WIAW #21, Featuring Biscotti and Borrowed Cookbooks

Happy What I Ate Wednesday! Jenn at Peas and Crayons is hosting another WIAW with this month’s theme of healthy– and possibly spooky–snacking!

Today I have a delicious and un-spooky recipe for biscotti from my mom’s cook book, Biscotti and Other Low-Fat Cookies by Maria Robbins. Since the holiday season of giving and receiving goodies is slowly coming upon us, any recipe from this book would be a great way to treat yourself (and your friends!) to something sweet without going overboard on the fat and calories.

I’ll do a quick run-down of some foods I’ve enjoyed this past week, starting with breakfast that my husband prepared for us on Sunday:

German breakfast: baked pretzels and sausages.

Here’s another delicious breakfast I tried as soon as I read the recipe. Created by Regan at The Professional Palate, It’s not really a breakfast, but it turned out that way after I drank my fill of this quick and easy dairy-free eggnog made with silken tofu:

Creamy and delicious!

I haven’t taken may photos of my lunches since they’re usually the same thing day in, day out (Chobani plain nonfat yogurt mixed with vanilla protein powder and fresh fruit). But since I was experimenting with tofu recently, I did have this the other day:

Tofu and steamed grated cauliflower make the bulk of skinny tofu patties.

And last night’s dinner after a tee-rrific run was pannekoeken:

Pannekoeken–Dutch pancakes–topped with sauteed apples, currants, and soon to be drizzled with dark amber agave.

I’ve been experimenting with pannekoeken for the past several weeks and will post a recipe later this week, so stay tuned!

Now…on to the biscotti!

mom’s biscotti book

I borrowed this cook book from my mom a few years ago and–like many of you moms and daughters know–it may take a while to make it back to its original owner. I know I should give it back because I certainly wouldn’t like it if someone didn’t return something they borrowed from me. But there’s sentimental value to this book that makes it difficult to part with. I love books in general, particularly second-hand books (browsing thrift stores is like a treasure hunt!) There’s already history to the book, it made fond memories for someone else (and really, can any of us associate a bad memory with our treasured books?) Pages might be marked up or dog-eared, and you might even find a memento like a receipt or business card used in place of a book mark…or something else:

Dukie (left) and Bear doing her business at the pond, circa 1989.

I made only four biscotti recipes so far, here is one of them. Biscotti are no more difficult to make than regular cookies. They use no butter so contain a LOT less fat, and are great for dunking in your coffee or tea. Aside from being a great coffee break snack, biscotti are perfect for sending to friends and family, just be sure to pack them tightly wrapped in foil and sealed in a ziploc bag.

I tried making them with spelt flour, which made them very crumbly:

Spelt flour biscotti: more crumbly, not good for shipping.

Not good for shipping, but still good for eating!

Below is the recipe for biscotti from Biscotti and Other Low-Fat Cookies by Maria Robbins. I hope you try it!

Chocolate Chip and Almond Biscotti

Chocolate Chip and Almond Biscotti

1 cup almonds, toasted (preheat oven to 350 F, spread nuts in a single layer on baking pan & roast until nuts are very hot and start to have a definite aroma, about 10-15 minutes, then cool.)
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
2 egg whites
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips mixed with 2 tablespoons flour (I skip the flour-mixing step!)
1 egg white, lightly beaten

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
2. Place 1/3 c of the toasted almonds together with 2 tablespoons of the granulated sugar in the bowl of a food processor and process to a fine meal. Remove to a small bowl. Place the remaining toasted almonds and 2 tablespoons of the granulated sugar in the food processor and pulse on and off to a coarse meal. Add this mixture to the other ground nuts.
3. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle, mix together the ground almonds, remaining sugar, flour, baking soda and salt. Add the eggs, egg whites and vanilla extract and mix at low speed until you have a dough that holds together. Remove bowl from mixer and stir in chocolate chips with a wooden spoon.
   

   brushing biscotti logs with egg white wash

4. Remove the dough to a lightly floured surface and knead for a minute or two, until the dough feels smooth. Divide into 4 equal pieces and shape each piece into a log about 12 inches long. Arrange the logs on the baking sheet, flatten the tops gently with the palm of your hand and brush the tops with the beaten egg white.
5. Bake the logs for about 20-25 minutes, until the tops are firm to the touch and lightly colored. Remove baking sheet to a wire rack and let cool for about 10 minutes, until cool enough to handle. Reduce oven temperature to 300 degrees.
   

   Bake, cool, slice, then bake again.

6. Slide the baked logs, one at a time, onto a cutting board. Use a long serrated knife (bread knife) to cut each log diagonally into ½-inch slices. Arrange the biscotti, cut sides down, on the baking sheet. Bake the biscotti for 5 minutes on each side. (Note: I increased time to 7 minutes on the 1^st side, then checked after 7 minutes on 2^nd side. They will get crisp after a couple minutes sitting out of the oven, but if they are still not crisp, put them in for 2-3 minutes more and check again.)
7. Transfer the biscotti to wire racks and let cool completely. Store the biscotti at room temperature in airtight containers. They will keep for about a month.

