The Most Nutritional Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

A few years ago, I got into this sort of health food kick, along with several of my friends. At that time, I was first really getting into cooking, so I was trying hard to come up with healthy versions of my favorite meals. This was right after the short period of time when I'd finally started to gain weight from eating junk food and, since I just can't give up my favorite foods, I really needed an alternative!

Once I started to bake more often for friends and family, though, the experimentation died down. I didn't want to chance serving anybody something that didn't turn out right and I didn't want to have to eat my experiments alone, so I just stuck with the more traditional recipes. My own eating habits were generally fine, though--I'm really a fresh fruit for dessert and pasta for dinner kind of girl--but since I've become much more interested in cooking and baking, I've started to gain weight again. In the past year, I've probably gained around 10 pounds and gone up one full size...so many jeans...so painful on my hips, haha.

So, my mission is back on! With my successes in the past (such as my delicious 80 calorie cheesecake!) and better experience, I'm confident I can easily come up with new, healthier alternatives to keep myself (and Billy) on the right track. I decided to start it off by making a batch of my nutritional oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

These cookies are soft, chewy, sweet, nutty, and full of nutritional value! To an extent, of course. I took a basic oatmeal cookie recipe from the Quaker Oats container and heavily altered it, replacing most of the "bad" fats with "good." In 4 dozen cookies, there are only 4 1/2 tbsp of butter and 1 egg; that's roughly .09 tbsp of butter per cookie! Of course, I replaced them both with other fatty ingredients, such as ground almonds and flaxseed meal, but these contain the "good" fats. Should you devour a dozen cookies in one sitting? Probably not. But you definitely shouldn't feel as guilty. That's why I don't consider these low cal/low fat cookies, but rather "nutritional," which I think should be the happy medium.

The ingredients may sound odd to anyone who's not used to them, but it can't hurt to give it a try, right? I have a problem where I like to hide certain ingredients from people because I know very well that something can taste different to you if you're prepared for it to suck. For instance, Billy doesn't like vegetables, so when I put parsnips in our pot pie last winter, I didn't let him know; while he picked around the carrots, he ate every last parsnip...because he thought they were chunks of potato ;) Obviously, he doesn't hate parsnips! But if I'd told him what they were, you can bet he'd have eaten around them. My mom takes issue with this, likes to harass me about it...but I'm not trying to feed someone something truly disgusting or something they're truly against eating. Maybe I make turkey meatballs and don't tell anybody they're not beef, but I'm not making liver meatballs!



Anyway, the purpose of this confession is that I've given these cookies to plenty of people without saying a word about the replacement ingredients and the only reactions I've ever gotten is a want for more. To me, that means that these taste just like any other cookie; not some weird nutritional hybrid. I think anybody looking for a more nutritious alternative to replace a particular sweet you like to snack on all day should try this!

Nutritional Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies


Ingredients

• 1 3/4 cups all purpose or whole wheat flour (or a combination)
• 1 heaping tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 4 1/2 tbsp butter
• a little over 3/4 cup honey
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 cup flaxseed meal
• 1 large egg
• 3 tsp flaxseed meal + 1/4 cup cold water (mixed together)
• 4 1/2 tsp milk
• 2 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 1 cup finely ground almonds
• 2 1/2 cups oats
• 1 1/2 cups dark or bittersweet chocolate morsels (mini are best because they'll spread out more)
• 1 1/2 cups dried fruit

You can do any combination of mix-ins that you like...dried fruit, chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, cinnamon chips, toffee chips, chopped nuts. Don't be afraid to experiment and find what combination you like best!

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Combine flour, baking soda, and salt in a small bowl. Beat the butter with the honey and sugar until creamy. Beat in the flaxseed, egg, flax/water mixture, milk, and vanilla; add ground almonds. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in oats, morsels, and dried fruit. 

Drop by rounded tbsp onto a baking sheet. This recipe makes approximately 4 dozen cookies, so you can use multiple sheets or make multiple batches. I like to roll the dough into a ball with my hands, so I recommend greasing them with vegetable oil because it's very, very sticky. I, in fact, have to wash my hands every so often and re-oil them. It works out well, though! Perfect, precious little mounds of cookie :)

Bake approximately 13 minutes; the cookies should be a golden brown. Let cool on wax paper.