cashew cookies

To prevent myself from eating off-plan treats, I'm going to supply myself with healthy treats so I don't feel deprived. These don't make me feel like crap the way the sugar and chocolate and oil in regular cookies do (plus they don't give me all the diseases those other cookies do). This recipe is posted here, which is a public site, so I think it's okay to repost here for my own benefit. Also I did some variations.

The ingredients are:

1 cup raw cashew butter or 2 cups raw cashews

1 cup oats

1 tsp cinnamon

1/3 cup date sugar

1/2 cup water

1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce

1 tsp vanilla

Unsweetened strawberry jam

Well, I don't see the need to buy unsweetened apple sauce when you can just cook up an apple in some water and that will turn into apple sauce. So that's what I did:

And I thought, a pear would be good too, so I added in a pear too. I probably had quite a bit more than the 1/4 cup called for in the end (1/2 cup maybe or more, didn't seem to hurt anything). I added my 1/3 cup date sugar and 1/2 cup water to this to let the flavors blend in a bit.

Then I was at the store looking at the ingredients in unsweetened strawberry jam and it was just strawberries and apple or grape juice, and I thought, well, I can make that too. I just happened to be making a bunch of smoothies for house mate anyway, so I took some of the frozen berries---blueberries, raspberries, cherries, and strawberries, and put them in a pan. Then I juiced a pear and apple (helps to have a juicer!). Here they are cooking:

I just let them cook down until it was a mushy jam. I was busy making the smoothies while this was cooking so I was in no hurry.

Next you grind the oats to a flour. Vita-mix has a dry blender container. I think the blades are pointed differently and it works great. Here's the ground oats:

You can use this container to grind the cashews too. before grinding:

And after, in the mixing bowl. It was turning into cashew butter:

Next, mix everything together, then drop onto a cookie sheet, make a well in the middle and add the jam there. I oiled the cookie sheet with olive oil, wiped up with a paper towel so it was just a thin layer.

Here they are after baking:

I liked them! They taste kind of like peanut butter and jelly. House mate liked them too, which surprised me, because she also likes the standard cookies with lots of sugar and butter. This container is going in the freezer, and another in the fridge: