I'm Back

Let me start with a quick apology for having been missing from the Courier for the past month. I really wasn’t procrastinating. Family matters kept me from even thinking about either gardening or cooking.

I’ve noticed lots of geese flying north lately. We’ve seen several gophers out basking in the sun alongside the highway between Opheim and Glasgow. All these critters may be confused, or they may be correct that spring is actually on its way to rejoin us. The snow is rapidly disappearing from my yard and garden area. Of course, it could always dump fresh stuff on us. But perhaps I need to start paying attention to the multiple seed catalogs that have been trying to clog our mailbox? I’ve been tossing them willy-nilly up to now.

St Patrick’s Day has always been rather special to me, but not because there’s any Irish blood in my ancestry. No, it’s because it was my mom’s birthday. She would have been 95 this year, but sadly only was able to celebrate 51 birthdays. Anyway, mom had a really green thumb, always having multiple houseplants to care for. I’ve inherited her love of green. I think I’ve passed it along to our daughters. My sisters and I all have descendants of the kaffir lily she smuggled home from Germany in 1968. My sisters reside in Southeast Missouri, where spring arrives much sooner than it does here, so their lily plants are already blooming. Mine may decide to do that by late June/early July.

I have been back in my kitchen, getting back into the routine of preparing basic meals this past week. There hasn’t been anything especially noteworthy, but I did make a double batch of the gingerbread breakfast cookies, the recipe for which I shared on Feb 3rd. I had the proper fake powdered sugar for the icing this time. Certainly I couldn’t tell that the sweetness atop the cookies wasn’t from real sugar. It’s very tasty, with no lingering aftertaste you sometimes get from sugar substitutes.

The newest sweet dessert I made is Whole Life Challenge compliant. The spring challenge doesn’t begin until mid-April, but I’m still trying to limit the amount of sugar and wheat flour in my diet, hence the gingerbread cookies and the following recipe. You can still have a sweet tooth and indulge it. I do both.

4 Ingredient Almond Flour Cookies

3/4 C almond flour

1/3 C cocoa powder

3 1/2 Tbl coconut palm sugar

3/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 C water

Heat oven to 350°. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone mat. Whisk the dry ingredients together. Add the water and stir until blended. Drop by tablespoon 2” apart. Bake 12-14 minutes. Cool 10 minutes on the baking sheet, then on a wire rack. You can make into thumbprint cookies by making an indentation on top, and adding raspberry jam.

Will keep at room temperature 3 days, in the fridge 2 weeks, or the freezer 6 months.

The title of the recipe is incorrect, as I count six ingredients. Maybe it’s the new math? I made mine as thumbprint cookies, using the raspberry curd (think lemon curd, but with raspberries instead) I’d made last August towards the end of raspberry season. It’s been in the fridge since then, nagging me because I never did make the dessert that called for the curd! There’s enough sugar in it to keep it from spoiling (sugar is a preservative, after all). I used about 1/2 teaspoon per cookie. The recipe made 16 not-large, maybe two-bite-size cookies. I do love a chocolate/raspberry combination dessert.