The Pinterest Diaries: The Two Ingredient Cookie

We are trying to switch over to eating more "farm foods" (also known as whole foods) at our house. We are not a 'gung ho' family -- probably more because of the adults than the kids! -- so this will be a gradual process. I thought a good place to start would be the two ingredient cookie I saw floating through the boards of Pinterest.

The concept is a cookie whose base is only two all-natural ingredients -- bananas and oats -- thereby eliminating potentially harmful (and potentially GMO) processed oils, excess sugar and flour. We are fortunate to not have any food allergies in our household, so we don't have to worry about sensitivities to gluten or anything like that. But my kids do love a cookie and I love keeping them healthy so I thought if I could lighten a cookie up the natural way, we could all indulge and not have any negative consequences.

I also liked that you could add "mix-ins" of any type to the cookie to tailor it to your tastes. We chose raw chopped almonds, cinnamon and chocolate chips, but I was thinking pistachios and dried cranberries would be good, too. Or coconut and chocolate chips. Or a big spoonful of all-natural peanut butter.

So, we got to work on what could only idealistically be called the "recipe." First, we gathered our ingredients:

three small (over)ripe bananas, raw almonds, cinnamon, chocolate chips

Then we chopped the almonds. Josie helped.

Next, we mashed the bananas into a bowl.

We added about a cup of the quick oats and mixed until it looked like this:

There's your two ingredients right there.

Then we added the good stuff --

                                      chooooocolate chiiiiiiips

Stirred it up and dropped by tablespoonfuls onto a well-greased cookie sheet. Is 'tablespoonfuls' a word?

These don't spread really at all because there is no butter or oil, so you can put them pretty close together. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes.

Let cool on a rack.

Yep, pretty much like that.

So what grade would I give them, you ask? Well, I hate to say it, but they get a D+.

I gave one to my daughter Josie, who was eagerly awaiting the final product. She ate all the chocolate chips out of the cookie, handed me the rest and said, "here Mommy, I saved this for you." That pretty much sums it up.

The cookies turned out gummy, rubbery and weird. With there being no flour or sugar to give you that cookie crunch, you basically just baked a banana with some oats thrown in there for texture. I mean, what did I expect, right? But I guess I was hoping for a miracle, where I could eat six delicious cookies for breakfast in one sitting and tell people I just ate a handful of oats and a banana and would not be lying.

Online, the cookies have received (with only a few exceptions) rave reviews, so I feel like it must have been user error. It is possible that the bananas I used were too ripe. Or maybe I should have flattened out the cookies more. Or added some minutes to the cooking time. I think I will experiment and try again as I now have a giant 80 lb. canister of quick oats waiting to either be used or become a moth buffet. I did really like the addition of almonds to the cookies though and will likely use those in another cookie recipe since I do not really like walnuts, which are ever-present in cookie recipes.

Anyone ever tried the two ingredient cookie with success? Care to share your secret? (Unless your secret is just "I love cookies that double as rubber balls" -- that's a secret I don't need to know.)

A Shift in Focus

Remember me?

I have been struggling with the direction of this blog lately. I love to write, I love my girls, and they are an endless source of inspiration. But I was starting to dread coming up with material that would please everyone and be entertaining but would also not cross privacy lines. I don't want my kids to hate me later for exposing their every feeling and phase for the world to see. I don't want to feel like a reporter of my life, spending my time angling for that perfect photo instead of
getting in there with the family and making a memory together that we
remember in our minds rather than on a computer screen. I feel endlessly
guilty about this.

Then on the flip side, I get too personal and probably overshare. Not the
gory details necessarily, but bare bones emotion and complicated
toddler feelings and behaviors of my girls. Sometimes I picture them in
10 years, reading this and being angry or embarrassed at the fact that I
have spilled supremely personal details of our daily lives out into the
world without their permission. And then, again, I feel guilty.

Sometimes I get a little paranoid and worry my oversharing will
result in a serious problem, like giving a stalker material or allowing
internet sickos to use my girls' photos in whatever way Photoshop allows
them to. It happens. Not often, but it happens.

I realize my blog audience is fairly small at this point, so you might be wondering what I am so worried about. But these words and photos go out into the universe and I can't control where they end up. Even if I deleted my blog, the content is pinned on Pinterest, liked on Facebook and shared on other sites and that's all a bell I can't unring. Raising little ones at this time when social media and mommy blogs are equating strangers and random acquaintances with close friends and family is sort of uncharted territory, and I'm not so sure I want to explore it.

So I think for now, I will move the focus from more personal parenting stories via my children's follies to other baby and kid topics... DIY projects, preschooler activities, cool baby products, stuff like that. I do want you guys to like me, but more more than that, I want my kids to like me, you know? I know all you parents out there will understand. :)