This morning I went out into the back garden with my friend Tyrone, who helps me keep the rats and termites at bay. The pansies were too few even for a bud vase, and I didn’t expect to be out in the garden again to admire them before they withered, so I ate them. They remind me of wintergreen.
The pouring rain is an inconvenience on a play day when I am toting baggage, writing materials, and electronic devices. It is hard to remember, when surrounded by concrete, glass, steel, and macadam, how urgently we need the rain. I am hoping for the trees, the farmers, and all of us, that it is also raining back home in DC.
These cookies are loosely inspired by the peanut butter cookies from the Joy of Cooking because those were my first peanut butter cookies.
1. Soften a half cup of vegetable shortening (preferably organic), then cream with 1/4-1/2 cup of sucanat (sweeten to taste). Beat in 1/2 cup agave nectar or maple syrup. Add in equivalent of one egg of either “egg replacer” or flax seed emulsified with water. Cream in peanut butter (make sure the peanut butter is organic; creamy works best in this recipe as they are crumbly cookies), a dash of salt, and a 1/2 tsp of baking soda.
2. Mix together 1/2 cup whole wheat flour and 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour. Then mix the combined flours into the wet ingredients until well combined.
3. Blend in 1/2 cup of toasted wheat germ (flax seed meal or a combination also would work).
4. Chill the dough for at least 1/2 hour for best results. Lightly grease a cookie sheet while the dough is chilling. Shape the dough into walnut sized balls (or make them smaller, but shorten the cooking time). Make an indentation with your thumb to flatten slightly. The dough will rise and the thumbprint will disappear during the baking process, leaving a smooth, round pillow of a cookie.
5. Depending on your cookware and whether you have convection (needs lower temperature) or conventional oven, bake at 335F-375F. Starting from a cool oven (many baked goods are fine without the oven preheating; to save energy, try to start baking with something that doesn’t mind starting in a cool oven and then baking several items at the same time to take advantage of the already heated oven), bake for 15-20 minutes, depending on whether the oven was hot already, until golden.
6. THIS IS IMPORTANT: these cookies crumble very easily when first taken out of the oven. Leave them to cool for at least 15 minutes on the cookie sheet before transferring directly to a plate.
Variations: any nut or seed butter. Hemp would be particularly good, as would almond.
Current stack of to be read in anticipation of upcoming travel. Though I’m on a brief detour into a reread of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” which appeared the other day in a nearby “little free library.” The Arundhati Roy is so finely wrought, I can only read a few pages at a time. The Madhur Jaffrey, by serendipity, has a bit about one of places I will be eating.
Almost the last of everything but greens.
