Easy Peanut Butter Cookies

It’s a Friday night in June and I’m standing in the kitchen of my apartment in DeKalb, Illinois, making peanut butter cookies at ten o’clock at night, and I’ll tell you why in a minute.

First, let me tell you who I am, because I figure if you’re going to be reading anything I write, you deserve to know what you’re walking into.

My name is Amanda Jean Kowalczyk. I’m twenty-one years old. I grew up in Oak Lawn, Illinois, which is a south suburb of Chicago that most people have either never heard of or have strong opinions about, depending on whether they’re from there. It’s the kind of place where your dad is a plumber and your mom is a school secretary and nobody is getting rich but nobody is going hungry either, and that particular middle-ground teaches you a lot about how to stretch a dollar and how to mean it when you say thank you. My dad, Steve, runs his own one-man plumbing operation. My mom, Patty, has known every student at Richards High School by name for the last twenty years. I am the youngest of three, which means I was adored and overlooked in equal measure, which is fine. It made me resourceful.

I go to Northern Illinois University. I’m studying special education because I want to teach kids who struggle — the ones with learning disabilities, the ones who need someone to pay attention, the ones the system was designed to rush past. I’m going into my senior year in the fall and I love it so much it scares me sometimes, the way loving something that much always does.

I learned to cook from two women who could not have been more different from each other.

The first was my Babcia Rose — my dad’s mother, a Polish grandmother of the highest order, a woman who expressed love exclusively through food and disapproval and then more food. She and my Dziadek Wally lived three blocks from us on Ridgeland Avenue, and every Sunday without exception they were at our dinner table, and every Sunday without exception Babcia Rose arrived with something she’d made from scratch. Pierogi. Gołăbki. Potato pancakes. Mushroom soup at Christmas. She cooked the way some people pray — with total focus and complete faith that it would matter. I used to stand next to her in the kitchen when I was small and watch her hands, how they moved without hesitation, how she never measured anything. “You put in what it needs,” she told me once. I was seven. I had no idea what that meant. I’m still figuring it out.

The second was my mom, Patty, whose cooking was entirely different — American, practical, designed to feed five people on a plumber’s income without anyone leaving the table hungry. Casseroles. Meatloaf. Pot roast on Sundays when Babcia Rose wasn’t there to have opinions about it (and Babcia Rose had opinions about meatloaf; they were not positive). My mom made food that was warm and solid and reliable, food that said I thought about you today, I planned ahead, you will be fed. That’s its own kind of love. I learned that too.

I grew up eating both traditions and loving both equally, and I carry both of them into every kitchen I’ve ever stood in, including this one — a galley kitchen in a second-floor apartment in DeKalb where the oven runs about twenty degrees hot and the cabinet above the stove has a door that won’t close all the way and I have a jar of peanut butter, a bag of sugar, and an egg, and it’s ten o’clock on a Friday night.

Now I’ll tell you why.

My best friend since we were five years old is a girl named Jess Papalardo. She grew up two houses down from me on Ridgeland Avenue, and for twenty years she has been the loudest, most fearless, most impossible person I have ever known and also the most important. Jess was everything I wasn’t — impulsive, fearless, the first to try anything and the last to worry about consequences. I was her anchor. She was my adventure. For fifteen years, it was the perfect arrangement.

Jess is going through something hard right now. Has been for a while. I don’t want to talk about the specifics because they’re hers, not mine to share, but I will say that I worry about her in a way that sits in my chest like a stone, and some nights that stone gets heavier than others, and tonight was one of those nights.

I talked to her for an hour. She sounded tired. She said she was fine. I said okay. Neither of us believed it, but we’ve had that conversation enough times now that we both know how it ends, and I hung up the phone and stood in my kitchen for a minute, and then I opened the cabinet and got out the peanut butter.

Here is the thing about peanut butter cookies: Jess and I made them for the first time in seventh grade, in her mom’s kitchen on a Saturday afternoon when we were supposed to be doing homework. We found the recipe on the back of a jar — three ingredients, no flour, no mixer, just peanut butter and sugar and an egg, and you press them down with a fork in that little crosshatch pattern and bake them for ten minutes and they come out crispy at the edges and soft in the middle and they taste like something a grandmother would make but you made them yourself in forty-five minutes on a Saturday at age twelve and that felt like witchcraft. We burned the first batch because we were arguing about something — a boy, probably, or whose turn it was to pick the movie — and the second batch came out perfect and we ate half of them standing at the counter before they were even fully cool.

