There is nothing like reorganizing the pantry to set me going in the kitchen. I have a bad habit of making shopping lists without checking the pantry first and then buying things impulsively when I am in the store. That is why in the reorganization I found things like three entire bags of dried chick peas. And a dozen cans of tomatoes. I keep buying them meaning to cook them then a few weeks later will forget about them and buy more. In an effort to make a dent in all the stored food around here we had chana masala for dinner.

More exciting than the chickpeas and a canned tomatoes was a bag of macadamia nuts that I found hiding behind the pistachios since my last trip to Trader Joe’s. As soon as I saw them all I could think of was making macadamia nut cookies. Because parve white chocolate isn’t as delicious and luscious as real good quality white chocolate my plan was to take a white chocolate macadamia nut cookie recipe and use other additions instead of the white chocolate. Imagine my shock when I turned to my handy Mrs. Fields cookie book (the first cookbook I ever owned myself) and found that there wasn’t a recipe for white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. I was surprised because I remember the original Mrs Fields store in Palo Alto (before it was an international franchise) and I know they sold them. Maybe they weren’t popular enough to make it into the book. However, there was a recipe for lemon macadamia nut cookies that caught my eye, especially since it didn’t even call for white chocolate.

The cookies are very tasty. I like the contrast of the lemon flavor with the rich macadamia nuts. My cookies didn’t spread at all, which is why I am calling them “tasty lumps”. They stayed pretty much exactly the shape they were when I put them on the cookie sheet. For some reason the last 6 cookies I made (the ones that didn’t fit in the oven with the first batch) spread more and looked like the ones in the picture so I don’t know if it was a temperature thing, or just because of the type of margarine I used to make them parve. They weren’t my favorite cookie, by any means, but they were a nice change. (Maybe the original version is better than my parve adaptation). In my opinion the cookies are best still slightly warm. I would make them again but next time will press the dough down a bit before baking to get a better shape. I used lemon oil to flavor them, but I bet they would be great with lime oil too.