Best Chocolate Chip Cookies

I know there are a million recipes for chocolate chip cookies in existence, ranging from the Nestle standard to the Neiman Marcus million-dollar recipe. I found my personal favorite...on the back of Aldi brand chocolate chips. Apparently the magic comes from the hot water, as I've never seen that in any other recipe. Who would have guessed? Also, it only uses one bowl, it comes together quickly,  it's always produced the same great results for me, and it's super easy to cut in half or double. In other words: it's a winner.
I'm writing it down here so that I never lose it, even if Aldi changes its recipe. I do add vanilla, which wasn't in the original recipe.

Chocolate Chip Cookies
Makes approximately 3 dozen cookies.

2/3 cup butter
2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
2 Tbsp hot water
2 tsp vanilla
2 2/3 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375º. Melt butter (until very soft or even until completely melted), then stir in brown sugar. Add eggs, hot water, and vanilla and stir to combine. Add in flour, then baking powder, soda, and salt on top of the flour. Stir the dry ingredients together gently to make sure there aren't any big pockets of baking powder or baking soda (a fork is good for this). Then, stir the wet and dry ingredients together. Fold in chocolate chips.

Form dough into balls (about 1 tbsp each) and place on cookie tray. Bake for 8-10 minutes or until cookies are slightly golden brown on top.

Banana-oatmeal breakfast cookies

More road trip food! These cookies were a delicious way to use up old bananas despite the fact that I didn't have any flour. Gluten and dairy free (depending on your chocolate chips), but still delicious!

Start with bananas.

Mash 'em. Just in case you didn't know what mashed bananas looked like:

Add the oatmeal, peanut butter, vanilla extract, salt, sugar, chocolate chips, and walnuts.

I tried an experiment of baking these in muffin tins. It kept the cookies nice and round but created a weird edge to them so...not really worth it?

Banana-oatmeal Breakfast Cookies
Adopted from Chocolate Covered Katie

1 ripe banana
1 cup quick-cooking plain oatmeal, divided (gluten-free if desired)
1/4 cup peanut butter
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
dash cinnamon
1/4 cup walnuts
1/4 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mash the banana in a large bowl. Place 1/2 cup of oatmeal in a magic bullet or other blender/food processor and blend for approximately 30 seconds, or until the oatmeal looks like coarse flour. Add the oatmeal flour and the rest of the oatmeal, along with the peanut butter, vanilla extract, salt, sugar, and cinnamon. Stir to combine and then fold in the walnuts and the chocolate chips.

Bake for 15 minutes or until cookies are light golden brown.