Whole Wheat Oatmeal Cookies

These are great tasting cookies and pretty good for you too as far as cookies go. My family loves them. I made mine without the raisins this time. Some of my crew like raisins in cookies and some don't so I usually do half and half, but this time I was out of raisins.

1/2 cup butter (1/4 pound)
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 lightly beaten egg
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup toasted wheat germ
3/4 cup rolled oats
3/4 cup raisins
3/4 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add egg, vanilla, and salt, beat well.

Stir flour, baking powder, wheat germ, and rolled oats together with a fork. Blend well with other ingredients, adding a tablespoon or more of water if necessary to hold the mixture together.

Place by tablespoonful on greased cookie sheets. Flatten them slightly. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes.
Makes 24 cookies (I usually double the recipe).

This recipe comes from one of my favorite cookbooks The New Laurel's Kitchen. I want to share a some quotes from the introduction titled "The Work at Hand"

Subtler pressures are just as potent as economic ones. Someone asks you at a party what you "do". You tell them as vivaciously as you can that you run a household, and they simply don't know what to say next. From every quarter the message comes: housework is essentially demeaning, unmanly if you're a man, exploitative if you're a woman or child. (Unless you're running a trendy boulangerie or cafe or catering service. If you can make the car payments off those long-simmered soups and crusty French breads, you're an entrepreneur, and that gets you the blessing and admiration of everyone you meet.) p. 23

Any way you cut it, preparing a balanced and truly appetizing meal with unprocessed foods will take a chunk out of your day. If you're trying for healthful breakfasts and bag lunches too, the plot only thickens.
It's good to clear the air on this point, and recognize that if you choose to live a different kind of life, it will take some doing. Think of yourself, then, as a pioneer. Celebrate the small, solid gains you can make, and don't dwell on the ones you can't make yet. And take heart from knowing that you are not alone. p.26

Any work you do for a selfless purpose, without thought of profit, is actually a form of prayer, which unifies our fragmented energy and attention and calms the mind. In the words of a monk of the seventeenth century, Brother Lawrence: "The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament". p. 28