Spoons!!

The title of this post is a tribute to my beloved family members who know what I'm talking about with the single-word title "spoon!" AND to my good friend, Mipa, who has helped me to take this new step.  Whoa, that sounds like I'm going to announce a $1 million donation to a charity....  It's not quite that momentous.  But it is meaningful.  And delicious!

This evening I baked my first ever batch of vegan cookies.  I just bit into my third crispy-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside chocolate chip cookie and washed it down with a gulp of almond milk. It's been somewhat of a process to get to this point, so if you may, please indulge a little bit of background information!

A few weeks ago, I went with my dad to Oakmont Bakery - a local family-owned bakery selling a variety of breads, bagels, cookies, cakes, and other sweets.  Some are cute....

Some are creative...

And lots are that oh-so-delectable color of brown:

I figured there probably wouldn't be any vegan chocolate stuff, but I thought there might be some bread or bagel options.  When I inquired about this possibility to the young woman behind the counter, I could see that she must have been asked this before, because she quickly replied, "the only thing in here without eggs or milk is the Italian bread."  Well, that's one product.  So we bought it.  Along with some bagels and cookies.

I keep telling myself, "it doesn't hurt to ask."  It may actually help.  How can shops and restaurants even know there is a market for vegan food if no one ever shows an interest?  And some people are interested in egg-free, dairy-free food for the health benefits alone.  Anyway, the bread was great.  It was hard and crusty on the outside, but airy and chewy on the inside.  I ate some toasted slices for a couple of breakfasts, smeared with peanut butter and sprinkled with ground up flax seeds.

And those cookies that my dad bought....  I ate some.  Yup.  When people ask me, "so you don't ever eat anything with milk or eggs in it?" I usually say, "well, sometimes I eat things like birthday cake or cookies."  And that's the truth.  There are so many vegan options available at home and in restaurants, that I pretty much never have a problem feeding myself delicious meals and snacks.  But I haven't found any vegan baked goods in my area.  So I tend to tell myself, "you're eating this because there is no vegan version/alternative."  But after eating those cookies, I started asking myself why I cave into the milk and eggs of cookies, but never eat straight-up scrambled eggs, yogurt, cheese, coffee creamers, etc..  What's the difference?  Once I asked myself that question and allowed myself to answer, I heard this: I don't really have a clear desire not to eat those animals products, because I don't have a clear reason not to eat them.  I had guessed that diary cows don't live very good lives, and that laying hens probably don't either.  But did I really know?  No.  Have I ever been to an egg or dairy facility?  No.  Are there pictures or videos of these places in their advertisements or on the packaging of their products?  Once again, no.  So, to get a visualization of where eggs and dairy products come from, I turned to the podcaster that Mipa introduced me to: Colleen Patrick-Goudreau.  I downloaded a few of her "Vegetarian Food for Thought" podcasts (free on iTunes and other places).  I listened to a few, such as these: "What's wrong with eating eggs since the chickens aren't killed?" and "Aren't free-range eggs better than eggs from battery cage hens?" and "Where do I get my calcium if I don't drink cow's milk?" and "How humane are 'humane' meat, eggs and dairy?"  Great questions, with great answers and "ways forward" provided upon listening!

A few fast facts for you, taken from those podcasts:

- Why does dairy milk have calcium in it?  Where does calcium come from?  Calcium is a mineral, so it comes from the ground.  Things that grow out of the ground, like grass, absorb this calcium.  Cows eat grass, so their milk contains calcium.  Well, cows used to eat grass, in the days that they roamed around a grassy field outside the barn during the day.  Now they live day and night inside huge (and dirty) crowded concrete and metal buildings and eat "feed," which does not contain much calcium.  So feed producers take calcium from the ground, and add it to the feed.  All this so that humans can have calcium.

- Does a female dairy cow just naturally produce milk?  No.  She is artificially impregnated (over and over again) so that she will lactate, so that humans can drink her milk.

- When her calf is born, if it's a male, it becomes veal.  If it's female, she becomes a dairy cow.

- The most common affliction affecting dairy cows (50% of all dairy herds) is chronic mastitis: a painful, sore infection of the udder.  However, the cows are still milked, causing blood and pus from their infections to end up in the milk consumed by humans.  (Got that one from this website.)

- Inside a dairy facility, a diary cow stops producing a "profitable" amount of milk around the age 5 years, due to being constantly impregnated and milked for an amount that is much more than what is natural, without any respite for her body to have time to recover.  (In real life, outside the dairy industry, a cow's typical life span is 20 years and beyond.)  At this "teenager" point in her life, she is labeled "spent" and sent to a processing plant to be killed and have her flesh sold as "beef."

