Banana Nut Chocolate Chip Cookies

Bananas can be fiddly little buggers.  You see them in the grocery and you think to yourself "Yummy!  Bananas!"  That's how they get you.  You can never actually eat the bananas that you bring home from the store.  They are always a little too green.  So you put them on the counter somewhere.  If you're like me 50% of the time you just plain forget that they are there.  Two weeks later you move aside a box of crackers or a kitchen towel or something and there are your bananas - all brown and mushy.  The other 50% of the time your yearning for bananas just doesn't last as long as it takes for the bananas to ripen.  By the time they are ready to be eaten you see them and just thing "huh.....bananas."  I don't think that we have ever finished a bunch of bananas before at least 2 of them entered the mushy, brown stage. 

Naturally, if you are a smart little cookies like me, you now progress to the banana bread stage.  Bananas that have been deemed no longer edible by your kids are perfect for banana bread.  At least if you have an oven that is what you do.  But what if you don't have an oven....say perhaps your oven has been out of commission for more than 3 weeks.

Just as I was about to toss the bananas into the compost bin I stumbled onto this little gem - Banana Chocolate chip cookies....Hello!!!  I could easily mix up these cookies and then pop them into the freezer where they would enter a sort of time warp stasis until my oven (finally) arrived and I was able to bake them up.  This means that not only would I get to use the bananas, but I would be all geared up to bake as soon as the oven delivery guy left!  XANADU!!

I followed the directions to the letter except where I put all the chocolate chips into the batter.  Then I scooped out nice big cookie sized scoops and froze them on a cookie sheet.  Once they were nicely frozen I put them into a freezer bag and moved them into the cryogenic chamber otherwise known as my chest freezer.

And there they lingered until Monday afternoon when the my new best friend, Ramone, showed up with the oven.  After much banking and pounding and  lot of ominous sighing, my oven was installed and heating up.  I popped the cookies, fresh from the freezer into a 300° oven and left them to bake for 30 minutes.  They emerged beautiful, browned and yummy. 

I think that banana cookies may be the new banana bread.