These are compost cookies, kitchen-sink cookies, or as Christina Tosi’s brother-in-law puts it—garbage cookies. (Tosi is the creator of the original, trademarked Compost Cookie.) Whatever you call it, the basic premise is to make them with ingredients meant for the compost or the bin, or your doomsday pantry. Because really, in this time of pseudo-rations and anxiously tracking the ingredients you have left in your fridge to make sure you have food to last the week (not to mention an apprehensive peek at your expenses too), everyone could do with a cookie to comfort you and embrace you with a flavor-hug, telling you everything is going to be fine, everything will be okay.

Yes, like the wacky, nostalgic, queen of food-that-cheers-you-up Christina Tosi herself, these cookies can bring comfort without breaking the bank. The concept of it might sound zany—to make them, you add, according to Christina, “a hodgepodge of mix-ins, none in great enough quantity to make an actual single-flavored cookie on its own” to a base cookie dough; Tosi adds leftover potato chips and mini pretzels into hers, for instance—but it actually works. I think it’s a combination of the salty and the sweet, the crispy and the chewy, the chocolate-y, nutty, and the craggly, that just makes the whole cookie come together into a delightful disc, that’s much much more than a sum of its parts.

I took the Milk Bar-popularised base recipe, and gave it my own spin with whatever I scrounged up from my pantry. And really, you can too. Just scour through your own pantry’s leftover bits and bobs—I found half a pack of cornflakes, a handful of white chocolate chips from a recipe dev-ving project I did last month, an old bag of sesame seeds, a few straggler peanut biscuits from Chinese New Year, some rolled oats my mom stashed away, and a sprinkling of sprinkles because why not. The only thing I added that perhaps crumbles the spirit of the cookie so to speak (sorry Christina) is some chopped up bits of dang good Valrhona chocolate (just because I’m extra picky/boujee when it comes to chocolate). You can totally do without them, just substitute in any leftover bits of chocolate you have, or throw in a different ingredient entirely!

Plus, I have to say too, instead of using regular butter, if you take a tactical deviation away from Milk Bar’s recipe, and brown your butter instead of creaming them fresh (I detailed the process in the recipe below), you’ll end up with a nuttier, more fragrant cookie! (I now have a huge hunger for brown butter in desserts, ever since I saw my sister make cookies with them.)

But still, whatever you throw in it, the cookie will (mostly) take to it, and will still bake up in the very same spirit, whether it’s with cornflakes and salt shakes, sesame seeds and peanut bits, pretzel sticks and potato chips, it’ll make a banging cookie from ingredients destined for the compost heap.