Taste&Create: 4 Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies

Hi everyone! Look at me, blogging on a Tuesday like I'm supposed to. I was super excited to be paired with Dragon Musings for this month's Taste&Create. She has 3 kids, I believe, and does a lot of cooking with them that results in some pretty awesome things, like stegosaurus shaped calzones (which I can't find right now but I love dinosaur-shaped food so they must be delicious). She also posts a new flash game every Friday, which frequently consumes my weekends if I'm not careful, and menu plans on Monday which cause me to admire her ability to plan out what she's going to eat. I definitely can't do that. So check out her blog, but first look at how AWESOME these cookies are!

She emailed me to ask about my peanut butter and chocolate chip banana cookies, since she lives in Australia and they don't have peanut butter chips there. I, sadly, didn't know how to go about replacing things with peanut butter to get both tastes in there, but I asked her to let me know if she figures it out because I've been looking for a good peanut butter cookie recipe. She responded pointing out that she'd just posted a peanut butter cookie recipe the day before. Apparently I'd been too distracted to check my RSS feed, because I definitely would have noticed that, but I checked and was super excited to see that she had, and that they looked like the peanut butter cookies I remember eating when I was a kid. So here's the recipe! It's the most amazingly easy thing I've ever made. If you screw up every food that you ever cook, you can make these and they will be perfect. Just trust me.

RECIPE: 4-ingredient peanut butter cookies

Ingredients

-1 cup peanut butter (the kind with lots of ingredients, like Skippy or Jif, not the kind that is just peanuts or peanuts and salt)

-1 cup sugar

-1 tsp cinnamon

-1 egg

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Put all the ingredients in a bowl and mix them until they reach an even consistency.

3. Roll them into balls and place them on a cookie sheet lined with wax paper. Squash crisscrossed fork marks in them (as pictured below).

4. Bake for 8 minutes.

Step 2, part 1: put everything in the bowl.

Step 2, part 2: Mix everything until it looks like this.

Step 3: roll into the balls so they look like the balls here, and then squash with a fork so they look like the fork-squashed ones here.

Right out of the oven. Isn't that the most gorgeous peanut butter cookie you've ever seen?

I was SO impressed with this recipe. Not only is it incredibly simple, but it tastes exactly like a peanut butter cookie should. The consistency is very cookie-like, which I didn't expect given the lack of flour--Mike just ate one and asked me how they seem so cookie-like without any flour. So, other bonus: gluten free! (Assuming the peanut butter is gluten free. I'm not sure. I couldn't find anything on the label saying it was, but I couldn't find anything saying it wasn't, either. And I'm sure if it's not there are brands out there that are.) The whole thing took probably 20 minutes, and most of that was fork-squashing because I'm a bit of a perfectionist.

The only problem I had with this recipe was actually the cinnamon. I feel blasphemous even saying that--anyone who knows me knows that I put cinnamon in EVERYTHING and a teaspoon of cinnamon in a pie recipe translates to two tablespoons, but it was sort of weird with the peanut butter flavor. I think, though, that this is my fault--it was only weird for two cookies, so either I got used to it quickly OR I should have mixed the cinnamon and sugar together first so that it was evenly integrated. Whoops. I should know to do things like that by now. I'm pretty sure that the cookies that tasted too strongly of cinnamon just had a higher concentration of cinnamon in them than the others and it would be fixed if I followed normal baking protocol instead of getting excited to take a picture that clearly showed the four ingredients. Oh well.

So go make these! You probably have all the ingredients. I got 17 cookies, so it doesn't even make so many that you'll have to give them away or get sick from eating only cookies for the next few days. And don't forget to stop by Dragon Musings and check out her flash games...er...recipes and such.

Wheatberries for Breakfast!

I don't post a lot of breakfasts on here. A long time ago, I posted a recipe for banana pancakes that I just titled "Breakfast." This isn't because I was too lame to come up with a good title, honestly (not that I really put much thought into them in the first place)--it's because I never really expected to have another breakfast to post. I don't really eat breakfast; I like to sleep late and I'm not usually hungry when I wake up, so I don't usually feel like getting up and cooking up a storm. It does happen, but rarely. Add to this that I'm not a huge fan of most quick breakfast foods--I hate cereal, toast is boring, I don't drink coffee, I dislike the texture of oatmeal and its relatives. (Cereal's the worst--for some reason, if I'm not hungry or only a little hungry and I eat a bowl of cereal, I end up feeling much more hungry afterward, as if it just reminded me that there's space in my stomach for food.)

However. I have recently discovered a breakfast that is delicious, filling, healthy, and really really easy to throw together if you plan ahead. As you may have guessed from the title, it involves wheatberries. As I said in my previous post, wheatberries, once cooked, last about a week when refrigerated--this means that all the planning ahead that is required is to boil up a bunch of wheatberries over the weekend and you've got breakfast all week! So, here you go, and it really could not be any easier:

RECIPE: Wheatberry Breakfast

Ingredients:

-about 1/2 to 3/4 cups cooked wheatberries

-2 or 3 scoops of all-natural chunky peanut butter (I use Teddy brand and love it. As for the chunky, I hate chunky peanut butter in any other form, but the crunch is great in this.)

-honey, probably about a tablespoon

Instructions:

1. Get out a cereal bowl. Pour the wheatberries into it. Add the peanut butter and drizzle the honey on top. Mix.

I'd just opened this jar of peanut butter--it's way easier to mix when it hasn't been refrigerated yet, but I must say I prefer cold peanut butter.

Mixed!

Okay, how easy is this? You get protein from the peanut butter, fiber from the wheatberries. The honey keeps the peanut butter from being too sticky and is super tasty. The chunks in the peanut butter are excellent with the texture of the wheatberries. And I bet you could throw some fruit in there if you wanted, too! Apples or bananas would probably be delicious.

What do you guys eat for breakfast? Do you throw something together quickly or cook an actual meal in the morning? Or do you rush out the door and stop for coffee and a breakfast sandwich on your way to work? (I must admit, that's how I usually get by when I have to be somewhere in the morning.)

Have a great weekend, everyone! I'll be back with another update early next week :)