“Double Treat” Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

I don’t need bookmarks in my cookbooks. They naturally fall open to the most oft-used pages, guided by oil stains and batter splatters and clouds of flour.
The page where this Double Treat Cookie recipe is located is one of these.
  
These come from the one and only Church Cookbook: the blue-covered “Brethren Favorites From Yellow Creek” compiled by members of Yellow Creek Church of the Brethren in Goshen, Indiana. I received my own copy of it (at last!) on my 23rd birthday by my mom.
It didn’t happen right away, but over the years, page 85 has become stained with grease and splotches of dough from various stages of mixing.  (You’re probably beginning to understand, now, why my sister doesn’t like me baking in her kitchen – or, at least, leaving behind the aftermath of my baking.)
I think my go-to chocolate chip cookies are still the chocolate chip pudding cookies (four pages before this recipe in the same cookbook), but I think the pudding mix starts to bring back bad memories of overabundant Amish Friendship Bread starters….More recently, my common chocolate chip cookie craving is accompanied by a peanut butter hunger. And those times call for these cookies.

Double Treat Cookies

2 cups flour
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup shortening (2 sticks butter)
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup peanut butter
1 package (12 oz) chocolate chips
1 cup chopped peanuts, optional (I’ll pass, thanks.)
Beat together shortening, sugars, eggs and vanilla until fluffy.
Blend in peanut butter. Add dry ingredients.
Add chocolate chips (and peanuts, if you wish.)
Shape dough into small balls. Place on ungreased baking sheet (of course, I always use a silicone baking mat.) Flatten with the bottom of a glass that’s been dipped in sugar. Bake at 325 degrees for 8 minutes.
Makes about 4 dozen.