These Kitchen Sink Cookies ROCK! In honour of Earth Day, Danni and I are teaming up with Community Natural Foods to bring you creative and fun ways to reduce food waste in your home. It was about 10 years ago that I really started taking recycling, composting and food waste seriously. I have to say, I am not the most extreme. I am known though to sanitize and re-use my zip loc bags over and over and go through the garbage in the kids bathroom to make sure there is no hidden recycling. With the onset of residential compost service and pick up in our area, I have our family heavily utilizing the compost bin and drastically reducing our waste output. BUT wow, do you see how much food you are wasting. In the past few months I have some discovered some tricks and fun ways to reduce our food waste. Make sure you check in later this week for our post on the Top 10 Ways to Reduce Food Waste in the Home!
A couple of weeks ago, I was just minding my own business cleaning the kitchen counters, when I opened a drawer that holds all my baking ingredients. Have you even gone down the rabbit hole, and before you know it you are obsessively cleaning out drawers and noticing how many half bags of chocolate chips, coconut, random dried fruits are living there? Yup, that happened. So what is a gal to do but clean that shit up and create a “everything but the kitchen sink” cookie that serves a few purposes. First, warm refined sugar free / gluten free cookies are never a bad thing for the kids to come home to and second – I’m not wasting a darn thing!
While I was cleaning out this mess of a drawer, I committed to taking on the bulk section of the grocery store. Did you know that Community Natural Foods has an incredibly thorough bulk section – a few pretty reusable jars and my drawer was clean…
As you can see below, my baking drawer was stuffed with half used bags…
Check out the recipe below, and be creative!
Kitchen Sink Cookies
Clean out your pantry and put everything but the kitchen sink in these gluten free, refined sugar free cookies!
Ingredients
1 tablespoon chia seeds
3 tablespoons water
2 cups oats
1 cup almond meal
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt
6 tablespoons coconut oil, softened
3 tablespoons pure maple syrup
2 tablespoons almond butter
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup shredded coconut
1 cup total of “MIX-INS” – this is the odds and ends from your pantry! I like dark chocolate chips, dried cherries, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds – but really anything you want to throw in will work!
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Place chia seeds and water in a small bowl and set aside for 5-10 minutes for the seeds to form a gel.
Pulse 1 1/2 cups oats in a food processor until ground into a flour, about 1-2 minutes. Add almond meal, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt and pulse to combine. Add the chia mixture, coconut oil, sugar, maple syrup, almond butter and vanilla extract and pulse until combined.
Transfer dough to a large bowl and stir in the remaining 1/2 cup oats, coconut and your mix-ins.
Scoop ping pong sized balls of dough onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake 10-12 minutes until lightly golden. Let cool on the baking sheet 10 minutes, then transfer to a cooling rack to continue cooling.
** Just a note from the “test kitchen” – because these cookies have very little sweetener, try and include at least one item for your mix-in’s that has some sweetness to it (ie. chocolate chips, dried fruit) – they will be more “loved” by your teens then! 🙂 Also, feel free to substitute or add any spice like clove or nutmeg if you have a few dregs in the bottom of your spice jar!
Kitchen Sink Cookies – clean out your pantry or baking drawer and not only do you get the satisfaction of a job well done, but who doesn’t like a cookie as a reward?
Good luck with the cleaning and the cookies … for once that slightly anal side of you results in yummy snacks for your teens 🙂
xx
C
What a great post! They look absolutely amazing. Definitely going to try them out 🙂 Thank you for sharing and please keep up the good work
Enjoy! Let us know how they turn out!!