (Do NOT skip this step!)
- When you are ready to bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 350° F and line two rimmed sheet pans with parchment paper.
- Remove the dough from the refrigerator, and using a spoon or—my preference—a tablespoon-sized cookie scoop (also known as a #40 scoop), scoop the dough into approximately 1½-inch mounds and place them on the parchment-lined sheet pans, leaving some space in between the cookies to allow for some spreading. (If you’d like to freeze some or all of the cookie dough, put the sheet pan(s) with the balls of dough straight into the freezer for about an hour or two, then place the frozen dough balls in a freezer-safe resealable plastic bag. Keep frozen until you’re ready to bake them.)
- If desired, sprinkle the balls of dough with coarse-grained or flaky sea salt, then bake for 11 to 12 minutes (or about 12 to 14 minutes if baking straight from the freezer), or until the edges are just golden. (To help ensure that the cookies bake evenly, rotate the pans front to back and top to bottom about halfway through the baking time.) Be careful not to overbake.
- Remove the pans from the oven, and let the cookies cool on the pan for a minute or two to set up before transferring them to wire racks to cool completely (or to cool just enough to eat). Repeat the baking process with any remaining dough.
** The last few times I made these cookies, I used a combination of chocolate chips and chocolate “wafers,” which are small, round disks of chocolate; they look like flattened-out chocolate chips. If you can find them in your area, I’d highly recommend using them for some or all of the chocolate chips in this recipe. When the cookies are fresh from the oven, the disks melt into little puddles of chocolate and make the cookies even more gooey and chocolatey! I’ve found Guittard wafers at my local Whole Foods Market, but they are relatively expensive and therefore a special-occasion-only splurge. My local Whole Foods Market also carries Guittard’s Super Cookie Chips, which are bigger, flatter (yet sweeter) chocolate chips, and more reasonably priced. Ghirardelli’s 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chocolate Baking Chips are another, more widely available option; they are larger in size than most chocolate chips (my boys refer to them as “The Big Chocolate Chips”) and are consistently good. I’ve also had success just chopping up a good-quality bittersweet chocolate bar into roughly ½-inch chunks and using those chunks (along with all the little bits and crumbs that accumulate on the cutting board) in lieu of chocolate chips. (Keep in mind, however, that although most dark chocolate is dairy-free and/or vegan, some brands, including Ghirardelli, do contain milk, so be sure to check the ingredient label if this concerns you.)
*** I recently discovered California Olive Ranch Mild and Buttery Extra-Virgin Olive Oil and I have been using it with great success in many of my baking recipes that call for a light-tasting or neutral-flavored oil. It works especially well in these cookies, lending a buttery flavor without any actual butter. You can certainly use canola oil or another neutral-flavored oil in its place, but if you would like to use olive oil, be sure to use one that doesn’t have strong floral or grassy notes, unless you want those flavors in your cookies!
**** My boys prefer that I not sprinkle finishing salt on their cookies, but I quite like that sweet/salty contrast, so I earmark a few cookies just for me and sprinkle them with a little salt before I bake them. I have some “fancy” vanilla salt that someone gifted to me from Williams-Sonoma, and I reserve it just for these cookies. And bonus: I know there will always be a couple of cookies left in the batch just for me, because no one else in my house will eat them!
Recipe adapted from Ovenly: Sweet and Salty Recipes from New York's Most Creative Bakery, by Agatha Kulaga and Erin Patinkin.
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