Sharing some cookies to let the neighbors know what's up...

Another 10 new recipes for us this week - I would choose the Butterscotch Drop Scones, Herbed Cracker Bread and the Pasta, Sausage and Bean Soup as our top picks of the week.

We were hoping to mosey on over to the neighbors and fill them in on the house sale before the big sign went up outside, but they plunged it into the yard much sooner than we thought! Since I wouldn't let Jeff go empty handed, I thought I would mix up some cookies for him to bring along when he went to share the news. These Peanut Butter Graham Cookies have a couple of non-traditional ingredients, at least to me, that you normally wouldn't find in a drop cookie.

While you have your normal flour, shortening, brown sugar and egg that you would typically find, you also have the interesting additions of sweetened condensed milk and honey graham cracker crumbs. Also giving the dough a special touch is just a few tablespoons of creamy peanut butter. To entice that peanut butter flavor out in the cookie dough, we tossed in a couple good handfuls of peanut butter M&Ms - however, if you used regular M&Ms I certainly wouldn't turn my nose. I don't always like nuts in cookies, but we went ahead and added a half cup of toasted chopped pecans - we really liked the nutty depth that they brought to the cookie and it also played off the nuttiness from the peanut butter. The texture is a little hard to describe here - they are crisp, but it is not a crunchy crisp - they have a firm texture and don't have the bend to them that soft cookies do. I guess I would say that the cookies are dense with a very nice chew to them. I didn't need to refrigerate the dough at all and I did have to slightly flatten the dough balls to get them to spread out a little more... the first couple of test cookies didn't get as wide as I would have liked. You can use Crisco for the shortening, but I prefer to use spectrum organic shortening (trans fat free) - I'm not sure if they would still get this great texture they currently have if you used butter instead, but if you do try it, you may need to refrigerate the dough before baking (this will help control spreading if needed).

Recipes
Peanut Butter Graham Cookies