Preheat your oven to 375F. First, we put the flour, baking soda, and salt together in a bowl. Mix it all together. Butter isn't soft when you take it out of the refrigerator, so you have to soften it up.

Chop the butter into a few small pieces (about 1Tbsp each, so 8 chunks per stick), put them in a small bowl, and cover it with plastic wrap. Put it in the microwave for a few seconds, until it's just starting to melt. In my microwave, this took about 30 seconds.

When it's properly softened, it should look like this.

Brown sugar has a nasty habit of absorbing water from the air, so you need to make sure it's in a tightly sealed container, rather than an open ziplock bag. Breaking these clumps can be a real pain, I ended up using a pair of pliers on some of the harder ones.

Mix the two types of sugar together in a large bowl, along with the butter and vanilla.

When it looks like this, it's time to add the eggs. Add one egg, mix it in well, then add the other egg and mix it in, too. You can still kind of see some clumps in my brown sugar here, but they got mixed out eventually.

After the eggs are added, the batter should look about like this.

Next, we add the flour mixture, a little bit at a time. After each addition, mix well. Add the chocolate chips and nuts (if you want them) after the flour is all mixed in.

The batter should look like this when it's all done. It shouldn't be gooey, but it should stick to itself pretty well. Feel free to taste a bit of the batter and make sure it's good.

Next, we're going to put spoonfuls of batter on the cookie sheet. A spoonful is a pretty strange measure, so this is about how much I usually use.

You should be able to get 16 cookies on a large cookie sheet.

Put the cookies on the middle rack of the oven.

After 10 minutes or so, the cookies should look about like this.

Take the cookies out of the oven, and give them a few minutes to cool down before trying to do anything with them. In the end, this wound up making about 50 cookies.

Now that you have learned how to make chocolate chip cookies, please be sure to view these other cookies recipes and these chocolate recipes.