Category — recipes

I made these cookies because they don’t have flour in them, which I realize is a little like saying I made my own homemade deodorant this weekend (which, yes, I did—recipe here), in that I’ve probably lost about half of you who are now thinking, what is with this girl? why make cookies without flour in them?

Well, I’ll tell you why.

1. I hadn’t done it before. Generally speaking, if I haven’t done something before, it’s a good idea to give it a shot (cue sweet potato brownies, whole wheat pastry flour, homemade deodorant again). And it’s not just true with food of course. What would my life be like now if I’d never tried starting a blog? Or throwing a party? Or going antiquing with my mom like she likes to do? I’ll tell you how it’d be: less. Less than it is.

Also, 2. I love cookies (you know I love cookies) and so naturally, now that I’m staying away from white sugar and white flour, I wanted to make a cookie without all-purpose flour, but the version I’d tried with spelt flour had been a bust (flat as pancakes), and therefore a cookie sans flour, especially one that closely resembles my favorite, favorite cookies of all time, well, it had my attention.
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These days, I wake up naturally an hour before my alarm. Every morning.

My eyes open, I blink in the early sunlight and I reach for my alarm clock, hoping against reason that it won’t be what it always is: bright blinking numbers signaling 6:30 (or worse, 6:15). Understand, it is not the time that bothers me, but the timing, a full hour or more before I need to wake up, a full hour or more before I need to have my eyes open or my arms reaching for the alarm clock. It’s a matter of waste, really, a waste of precious sleep. At this point, I have two basic choices: I can get up, and I do sometimes, or I can try to go back to sleep, laying there, awake, beneath the giant white cloud that is my down comforter, and I can close my eyes and wait—for sleep to come or for a more decent hour to arrive. In either case, when I do eventually rise, I’ll have to wait for other things. I will go to the shower, waiting for the hot water to come; to the kitchen, waiting for the bread to toast, for the water to boil; out on the roads, waiting for the light to turn green while I drive to work.

A lot of life is waiting, have you noticed that? And I don’t just mean with the small stuff of alarm clocks and commuting and morning kettles. We wait for graduations. We wait for job offers. We wait for proposals to be made and babies to be born. We wait, many times, for people. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and here is what I want to know: If so much of life is waiting, how can I get better at it?

You hear people say things all the time about enjoying the journey, and I think that’s good. I want to enjoy the hour I have to relax before getting up, especially since there are a lot of tired moms who would wish for exactly that (am I right?). I want to redeem my morning commutes, with the radio, with talking to the One who never leaves me or forsakes me, and when I drive home, with gratitude for the way the sun streaks across the sky at 5:45 PM.

And, on those mornings when I end up dressed and ready to go a good 30 minutes before I should head out the door, I want to sit at the table, and I want to eat toast with homemade Nutella® on top. It is a simple pleasure, but trust me: it’s one worth savoring. [Read more →]

You know what food trend I’ve never fully understood? The one about the hidden vegetables. The puree-something-your-kids-won’t-eat-and-bury-it-in-brownies! Add spinach to chocolate cake! Sneak cauliflower in pasta! Do whatever you can to trick them into eating nutrition!

I mean, I think I kind of understand it, or at least the premise of it: if you can add good-for-you foods to what someone normally eats without them noticing, then you get them to eat what they should while also eating what they want. Everybody wins! OK. But the problem is your kids still don’t like vegetables; they like chocolate cake, a chocolate cake that’s lying to them. Maybe I don’t get it because I don’t have kids? You can feel free to tell me what I’m missing.

Anyway, that said, you’ll see the irony in the recipe I’m about to give you, for what else but sweet potato brownies. Yes, they’re exactly like those crazy sneaky recipes I don’t understand. Yes, they use a pureed vegetable in the middle of a normal dessert. But, I made exception for them and baked them for two reasons: 1) The recipe already called for whole wheat pastry flour, and I like using whole wheat pastry flour in baking, and 2) I was curious, I’ll admit it, to see what a pureed vegetable could add to a chocolate brownie.

(Plus, bonus reason! I had a lone sweet potato in the fridge, begging to be used.)
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There are some things in life that grow on you—places that get better every time you visit, favorite movies that catch you with something new each time you watch, people that seem funnier and smarter and kinder every single time you talk.

With these things, it’s rare you didn’t like them at least a little to begin with; you probably did. It’s just that, for whatever reason, when you liked them enough and kept experiencing them again and again, your affection kept increasing—and in continued exposure, you found the marvelous reality that discovery, even or maybe especially in something familiar, leads to greater love.

That’s how I feel about granola.

Our back story—mine and granola’s—is pretty ordinary: I had granola bars in the school lunches I made myself in high school. I threw them in my messenger bag in college. I even bought bulk packs at Costco or Sam’s when I worked my first adult job, so I could grab a couple to stick in my purse or to make a quick breakfast on my way out the door. You could say I always liked granola, and we spent many years on good terms.

But. Then sometime after I started this food blog, I decided to make granola (here and then here and then in bars last November, and there was also a batch last December 24 that I never told you about, which smelled sweet with cinnamon and cloves and Christmastime). I know it’s nothing difficult, baking granola. It’s as simple as stirring, spreading and putting in the oven. But over the last year or so, I’ve discovered how much better granola can taste when it’s homemade, fresh out of the oven, fragrant and golden with clumps. I’ve discovered that I like it in a bowl, with milk; spread over yogurt, with or without fruit; eaten straight from the pan, in big fistfuls I bring to my mouth.
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