We have made them approximately one hundred times since then. Jess always eats more than her fair share. I always let her.

I make them on the nights when the stone in my chest gets too heavy, because they taste like her kitchen in seventh grade and like everything being fine and like a time before everything got complicated. Cooking is the only thing I know how to do when I feel helpless. I can’t fix what’s happening with Jess. I can’t fix anything. But I can make peanut butter cookies at ten o’clock on a Friday night and I can eat two of them while they’re still warm and I can pack the rest into a container and bring them to her next time I drive home, which will be in two weeks, and she will eat more than her fair share and I will let her, and for an hour or two we will just be Jess and Amanda, the way we have been for as long as I can remember.

That’s what food does. Not just for me — for everyone who’s ever stood at a stove because standing somewhere was better than sitting still with a feeling. My Babcia Rose didn’t cook because she was hungry. My mom didn’t make pot roast because she wanted pot roast. They cooked because it was the thing their hands knew how to do when their hearts needed an action, and I am their daughter and their granddaughter and I am standing in a galley kitchen in DeKalb at ten p.m. mixing peanut butter and sugar in a bowl, and somehow that is enough.

I’m going to be writing here about food and about the life I cook it in, which is currently: a college senior’s life, which means a budget that requires creativity, a schedule that requires shortcuts, and a heart that requires comfort in small, warm, edible doses. I’ll write about the Polish recipes I’m slowly learning from Babcia Rose before she decides she’s done teaching and the knowledge goes with her (she’s eighty-two and shows no signs of slowing down, but I’m not taking chances). I’ll write about the casseroles my mom made that I used to take for granted and now make for myself when I’m homesick. I’ll write about the things I invent when the fridge is low and payday is three days away, and some of them will be brilliant and some of them will be cautionary tales.

And I’ll write about Jess sometimes. Not everything — it’s her story as much as mine — but enough, because she is woven into the whole thing, into who I am and who I’m becoming and why I cook the way I do. The people we love are in every recipe we make. That’s what I believe. That’s the whole thesis, really. Everything else is just details.

Start here. Three ingredients. Twenty minutes. It’s enough.

So here’s where I start: not with Babcia Rose’s pierogi or my mom’s casseroles, but with something I could make before I even knew I was a cook — three ingredients, no equipment, no excuses. These peanut butter cookies are what I make when I need to prove to myself that the thesis is true, that something made simply and with intention is still something real. Jess used to say that showing up is the whole job, and I think about that every time I press a fork into the dough.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 11 minutes | Total Time: 21 minutes | Servings: 24 cookies

Ingredients

1 cup creamy peanut butter (the regular kind, not natural — natural gets oily and these won’t hold together)
1 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional but worth it)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda (optional — gives them a little lift)
Pinch of salt if your peanut butter is unsalted

Instructions

Preheat your oven. Set it to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or give it a light spray of cooking spray. If your oven runs hot like mine, go with 340°F and check them early.
Mix the dough. In a medium bowl, combine the peanut butter, sugar, egg, and vanilla if you’re using it. Add the baking soda and salt if using. Stir until everything is fully combined and you have a thick, uniform dough. It will look almost too simple. That’s correct.
Roll and place. Scoop about one tablespoon of dough per cookie, roll it into a ball between your palms, and set it on the prepared baking sheet. Leave about two inches between cookies — they spread a little.
Press the crosshatch. Use a fork to flatten each ball, pressing down once in one direction and then again the other way to make the classic crosshatch pattern. Press until the cookie is about 1/2 inch thick. This is not optional. It’s not functional, it’s ceremonial. Do it anyway.
Bake. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are just set and the tops look dry. They will look slightly underdone in the center — that’s right. They firm up as they cool.
Cool on the pan. Let them sit on the baking sheet for five minutes before moving them to a rack or a plate. They are fragile when hot. Do not rush this part. Eat one anyway. You’ve earned it.

Nutrition (per serving)

Easy Peanut Butter Cookies — The Recipe That Tastes Like Friday Night and Jess Papalardo