Christmas Kitchen Sink Cookies

Late December. Christmas and New Year's compressed into one week of cooking and gifting and gratitude. Christmas morning with Miya: tamagoyaki, miso soup, rice. The ritual. The anchor. The practice that does not vary for holidays or publications or birthdays or any occasion, because the practice is the occasion, because every morning that begins with miso soup is a celebration, because the daily is the sacred, because Fumiko did not celebrate special days — she celebrated every day, with dashi, with precision, with the same soup made the same way, and the sameness was the celebration.

Miya's Christmas present this year: a set of Fumiko's recipe cards — not the originals (those stay on my wall, framed, untouchable) but careful reproductions, handwritten by me in my best attempt at Fumiko's handwriting, the characters as close to hers as I can manage. The cards are in a small lacquered box that I found at Uwajimaya, and the box is for Miya, and the cards are for Miya, and the handwriting is my approximation of Fumiko's, and the approximation is the love, and the love is the card, and the card is the recipe, and the recipe is the inheritance, passed from grandmother to mother to daughter, by hand, in ink, in the language that Fumiko wrote and that Miya can now read.

Miya opened the box and looked at the cards and read the first one aloud — "Miso Shiru" — and her voice was steady and her Japanese was clear and the words were Fumiko's words in Miya's voice and the hearing was the miracle, the ordinary miracle that occurs when a dead woman's recipe is read aloud by a child who never met her, in a kitchen three thousand miles from the kitchen where the recipe was written. The chain. The chain holds. The chain sings.

New Year's Eve. Miya is here this year. We make noise with the paper-plate shakers and we drink amazake and we eat kuromame and at nine PM (fake midnight) she shakes her shaker and says "Happy New Year!" and I say "Happy New Year, baby" and the baby is not a baby but the word persists and the year turns and the practice continues and the miso soup is ready for the morning and the morning is tomorrow and tomorrow is another year and the year will hold another fifty-two bowls of soup and another fifty-two blog posts and another twelve columns and another year of Miya growing and another year of Ken declining and another year of the practice, the word, the practice, the life.

After a week of tamagoyaki and miso soup and amazake and kuromame — all of it precise, all of it intentional, all of it weighted with meaning — I wanted one thing that was the opposite of precision. Something you make by opening every cabinet and saying yes to all of it. These Christmas Kitchen Sink Cookies are that recipe: the everything cookie, the one that holds chocolate and salt and crunch and sweetness all at once, the way this week held grief and joy and Miya’s voice reading Fumiko’s words aloud. We baked a batch on New Year’s Day, Miya and I, and we ate them warm, and the year began exactly as it should.

Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 12 min | Total Time: 32 min | Servings: 36 cookies

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup white chocolate chips
1/2 cup red and green M&Ms or holiday candy-coated chocolates
1 cup roughly crushed pretzels
1/2 cup crushed potato chips
1/2 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
Flaky sea salt, for topping

Instructions

Preheat oven. Heat oven to 375°F. Line two large baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.
Whisk dry ingredients. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and fine sea salt until combined. Set aside.
Cream butter and sugars. In a large bowl using a hand mixer or stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the softened butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar together on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.
Add eggs and vanilla. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the vanilla extract and mix until fully incorporated, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.
Combine wet and dry. Reduce mixer speed to low and gradually add the flour mixture, mixing just until no dry streaks remain. Do not overmix.
Fold in the “sink.” Using a sturdy spatula or wooden spoon, fold in the semi-sweet chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, holiday M&Ms, crushed pretzels, crushed potato chips, and rolled oats until evenly distributed throughout the dough.
Scoop and space. Drop rounded 2-tablespoon portions of dough onto the prepared baking sheets, spacing them about 2 inches apart. Sprinkle each cookie with a pinch of flaky sea salt.
Bake. Bake one sheet at a time in the center of the oven for 11–13 minutes, until the edges are golden and set but the centers still look slightly underdone. They will firm up as they cool.
Cool on pan. Let the cookies rest on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely. Repeat with remaining dough.

Nutrition (per serving)

Christmas Kitchen Sink Cookies — Everything in the Bowl, Everyone at the Table