In “One Good Meal,” we ask cooking-inclined creative people to share the story behind a favorite dish they actually make and eat at home on a regular basis — and not just when they’re trying to impress.
While earning her M.F.A. in fiction at Brown earlier this decade, Mona Awad had an unexpected breakthrough: If she took the virtuous ingredients from her morning bowl of oatmeal and baked them, she would wind up with a virtuous cookie. Not an oatmeal cookie in the dessert sense, but a cookie made from oatmeal in the breakfast sense. “A better iteration of what I’m already eating,” Awad says now. “It’s a plate of cookies for breakfast. I can’t imagine anything more decadent. And yet, it’s the same thing.”
Awad, 40, still enjoys those oatmeal cookies every morning. She literally wakes and bakes, whipping up a daily batch of spiced dough in her South Boston apartment. “It’s the same amount of time that I would take to make steel-cut oats,” she says. The cookies emerge warm from the oven, soft in the middle and crispy around the edges. Awad slides them onto a plate, sits down with her coffee and begins to write.
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Her debut novel is also based in graduate school, and it involves a fair number of baked goods. “Bunny,” out this month, is a wicked satire set in a prestigious all-female writing workshop that revolves around a clique of students who call one another ‘bunny’ while composing pretentious fiction and nibbling mini cupcakes. But Awad thinks her bunnies would turn their noses up at her cookies: After all, they have no added sugar. Not even a tiny pat of butter. “This is absolutely the same as a bowl of oatmeal with a banana and some raisins,” Awad says. “It’s just way more interesting.”
CreditBuck Squibb
Mona’s Breakfast Cookies
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1 large ripe banana
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2 tablespoons pumpkin purée
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½ teaspoon vanilla
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½ teaspoon cinnamon
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Pinch each of salt, ginger, nutmeg and ground cloves
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¼ cup old-fashioned rolled oats
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¼ cup quick-cooking rolled oats
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Handful of raisins (or dried sweetened cherries or cranberries)
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Meanwhile, mash banana in a bowl. Mix in pumpkin purée, followed by vanilla and spices. Add both kinds of oats and combine with a spoon until a dough forms. Add dried fruit and mix again.
2. Drop spoonfuls of dough onto a baking sheet. (A silicon baking mat is nice if you have one; if not, line with parchment paper.) With your hands, form dough into cookie-shaped discs; this recipe should make 7 to 10 cookies.
3. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until cookies are crispy on the outside but still soft in the middle. Do not brown the edges. Pull from the oven, let cool for a minute and then remove cookies with a spatula. Serve warm, preferably with coffee.