- Can we get plenty of calcium anywhere else?  Yes.  We can't eat grass, but we can eat other greens that come from the (mineral/calcium-containing) ground, like spinach, kale, collard greens, turnip greens, okra, and broccoli.  Other high calcium foods: black beans, chickpeas and other beans, figs, seaweed, almonds, fortified OJ and non-dairy milks, tofu and other soy products (soy yogurt, veggie burgers, tempeh), oatmeal, black strap molasses....

To say the least, once I allowed myself to listen to the thoughtful and well-researched information in those and other podcasts, I pretty much lost any desire to eat anything that contains the milk of a cow (or goat for that matter) or the egg of a chicken. Chocolate is bliss, but ignorance is not.  Knowledge about this area of food, however, is easily attainable, and leads me to living my life with more integrity, more compassion, and more joy.  Turning down offers for cookies, cake and other beautiful-looking goodies - yes, even that is more blissful than eating them.

Really?  You may not believe me.  That's a good thing.  As I like to say, don't believe anything just because someone else does, or because someone else tells you to.  Investigate it and try it yourself.

Something I wanted to try for myself was cooking up a batch of something deliciously chocolaty and vegan.  Giant Eagle didn't have any vegan chocolate chips, but Whole Foods did!

At $3.49 a pack, they are a bit pricier than the normal chocolate chips that inevitably have milk or a milk derivative in them.  Some things are worth it, though.  At least, that's the mission I was out to pursue.

Step One:  Consult this recipe from Mipa's blog, Alien's Day Out.

Step Two:  Pre-heat the oven and break out those cruelty-free ingredients!

Step Three:  Figure out how to convert the measurements from grams to cups and tablespoons and go at it!

The conversions were a bit difficult to calculate.  As you can see, the proportions of wet and dry did not meld too well....

I added some more oil and water and was able to produce a ball of dough of nice consistency.  So I poured in those vegan chocolate chips and mixed it up as much as I could.  I had probably added too much oil and too many chips, because they seemed to keep slipping out of the dough, and I ended up taking some out of the bowl!  Once I was satisfied enough, I made the official announcement to the household that the dough was ready to be sampled before being cooked by calling out: "SPOONS!"

I haven't made cookies in yearrrrrs, but I definitely haven't forgotten my family's tradition of happily sharing the gobs of raw cookie dough, one spoonful at a time.  The only difference this time around was that the risk of salmonella was zero percent!

The flavor was a nice twist to the common chocolate chip cookie goodness.  Mipa's recipe is actually for Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies, but since I didn't have any mint extract, I decided to use almond extract, just for fun.  Dad and Janet gave their taste-test approval, so I arranged some balls of dough on cookie sheets and stuck them in the oven.

After eating about 3 spoonfuls of dough, the recipe yielded 17 cookies.  They seemed to take longer than the 9-10 minutes of recommended baking, so I gave them another minute or two.  I used a toothpick to gauge when they were done, and ended up with a batch of plump chocolate pastries!

All members of the house ate a few, remarked that they didn't think cookies could be made without eggs, and gave great reviews!  Dad even got out a special china dish to spruce up the presentation.

Here's the recipe, with my alterations and ideas for next time noted:

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (170 degrees C).

Sift and mix together these dry ingredients in large bowl:

140 grams (1 1/4 c) flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/8 tsp salt

In a small bowl, whisk together sugar and wet ingredients:

100 grams (1/2 cup) sugar

25 grams (2 Tbsp) grapeseed or canola oil (I had neither so used olive oil)

25 grams (2 Tbsp) water

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp mint extract (I used almond extract again, which makes for a bit different flavor)

6 grams (1/4 tsp) black strap molasses

Pour the wet ingredient mixture into the large bowl of dry ingredients and combine well.

At this point, I ended up adding almost another 1/4 cup of water and 1/4 Tbsp of oil.

(Next time, I wouldn't add as much oil, because it made the dough a little too slippery for the chocolate chips to adhere to.)

Add 30 grams of chocolate chips to the dough and combine.

I ended up adding less than half of the 340 gram (12 oz) chocolate chip package, and that may have been too much.  With this many chocolate chips to go around, next time I will probably double the dough ingredients and end up with more cookies!

Bake in oven for 9-10 minutes.

The oven I used may be a little off... but I had to let the cookies bake for 12 or more minutes.  However, I forgot that they would continue "baking" even after I put them on the drying rack.  So they tasted a wee bit dry.  But nothing that a glass of non-dairy milk couldn't cover.  Mental note: take the cookies out of the oven when they look like they are almost done!

Well, I'm happy to say that the family members and I thoroughly enjoyed eating my first attempt at vegan cookies, that they went scrumptiously (and ironically) well with a glass of almond milk, and that I still have more than half a bag of chocolate chips left for a different recipe!  Oh yeah!  Be on the lookout for what that may be!