If You Give A Mouse A Cookie... in Reverse (How My Morning Was Hijacked)

I love those childhood stories where one thing leads to another.  The mouse and the cookie.  The moose and the muffin.  They really capture how my mind works!

Except this past weekend, I had the reverse happen to me.  Let me 'splain.

Saturday morning, I woke up with the intent of making my weekly batch of Trim Healthy Mama E pancakes.  (These are my favorite way of getting my E meals in, by the way.)

My carton of egg whites were thawed and ready.  My oats were ready to grind.  My brain was awakened  by coffee.  Let's go!

Ahhhhh!  I was out of cottage cheese... the one thing that I had forgotten in my previous day's Costco run.

So, if you take from a mouse her cottage cheese, and said mouse really needed to come up with an E meal, our mouse decided to make granola!

And if mouse is making E granola, why not come up with S granola at the same time? So with a little help from Pinterest, I was off and running.

My pancake morning morphed into a granola morning.  So let me share my recipes, which you can tweak to your heart's content.  Both recipes contain egg white, adding that protein element.

Oatmeal Cookie Granola  (THM E)
3 cups old fashioned oats
3/4 cup egg whites (or 3 egg whites)
1/2 cup THM Gentle Sweet (or your favorite on-plan sweetener that is double the sweetness of sugar)
1 T. melted butter or coconut oil (I did half of each)
1 t. vanilla
1 t. baking soda
1 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. mineral salt

Mix all ingredients well. Spread onto  a large cookie sheet and bake at 350 for about 25 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Nuttty Granola (THM S)
1 cup almonds
1 cup hazelnuts
1 cup pecans
1 cup flaked coconut
1 cup flax meal
3/4 cup egg whites (or 3 egg whites)
1/2 cup Gentle Sweet (see note above)
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 t. mineral salt

In food processor, pulse the harder nuts (almonds and hazelnuts, in this case) until well-broken up.  Add pecans and coconut, pulse further until nice and crumbly.  Pour into a bowl, add remaining ingredients, and mix well.  Spread onto a cookie sheet and bake at 350 for about 20-25 minutes, stirring often.

Because these recipes include egg white, I am refrigerating my granola in glass jars, labeled E and S.

E on left, S on right

The next thing I had to do in the kitchen was make something for the church picnic that was happening the following day.  My intention was to make the Trimtastic Holiday Pumpkin Roll (Trim Healthy Table, page 393).  I even had my shredded yellow summer squash ready to go for it.  But then something changed in my brain (I'm not sure what), and I decided to make my favorite pre-THM cookie recipe instead:  molasses spice cookies, which I Trim-Healthy-Mama-fied.  Here is the result of my efforts.

Molasses Spice Cookies (THM S)
3/4 cup coconut oil
*1/2 cup Gentle Sweet (or sweetener that is 2x sugar sweetness)
1 egg and 1 egg white (or just use 2 eggs)
2 T. molassas
2 doonks pure stevia
**1 1/2 cups THM baking blend
2 t. baking soda
1 T. gelatin
***1 t. cinnamon
***1/2 t. each of cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and mineral salt

Melt oil and cool slightly.  Add sweetener, egg, and molassas and whisk well.
Meanwhile, combine remaining ingredients in a medium bowl.  Add wet ingredients and mix well.  Form balls, roll in a little bowl of Gentle Sweet, and press them down slightly onto a baking mat or parchment.  Bake at 375 for 9-10 minutes.

* For a homemade Gentle Sweet recipe, click here.

** For a homemade baking blend recipe, click here.

***I love these cookies so much that I mix up a batch of the spice blend, and use 1 tablespoon of it for this recipe.  Two parts cinnamon, and one part each of cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and salt.

These cookies were Left Behind and never made it to the church picnic.

(O the rebel in me - I was assigned a side dish, but one does not simply go to a church function that contains no dessert that one can eat.  So my side dish was cookies.)

Another note about those cookies - the molasses.  Molasses contains about 15 grams of carbs per tablespoon.  Used mostly for color in this recipe, which makes about 15-17 good-sized cookies, the molasses only adds just under 2 carbs per cookie.

And one more note (the last, I promise) on these cookies.  My friend Vicky suggested adding gelatin to my recipe, and it worked wonders!  It made the cookies soft, chewy, and not as crumbly as my original recipe.  The only other change I made to the recipe was to add the egg white, because the addition of the gelatin made the dough a little too dry.

I know you are thinking, "but what about your thawed summer squash?"  Or maybe you were so enthralled by the spice cookies that you have forgotten  all about it.  But I had to deal with the thawed stuff, so I squeezed out the water, threw in some baking blend, salt, pepper, Trader Joe's 21 Spice Salute, salt, pepper, and egg whites.  Then I made little patties/blobs and fried them in some butter and coconut oil for a delicious S lunch side dish - Fritters!  They were delicious and even my hubby loved them.

My veggie-heavy garden season lunch.  Fritters are on the left.