This morning I tried steel-cut oats for breakfast. They sounded so yummy on WantNot. And I will say this: they are better than rolled oats. And they left my tummy feeling warm and happy and satisfied. Plus, I felt so righteous and healthy for eating them.
But YUCK. I started adding things, trying to make them taste better. A little sugar? A little peanut butter? A little cocoa? And before long I was thinking maybe I should just go ahead and make No-Bakes instead. No-Bakes are the kind of recipe where if you make them and bring them to an event, everyone will be like, “HEY!!! I’ve had these!! I didn’t know what they were called and couldn’t find the recipe!! YOU MUST GIVE ME THE RECIPE!!”
No-Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies
- 1 stick (1/2 cup) butter or margarine (I like to use butter, but the original recipe I have calls for margarine)
- 1/2 cup milk
- 2 cups sugar
- 3/4 cup peanut butter (creamy or crunchy; I prefer creamy)
- 3-1/2 cup rolled oats (regular or quick; I prefer regular)
- 6-7 tablespoons baking cocoa (I go for, like, 6-1/2)
- 1 tablespoon vanilla (I use the cheapie imitation stuff for this, not the real vanilla extract, because a TABLESPOON??)
In a medium saucespan (a 2-quart is big enough, but a 3-quart will give you more stirring room so you’re less likely to slop over the edges), bring the butter/margarine, milk, and sugar to a boil. Boil for a minute and a half, then remove from heat. Add everything else and stir it up. Spoon mixture onto waxed paper in cookie-sized lumps. Let cool/set.
See, look at all the OATMEAL! Your cookie size will vary, but when I make them I get about 24 cookies to the batch. There are 3.5 cups of oats in the recipe, and there are 16 tablespoons to the cup, so that’s 56 tablespoons of oats divided by 24 cookies, or well over 2 tablespoons of oats per cookie. The butter might look intimidating, but it’s only 8 tablespoons in the whole recipe; there are 3 teaspoons per tablespoon, so that’s 24 teaspoons of butter divided by 24 cookies, or 1 teaspoon per cookie. I have more butter than that on a slice of toast, so that amount of butter doesn’t scare me. And there’s half again as much peanut butter as butter, so that’s 1.5 teaspoons of peanut butter per cookie, and that doesn’t scare me either.
Of course, these are a food allergy NIGHTMARE. Peanut butter! Dairy! I haven’t tried it, but I suspect you could make them with a non-dairy milk, and you can go for margarine rather than butter. I made them without peanut butter once when I was out of peanut butter, and I made the notation “OK wo/PB” so it must not have been a disaster. I also see a VERY old notation next to the margarine/butter that says “can be halved.” That seems…unlikely. But there it is in my own handwriting. I wouldn’t halve the margarine/butter, though, if you’re leaving out the peanut butter.
1. Steel-cut oats are good with lots and lots of butter/margarine, brown sugar, and a little salt.
2. Yes! You can make dairy-free no-bake cookies with soymilk (or another milk substitute) and dairy-free margarine. And they are GOOD.
3. I’m sure you could also use another nut butter (soy, sunflower, almond, etc.) and they would turn out fine.
4. I love recipes.
OMG SWISTLE!
I made these in my Home-Ec class when I was 12! I made them all the time for my family but then I lost the recipe and could only remember bits and pieces. Imagine my surprise when you post the recipe that has been lost in my head for like 15 years! You’re my hero!!
Perhaps for some people they are a food allergy nightmare, but if you use gluten free rolled oats, they’re gluten free! no flour! Woo Hoo! Once again, you rock.
We do eat sunbutter here, and I’ve been meaning to try baking with it. It’s made from sunflower seeds. I might lessen the butter though, because sunbutter is oily, like natural peanut butter would be.
Mmmmm, I see my afternoon snack right now. I just hope I can leave some for the girl to eat when she gets home from school! :)
I’ll tell you what we used to call them when I was a kid: Moose turds. (And they are delicious.)
I can’t wait to try these.
My morning breakfast routine is to take oatmeal (rolled, steel, oatbran, but never instant), put it in a mug, slice a banana into it, pour hot water over, throw it in the microwave for a minute and a half. The microwave caramelizes the banana making it seem like yummy dessert, but for breakfast. it’s delicious.
Oddly, I’ve been baking all day (I stopped only because I ran out of vanilla) because I have a cookie walk next Saturday that I’m working at the entire day for the animal shelter I can no longer volunteer for (distance and children, not like I was kicked out) ;) I think I’ll add these to the mix when I do my next round of baking!
Do you also have a recipe for those delicious things that are like rice krispie treats but with peanut butter and a thick coating of chocolate on top? Because it seems in the same vein and I would KILL for that recipe.
My husband has a peanut allergy and I have sadly been depriving myself of all yummy baked (and non-baked) treats involving peanut butter for ten years now. But this year I decided to try with alternative nut butters. I was going to use almond or cashew butter but they looked so much more runny than your standard peanut butter so I bought the soy nut butter instead. The consistency is EXACTLY like peanut butter. I think it has a slightly funny aftertaste if you eat it just plain (and you are a big fan of peanut butter) but I used it in a square recipe that also had butterscotch and chocolate chips and the funny aftertaste totally disappears and it tastes just like it was made with peanut butter! Awesome! Only the hubby doesn’t like it because peanut butter tastes bad to him. But at least I can have the squares in the house and feed them to my kids without worrying that they will contaminate other foods. I highly recommend the soy nut butter! I used a brand called “I.M. Healthy” that is made in a nut free facility so you know it hasn’t been contaminated.
