Grain-Free Sandwich Cookies With Pumpkin Butter

I have been on a kick, going back to old Foraged Dish recipes and taking new photos. It is insanely satisfying to compare the old ones to the new. Progress is difficult to measure day-by-day, but all of those days add up! I’m sure, in three years, I’ll look back at my photos from 2018 and roll my eyes. C'est la vie.

These sandwich cookies were one of my recent victims, and since it is the season for baking and pumpkin, I thought it would be a good opportunity to update the whole post. That means a few updates to the recipe, too:

• Simplified. The original asked for both almond flour and coconut flour, but since 2015 I’ve discovered a much simpler grain-free shortbread cookie using just almond flour. I quite like the texture of the cookies, too! They are a bit chewy, stay together well, and have great almond and honey flavor.

• Drizzled with chocolate. How can you make a boring cookie look a little fancier? Maybe you’re thinking frosting, which is true, but since this cookie is a sandwich I wanted the filling to shine. I drizzled each cookie with chocolate, which was just the right touch!

• Doubled it. More is better right? In this case, there’s no doubt: the original recipe made about 6 sandwich cookies… what was 2015-me thinking?!?! A dozen is much more reasonable (but you still may want to double that if you’re cooking for a crowd).

Once baked, these cookies are stuffed with pumpkin butter, so the end result tastes a bit like pumpkin pie. Perfect match with a cappuccino! But I also experimented with filling the cookies with salted caramel. Oh. My. Goodness. Now that’s a treat! A bit like an alfajore, if you are familiar. I am definitely going to need to make an alfajore recipe now (Foraged Dish style, of course!).

Grain-Free Sandwich Cookies with Pumpkin Butter

Published October 26, 2015 by Caitlin Sherwood

Yield: 12-24, depending on size   |    Active Time: 60 minutes

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Ingredients:

2 cups finely ground almond flour

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 cup butter or coconut oil, melted

1/4 cup honey

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 cup pumpkin butter

1/4 cup dark chocolate

Directions:

1. In a medium mixing bowl, combine the almond flour, salt, and baking soda. Whisk until incorporated. Add the melted butter or coconut oil, honey, and vanilla, and stir until a dough forms. Shape dough into a disc (about 1 inch thick), wrap in plastic wrap, and place in fridge for 30 minutes to 1 hour to chill.
2. Preheat oven to 325°F. After dough has chilled, remove from fridge. Cut a piece of parchment paper to fit your baking pan.
3. On a separate piece of parchment, use a rolling pin to roll dough out to 1/4-inch thickness. Use cookie cutters to cut circles out of dough and place on baking sheet, with at least 1/2 inch between each cookie. Bake for 9 minutes, until golden. Allow to cool.
4. Once cookies are fully cooled, spread pumpkin butter on one cookie, and then use another to create a sandwich. Set aside, and then continue until all of the cookies are sandwiched.
5. Heat the chocolate in a microwave-safe bowl for 30-second intervals (string between each!) until chocolate is glossy and smooth. You can also do this in a double boiler (stir frequently). Drizzle melted chocolate over sandwich cookies. Allow chocolate to set before serving cookies.
6. Tip: You can use any sort of jam to fill these cookies! I also made a few with salted caramel sauce and they were SO. GOOD.

Baked Oatmeal Apples

Mornings are the best. (Who’s with me?) They are the best for a pretty specific reason (IMO), and that’s the peace and quiet they bring (morning lovers will understand). That peace and quiet is largely possible due to routine for me. And it’s really hard to change something about your morning routine. I’ve tried adding in meditation (lasted about 14 days), journalling, and stretching, but none of them stick. What I usually find that adding more in just brings unnecessary stress during those early hours. When it comes to mornings, I’m all for simplifying.

Which is why lately, I’ve been doing my best to make breakfast in batches one or two times a week (things like casseroles, baked oatmeal, and frittatas) so that when I wake up there is one less thing to do as part of my routine. I usually do this on weekends, when there’s no rush to get out of the house.

This breakfast (almost dessert…) is one of my favorites in the fall. Baked apples are filled to the brim with baked oatmeal and warm spices, like nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon. With a little whipped cream, they even make a sweet dessert later in the day.

Baked Oatmeal Apples

Published October 25, 2018 by Caitlin Sherwood

Serves: 6   |    Active Time: 60 minutes

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Ingredients:

6 crisp apples

2 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled

3 tablespoons maple syrup

1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup whole milk yogurt

1 egg yolk

1 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 cup rolled oats

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/16 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Pinch of ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup chopped pecans

To serve: plain or vanilla yogurt

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375°F.
2. Using a paring knife, cut the tops off the apples and save for step 5. Using a spoon with sharper edges, such as a melon baller, scoop out the apple core and some of the flesh. Be sure the leave at least a 1/4-inch thick outer wall of apple all the way around. Reserve the flesh you’ve removed from the apples, discard of the seeds and pith.
3. Chop up the reserved apple flesh and place in a medium mixing bowl, along with the melted butter, maple syrup, milk, yogurt, egg yolk, and vanilla. Stir to combine.
4. Add the dry ingredients to the bowl: rolled oats, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, baking powder, salt, and chopped pecans. Stir until full combined.
5. Arrange apples in a baking dish and scoop oat mixture into the cavity of each apple. Place the apple tops back on, and place baking dish on center wrack in oven. Bake 35-45 minutes, until apples are baked though.
6. Allow to cool 5-10 minutes before serving. Serve on plates with yogurt (for breakfast) or whipped cream (for dessert).