Yield: about 48 biscotti.

Don’t forget to check out what other WIAW bloggers are sharing at http://www.peasandcrayons.com/2012/10/what-i-ate-wednesday-92-even-more.html.

 

WIAW #9, Featuring Raw Chocolate Chip Cookies

Happy Wednesday, everybody! Jenn at Peas and Crayons is hosting our weekly blog party and there’s LOTS of delicious goodies to be found! I’m pretty excited today because not only do I have another chocolate recipe to share this week, it is a raw chocolate chip cookie recipe, perfect for this month’s WIAW theme of “sensible snacking” and my Flavor of the Week, chocolate!

Last winter I became interested in learning about raw food dieting. Not sushi kind of raw, but uncooked veggies and soaked grains kind of raw. I won’t go into a lot of detail but here’s just three easy-to-remember health benefits to a raw (or mostly raw) diet:

1) more nutrition – uncooked foods (foods heated to less than 118 degrees farenheit) retain more of their vitamins and minerals. When cooked, the nutritional value is greatly reduced and you will have to eat more food to get the nutrition your body needs (so eating raw foods can help you maintain a healthy weight, too!)

2) easier digestion – raw foods contain lots of fiber and water to help your body with elimination.  You won’t have that bloated, over-stuffed feeling after finishing a meal and no afternoon slump.

3) increased energy – since raw foods are easier to digest, your body won’t have to “shut down” while its trying to digest your food, like it might do with heavier foods like a delicious bacon cheeseburger and french fries. (Ask my husband, he’ll tell you I pretty much always crash out after eating stuff like this for lunch.)

Even if you don’t go 100% raw, you can still benefit with a chocolate green smoothie for breakfast, a colorful veggie salad for lunch, and a normal-cooked dinner with some kimchee or sauerkraut on the side (also considered raw!)

Speaking of which, here’s some of the foods I had for BL&D over the pas few days…

On Sunday morning I pulled out my juicer and made some fresh carrot-apple-ginger juice and grape juice and garnished with mint and lemon thyme. Looks good, doesn’t it?  Served up in a champagne glass, it looks like an expensive cocktail!

raw foods: fresh carrot-apple-ginger juice and grape juice

The colors alone will energize you!

Breakfast that followed was a not-so-raw peanut butter toast with raspberry preserves and coffee (recycled pic):

Lunch on Tuesday was a mish-mash salad of veggies and fruits, plus some pulverized flax seed crackers that tasted better crushed than in cracker-form. I sat down with my bowl, got my camera ready and look who decided to stick his furry orange head into my shot:

Sammy is not a vegetarian…he was after my goat cheese!

Dinner was kind of up in the air, I didn’t know what to cook, didn’t want sandwiches and my husband probably wouldn’t have wanted salad. After running a few simple options through my head I decided to make pannekoeken (Dutch style pancakes) with cheddar cheese and mushrooms:

I can’t make ’em big without breaking them, so kiddie-sized it is!

I needed some greens with this meal, so ate a bunch of sugar snap peas:

I love raw peas in the shell, especially these fat ones!

Sugar snap peas aren’t the only raw & delicious food I had today. Remember those cookies I talked about in the beginning?  Those were made from a raw cookie recipe in Judita Wignall’s, Going Raw:

Going Raw: Everything You Need to Start Your Own Raw Food Diet & Lifestyle Revolution at Home, by Judita Wignall

Judita gives a lot of easy-to-follow information on raw dieting and makes it very user-friendly. There’s tons of mouth-watering photos that will inspire you to plan out your next grocery trip with veggies in mind, and maybe even try your hand at sprouting some grains! She has a ‘live and let live’ attitude that makes her book informative, not preachy, which is really great when it comes to talking about something like healthy diets. Plus, I love her gorgeous red hair!

She has several recipes that I like, including the Ice Box Chocolate Chip Cookies I’ll be sharing today. I didn’t change the recipe much except the substitutions I wrote in parentheses, and the instructions are not copied verbatim but the steps are the same.

Yum! These raw cookies are delicious and nutritious!

Raw Chocolate Chip Cookies
From the book Going Raw by Judita Wignall 

1 1/2 cups cashews
2/3 cup Medjool dates (about 6-7 large ones, with pits)
3 tablespons almond butter (I used 2 T peanut butter and 1 T coconut oil)
1/8 teaspoon sea salt (optional)
1/4 cup raw chocolate chunks* (I substituted Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips–not raw and contains dairy–and added dried cherries)

*Judita has a raw chocolate recipe in her cook book that is gluten-free and dairy-free, but you can use any chocolate you prefer

Directions:

1. In a food processor grind the cashews into a flour.

2. Add the dates, almond butter (or peanut butter and coconut oil) and sea salt and process until it sticks together. Use a spatula to scrape down the sides as needed.

