Bff Food Project: Oat'n Almond Meal Chocolate Chip Cookies: Wheat/Gluten free, dairy/cow milk free, vegan

Sing it with me, "C is for COOKIE it's good enough for me, hey! and REPEAT!" No wonder why I'm not loosing any weight these days. I'm obsessed with baking things that everyone can eat and will actually enjoy! Besides, it's always nice to have "treat" recipes on hand when you need to bring something special to someone's house for dinner and not have to worry about bringing multiple options for people with food issues. It gets insane, it really does. I'm always happy to bake or bring options, especially since my family are the high maintenance ones. ;-)

The ultimate comfort food for me, and many others I've compared notes with, is the good ole chocolate chip cookie. They are requested by my kids almost as often as pancakes. Years ago I used to love going to PCC (a natural food store in WA) to get some yummy Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies. I thought maybe they'd have a recipe for them on their website. With a quick search, I found a recipe on their website for Wheat-free Chocolate Chip Cookies that I've linked to here. The recipe was originally created by Post-Punk Kitchen. I changed a few thing to add my own nutty/coco nutty/super vanillaee twist and the result are some insanely yummy cookies. I'm actually eating one, um two, while I type this. To note, my recipes will always be heavy on the vanilla since our family motto is "you can never have too much vanilla".

My kids can eat nuts at home (away from the insane amount of kids at school who can't.) I really love the health benefit for nuts but my kids don't like whole nuts baked into their cookies. So, I'm taking a cue from my "Blue Velvet Blueberry Muffins" , I decided to use blended nuts (almond meal) instead. I've been wanting to use some of my Trader Joe's Almond Meal that was sitting in my pantry stash anyway. The taste is so "nutty", go figure ;-) and I love the stuff. Elana's Pantry, a gluten free site which uses primarily almond flour, recommends using almond flour and not the almond meal because the almond flour uses blanched almonds and the almond meal does not. She's talking mainly about her own recipes. I like the unbalanced almonds though, so I thought I would just try using it in my cookies, to see what would happen. I decided to use a combination of Bob's Redmill Gluten Free Oat Flour and Trader Joe's Almond Meal as my flour in these cookies, instead of just using Oat flour.

I'm a huge fan these days of So Delicious Coconut milk. At 90 calories a cup and a texture that foams, it's an excellent replacement for cow's milk. It's really smooth and creamy, just like the container says.

A chocolate chip cookie is only as good as the chocolate chips that are used it them. You can quote me on that. ;-) I've been using the Guittard brand for years since it was one of the only ones, for a long time, that didn't have any dairy derivitaves it them. They do contain soy lecithin in them. There are brands, like Enjoy Life Chocolate Chips, that don't have any ingredients that are known allergens.