No Sugar Coconut Apple Cinnamon Cookies

Welp, I fell off of the healthy bandwagon (I blame 4th of July, World Cup and all the awesome breweries in walking distance of my new house) and needed to get back on track, so it's back to 21DSD, although it's more of a 10DSD mini detox since I'm off to the east coast to visit family at the end of this week. I'm a week in a feeling good, although I learned the hard way yesterday on my run that I need to add the "energy" allotment of a small amount of starchy carbs to my diet. Otherwise, this time around has been a lot easier than the first. I think knowing what to expect and being overly prepared have really helped.

Anyway, hubs and I were craving something sweet and I was itching to bake something. I wasn't in love with the No Sugar Pumpkin Spice Cookies I'd made the last time, so I decided to look for something else. I found a recipe for Not-Sweet Cinnamon Cookies in the 21DSD cookbook that looked promising until I saw it required the dreaded BANANA. Ugh. So instead, I substituted green apple. I was nervous about how the consistency would turn not using banana, but I was pleasantly surprised.

These cookies turned out to be quite tasty and I will definitely be making them again! Maybe with bacon..................stay tuned.

No Sugar Coconut Apple Cinnamon Cookies

1/4 cup mashed green apple (about one small apple)
2 eggs
2 teaspoons melted coconut oil
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon coconut flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
1/4 teaspoon sea salt

Preheat oven to 350.

Wisk together apple, eggs, oil and vanilla. Sift in the coconut flour and cinnamon and stir until well mixed. Stir in coconut and salt.

Spoon onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper into 9 equal portions and flatten.

Bake about 15 minutes. Cool completely on cooling rack or foil.

Peanut Butter Apple Spice Cookies

My latest concoction was actually inspired by none other than this:

Yes, a Vanilla Coke.

I was in my local pharmacy the other day and noticed they had vanilla Coke in the fridge section. It got me thinking about fluffernutter sandwiches. Go ahead and look it up; I'll wait.

With memories of the deliciousness swirling in my head, I decided to go ahead and purchase one, you know, for nostalgic reasons.

I didn't have bread or marshmallow fluff at home and I was too lazy to go to the grocery store so I decided the Vanilla Coke would probably go equally well with apples and peanut butter, which I did have.

While chomping on my snack, the wheels in my head started turning and I started scheming as to how I could combine the apples and peanut butter into some sort of delicious treat. I'd made Peanut Butter Cookies and Apple Spice Cookies, now I just needed to figure out how to combine the two.

And I did.

And the results were awesome.

And may or may not have caused a family rift because nobody wanted to share.

Apple Peanut Butter Cookies

1 1/4 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon 
8 tablespoons butter
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar, packed
1 egg, room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup chunky peanut butter
1 cup peeled and chopped apple

Preheat oven to 375.

In a medium bowl, sift together flour, baking soda and salt. In a mixer, blend together butter and sugars until smooth. Mix in egg, vanilla and peanut butter. Slowly mix in the flour mixture a little at a time until everything is completely blended. Stir in apples. Drop cookies, about an inch around, onto an ungreased cookie sheet about an inch apart. Bake for 10-12 minutes. Remove cookies from the cookie sheet immediately and place on a cooling rack or wax paper.

Apple Spice Cookies

Conversations between my husband and me yesterday went a little something like this:

Husband: so I have this thing for work tomorrow
Me: uh-huh...[knowing full well where this is going]
Husband: and I need to bring something
Me: ...like a baked good?
Husband: yeah! that would be great. could you make something?
Husband: oh, there was a request for blueberry and pecans
Me: ...you're getting something from whatever we already have in the kitchen

I almost made plain old chocolate chips (and I swear I'll do so one of these days!) but I flipped quickly through my cookbooks and saw a recipe for these cookies in my High Altitude Baking book. I have a ton of
apples and  typically they end up going bad because I don't manage to eat the quickly enough so I thought it would be a great way to get some use out of them.

The directions call for "finely chopped peeled" apples, which I took to mean "as long as it isn't bigger than the size of a chocolate chip it's probably okay."

Looks fine to me. Heh.

On a side note, I just got cooling racks for the first time in my life and they are so super awesome.

Apple Spice Cookies

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

2/3 cup shortening

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup peeled and chopped apple

Preheat oven to 375. In a medium bowl, combine flour, salt, baking powder, nutmeg and cinnamon. In a large bowl, cream sugars and shortening. Add eggs and vanilla and beat until smooth. Add flour mixture slowly and thoroughly, a little at a time. Stir in apples. Drop cookies, about an inch around, onto an ungreased cookie sheet about an inch apart. Bake for 10-12 minutes. Remove cookies from the cookie sheet immediately and place on a cooling rack or wax paper.

Apple Mustard Pork Chops

Although I enjoy baking, I am not much of a fan of actual cooking. I'm actually pretty terrified of it, if I'm being honest. What, I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?

But, since you really can't healthfully live on baked goods and eating out every night gets expensive, I do the bare minimum. If a meal requires more than 5 ingredients, it's not happening.

I've started experimenting and trying different stuff together and so far nobody has died so I thought maybe I'd start sharing some of my creations. They are all super simple and easy and are usually the end result of me just looking through my fridge and pantry to see what I have.

To reiterate, I do not consider myself to be a cook and I actually have quite a fear of cooking. So who better than to show the world that maybe cooking might not be so scary than the girl who is afraid?

I figured I might as well start with what I cooked this week. I'm not typically in the habit of taking pictures while I'm cooking and didn't want to post a recipe without them. I came up with this concoction on the fly and it ended up being quite tasty.

The apple butter and the dijon mustard I used for these pork chops really compliment each other quite nicely and the mixture makes it so that neither overwhelms the other. If you prefer the taste of one over the other you can change the ratio of the apple butter to dijon mustard (50/50 in this version). I'll offer some variations I've tried in the past at the end of the post.


Apple Mustard Pork Chops
2 pork chops
1 1/2 tablespoons apple butter
1 1/2 tablespoons dijon mustard
Planko Japanese style breadcrumbs

Mix together apple butter and mustard in a medium-sized bowl (alternately you can mix them in a large zip lock bag). Dip pork chops into the mixture, one at a time, until fully covered. Place in a large zip lock bag and let sit in the fridge for 30 - 60 minutes.

Preheat oven to 400.

Place breadcrumbs into a medium sized bowl. Dip pork chops into the breadcrumbs until completely covered. Place into a glass dish. Bake in the over 30-40 minutes until thoroughly cooked (depending on the size of the pork chops).

Alternate versions:
Apple Butter Pork Chops:
2 pork chops
3 tablespoons of apple butter
with or without Planko Japanese style breadcrumbs or  regular style breadcrumbs (like Shake 'n Bake)

Cook as directed above.

or

Dijon Mustard Pork Chops:
2 pork chops
3 tablespoons of dijon mustard
with or without Planko Japanese style breadcrumbs or  regular style breadcrumbs (like Shake 'n Bake)

Cook as directed above.