3. Transfer to a bowl and mix in the chocolate chunks/chips (and optional dried cherries) with a spatula.

4. On a nonstick surface, roll out dough to 3/8″ thickness. Cut out with a small cookie cutter and freeze (not to worry, they won’t get rock solid.) Cookies will keep for 1 month in the freezer.

Raw chocolate chip cookies!

I almost forgot…look what else you can do with these raw chocolate chip cookies:

Mini ice cream sandwiches!

Check out these Mini Cake and Ice Cream Bites from last Thursday’s Recipe ReDux. They’re just as cute!

This recipe is also my first contribution to Cookbook Sundays, sponsored by Couscous & Consciousness.

Have you tried any healthy versions of classic recipes lately? What’s your favorite cookie? :)

 

Flavor of the Week — Chocolate

When I was in the 6th grade, I did a book report on this:

Image source: http://www.amazon.com/Chocolate-Consuming-Passion-Sandra-Boynton/dp/0894801996/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340490779&sr=8-1&keywords=chocolate+the+consuming+passion

I was pretty excited about doing this report because 1) it was on chocolate and 2) I gave out samples. :)

As I talked about the different kinds of chocolate I handed out paper muffin liners of  unsweetened, bittersweet and milk chocolate chunks to the class. The students were probably more excited about the “candy” than my book report, and I recall my teacher Mrs. Higaki grimacing when she got a taste of the unsweetened chocolate (ewww, bitter! said her expression!) I don’t remember what grade I got, but I remember being really excited about sharing one of my favorite things in the world: food! (and chocolate food, no less!)

So this week’s Flavor of the Week is the very popular happy-go-lucky CHOCOLATE!

In the vanilla Flavor of the Week post a couple weeks ago I mentioned my parents recently sending me a dozen home-grown vanilla beans. You know what else they sent? Hawaii-grown cacao nibs!  They’re about the size of a brazil nut and are processed similarly to coffee (fermented, dried, roasted.) But rather than a berry, these nibs grow in a large, thick-rinded pod that is harvested off the tree trunk:

Cacao pods, image source: http://superfoodinfos.com/top-three-antioxidants/

And, like vanilla, cacao was also cultivated by the Aztecs (they got the best of both worlds, didn’t they?)

Deconstruction of a roasted cacao bean

But with chocolate, it’s hard to get the best of both worlds. You get the antioxidant benefits of cocoa, but the unhealthy effects of sugar. Thankfully chocolate is just an occasional indulgence so enjoying a few sweet treats every now and then won’t reverse all the other good things you do for your health (like eating fresh fruits and veggies, taking your vitamins, exercising, and having fun while you’re at it!) But if you’re like me and are looking to cut down on dairy and wheat, then today is your lucky day!

I love homemade chocolate chip cookies, nothing beats the crispy-chewy texture from the butter and flour (or so I thought) until I came across a really good alternative to the traditional chocolate chip cookie recipe. Cutting back on my wheat and dairy, I wanted a chocolate chip cookie recipe that used neither wheat flour nor butter, and I happened across a wonderful cookie recipe at “Angie and James do stuff.” In her recipe, Angie uses spelt flour and hazelnut meal instead of all-purpose flour. That already sounded great! Although I made a few substitutions, I REALLY liked the results, and so did my husband. So much, in fact, that he even ate the burnt ones! (can you imagine how delicious the normal cookies were??) To view the original recipe, click here. Thank you, Angie, for letting me use your delicious recipe…it was just what I needed! :)

Thin, crispy, chewy chocolate chip cookies!

Chocolate Chip Cookies: wheat-free, dairy-free*

3/4 cup spelt flour
3/4 cup ground almonds (texture of cornmeal)
1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon brown sugar
1/3 cup white sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup dairy-free semisweet chocolate chips*
1/2 cup coconut oil, softened
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

*I used Nestle semisweet chocolate chips, which has milk fat, but items like Ghiarardelli semi sweet chocolate chips, Guittard semi sweet chocolate chips, and Enjoy Life semi sweet chocolate chips have no dairy ingredients listed. I have used Ghirardelli in previous cookie recipes and the texture/consistency were very similar (if not same) to Nestle’s.

Directions:

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Prepare a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or silpat.

With a wire whisk, combine dry ingredients (except chocolate chips.) Add softened coconut oil and mash into mixture until coarse but well-combined. Sprinkle in vanilla and add egg. Stir in chocolate chips.

Scoop rounded teaspoons of cookie mix onto baking sheet 2″ apart. Bake for 5-6 minutes or until edges are browned and middle is golden.

Remove from oven and cool on wire rack. Store in airtight container, will keep for 2 days before they are all gone!

Coconut oil makes them spread more, but the addition of ground almonds give them a different taste and texture from a traditional chocolate chip cookie.

Nooooo!!!

Not to worry, Wolfie doesn’t like cookies; he was just wondering what I was up to!

Do you have a twist on the traditional chocolate chip cookie? What was the BEST TASTING cookie you ever had? (If you have a pic, I’d love to see it!)