Sweet Potato & Kale Breakfast Skillet

This post was written three times over, which is two times more than the norm. First I wrote about something so unremarkable I can’t even remember it. Later that night I read an article on climate change and it left me unsatisfied. Shouldn’t I write about something worth taking action on? Something that actually matters? So then I wrote the post again, and attempted to find that perfect balance you need to strike when writing a post like this — but I’m not sure I ever found it. So, fair warning: it is a bit of a rant. If you’d prefer to just scroll right on by and get the recipe, I won’t even know it.

“Perfection is the enemy of good and done,” so let’s just get down to it.

8,030. That’s how many days are in twenty-two years.

It will be the year 2040. By then, I’ll be 49.

How about you?

By 2040, the International Panel on Climate Change predicts the planet will increase in temperature by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (you may already know this, it’s not the newest of news). It’s a minuscule difference, something that seems like nothing — barely discernible to the human body - but oh, it is most certainly not nothing.

The impact of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit? “Worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs.”

This blog has never touched on political issues before. That was intentional. And that’s not likely to change, aside from this one blog post. (TBH, it's absurd to me that keeping our planet live-able is even a political issue.) But I felt a need to say something, to spread the word, so here we are.

Because in the end all of us — you, me, and 7.2 billion other people - have to face this together. And while it feels, in so many ways, out of our hands (I get it), it doesn’t mean we can’t try.

I am a fairly environmentally conscious person but have never been an extremist by any definition, so I’ve been thinking about what I can do that still fits into my life. Tiny things that will add up. I already drive a hybrid car (though I could take the time to walk more places!), and we compost and recycle regularly. But what else?

Here is my running list so far — things that have just been on my mind.

• No food waste. I have already been much more aware of food waste and what it means to eat “root to stem” in the last few months. We are still eating crops harvested from the garden, but our first frost hit earlier this month so very few crops are still growing. Of course I knew this would happen, but going from growing most of our own food to figuring out how to preserve what we have has made me super aware of how the first homesteaders had their work cut out for them just to get through winter — and here I can just pop over to the store when our pile of squash runs out (or when we just don’t want to eat squash!!). So what? Eating local is on just about every “how to live an eco-friendly life” list,  but it’s just not realistic in every location. Our Farmer’s Market is only around in the fair weather months, and all I’ll be harvesting for the next six months is hearty greens. I’ll have to buy some food that was produced far, far away, and that’s just reality (at least for me, in the suburbs, where growing tons of grow beans, grain, or livestock isn’t realistic). But when I do, I’ll do my absolute best to make sure not a bit of it goes to waste. (Eh-hem, like that suuuupper crusty sourdough I made last week, which was basically a giant bread cracker. Strata, stuffing, bread crumbs... here we come!)

• Buy less. In college, I had a self-enforced rule that when I wanted to buy something (new clothes, jewelry, etc), I would put it on a list and wait for a month. If I still wanted it in a month, then I really wanted it — it wasn’t just an impulse buy. Back then, the rule was put into place because of financial reasons (college student making minimum wage!), but it’s a really practical rule. It is easy to get just about anything delivered to your door overnight now, and sometimes our recycling bin fills up over the course of just a few days! It’s not just the packaging thought — the amount of energy that goes into getting something from point A to B is a lot!

• Tame my wanderlust. I get this craving to see new places — to see the world. (Typical Millennial of me). But one round trip cross-country is a lot of greenhouse gases, and driving — or better yet carpooling - is more efficient in terms of CO2 emissions. I am very lucky to have travel a lot over the last twenty years, which I am so thankful for. Those trips molded my mind and made me who I am. But! There is no denying that all those plane tickets fuel an industry that’s putting of a lot of greenhouse gases. So, next time a case of wanderlust creeps up on me, I’m going to try to remember this paragraph, and go somewhere local instead. (Just this last weekend, we did a biking brewery tour of a near-by town and it was like being on vacation — so many places right here I’ve never seen!)

• Support brands making eco-friendly decisions. I am just one person, but companies are made up of dozens (if not hundreds) of people, and are serving many many more. When they make eco-friendly decisions (like using recycled packaging, buying organic ingredients, or avoiding harsh chemicals) they make a big difference faster.

• Collect and reuse water. For a long time in the state of Colorado, collecting rainwater was not permitted, but that changed two years ago. I’ve considered getting water barrels for watering my plants several times, but have never actually done it. Recently, I’ve been pondering what other water can be collected — for example, using water from rinsing dishes (avoiding harsh soaps) to water trees. A half baked plan, just something in my head.

We’re also considering getting solar panels on our house, but that’s not so much a resolution as it is something we’ve always planned to do.

That’s it for today. Just a rant and a resolution. And a breakfast!! Something that you can totally make from local ingredients almost no matter where you live, all year round.

Sweet Potato & Kale Breakfast Skillet

Published October 18, 2018 by Caitlin Sherwood

Serves: 3   |    Active Time: 30 minutes

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Ingredients:

1 sweet potato, diced

2 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 yellow onion, diced

1 tablespoon coconut oil

1 packed cup kale, chopped small

Salt & pepper

3 eggs

1/4 cup goat cheese crumbles

Directions:

1. Heat coconut oil in skillet over medium heat. Add diced onion, minced garlic, and cubed sweet potato to pan. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 15 minutes.
2. Add chopped kale, and cook for 2 minutes, allowing greens to wilt.
3. Crack the eggs into the pan. Cook for 3-5 more minutes, until egg whites are cooked through and yolks are cooked to your preferences. Top with crumbled goat cheese, and season to taste with salt & pepper. Serve hot.