I love these no-bake cookies! I have a similar recipe that uses peanut butter AND cocoa. Mmmmmmm.
Thank you! I love oats in every presentation possible. Especially on top of an apple crumble! I’m going to try these as soon as I get some peanut butter, which I keep forgetting to buy.
Those cookies are among my favorite cookies from my childhood. Mmmmmm.
Aw HELL. My son was watching a movie and I was all, hmmm, I’ll see what Swistle is up to, tra la la laaaa. And then I read this recipe, and I knew we had all the ingredients on hand, so I made this crazy mad dash into the kitchen, whipped up a batch in a frenzy of anticipation, and then fell into a total Friday afternoon cookie coma of bliss. YUM. Thanks!
We tried steel-cut oats for the first time this morning too!! I choked down about 4 bites before giving up, and my husband made it to about 8 bites before I told him that I wasn’t going to eat anymore, and he didn’t have to either. He was relieved. Blech.
In high school my friends and I called these poop cookies… but they’re soooooo gooooood!
We’re a steel-cut oats family here, and we never eat them alone. I mix those with brown rice and barley, toss in some chopped up raisins and other dried fruits du jour, mix in butter, brown sugar and/or maple syrup. It’s good! And totally healthy. Great for digestion, too. My 15 m.o. gets constipated sometimes, but just one bowl of this gets things moving again.
I wish I’d seen this earlier today! I have to bring stuff to a bake sale in the morning and I made 6 (!) pumpkin pies. I could have made these instead!
I actually love warm steel cut oats with brown sugar and milk!!! So yummy!
Try your oatmeal with a little sugar and a little hazelnut coffee creamer. Yummy!!
We love steel cut oats but my WORD, you have to doctor those bad johnnies UP!
We put some salt in the water (you really, really need the salt, IMO, otherwise, they have that ‘missing something’ taste. Then I put brown sugar or real maple syrup, a little cinnamon and some half-n-half (just a little to thin it and make it nice. The baby eats them too, so I use the half n half but you can use regular milk or whatever.) I much prefer the taste and consistency to instant or rolled oats.
I love these cookies too, but, every now and then, I will make them and be looking forward to the wonderful finished product and, randomly, the batch just doesn’t set; the chocolate part is more like thick syrup that all falls to the bottom of the pile of oatmeal and never gets nice and firm. Do you ever have that problem? And do you know how to fix it?
Psuedostoops- YES, I do have that one! I’ll post it soon! If you want, email me (swistle at gmail dot com) and I’ll send you the recipe earlier—it sometimes takes me Longer Than I Expect to post things I plan to post.
Doing my best- YES, occasionally it doesn’t SET. But more often, it takes AGES to set: like, the other day I made a batch and they were still all soft hours later—and then suddenly they set, boom. I don’t know WHAT that is. Making sure to cook the butter/milk/sugar long enough helps: the recipe I have says to cook 1 minute, but I always cook a minute and a half or even two minutes. I also wonder if it’s the butter’s fault? In high school I always made these with margarine, and I remember the problem was that they’d set TOO FAST, like before I could scoop them all out of the saucepan. So maybe they sometimes set slow (or not at all) because I’ve switched to butter? I’m not sure. Guess I’ll have to do a lot of EXPERIMENTING! *smacks lips*
We call no-bake cookies “Canadian Cookies”. I don’t have any idea why, but the recipe has been passed down for four generations now…
Ours is similar to yours. Subtract the peanut butter, and add 3 cups oatmeal instead of 3.5 cups.
And, reagrding the question by Doing my best, I have found that if I let the cugar-milk-butter mixture boil for a minute or more, I don’t have the gooey problem.
Finally, I can’t imagine using half the butter…but I do know that halving the entire recipe is very easy…maybe that’s what the old note means. Maybe?
Wow, excited to find a blog that recommends a cookie that does not require baking, because I think my kids and husband would keel over in shock if I ever did bake. I’m new to this blogging thing, and am getting so sucked into everyone else’s blog that I don’t know how I’m going to find the time to keep doing mine. This one’s especially fun. Will return! Come over and see me sometime.
My kid in college was home for the weekend, and made a batch of these today…very yummy!
Ooh, I’ve been looking for a cookie recipe all day. I might have to make these!
Here is the secret to steel cut oats: Cook it overnight in a crock pot. It comes out creamy and delicious, with no hint of that nasty gluey feeling that made me hate oatmeal for so much of my life. I top mine with milk, a little splenda, raisins and cashews, and its like the perfect combination of salty, sweet, and self righteously healthy.
Instead of expensive vanilla, substitute Kaluha. Significantly cheaper on a per tablespood basis, nearly identical alcohol content and similar taste. Yum.
WOW.
This sound absolutely delicious!
I’m off shopping tomorrow, I’ll let you know how it turns out!
I love those cookies adn make them all the time. Yum!!
I love steel cut oats. I always put maple syrup and raisins in it. YUMMMY (and I don’t even like raisins normally…)