Cooking from my mom’s recipe box has been an interesting experience. It’s not like I am cooking her recipes, she didn’t have recipes for most of what she made. Her recipe box is a collection of recipes she got from friends and family (including me), or clipped out of a newspaper. Although I mostly am interested in exploring the “friends and family” recipes that represent the 70’s and 80’s, there are some clippings that intrigue me. Here is a James Beard recipe that she clipped from some newspaper.

I made them as written, except that I thought the 2 teaspoon approach was unnecessarily fussy, so I used a tablespoon scoop. And, somehow ended up with 41 cookies instead of 24. That’s ok, I prefer smaller cookies.

They were very tasty, nice and airy for oatmeal cookies. But they were quite sweet and a bit too buttery – really unhealthy even though they have carrots in them. So, if I make them again, I will use whole wheat flour – I think that would actually improve the cookie, and reduce the sugar and butter to 2/3 cup each.

With the smaller cookies, they only took 10 minutes to bake.

I am bringing them to a BBQ this weekend, we’ll see what people think before I decide whether to try them again.