Baking Day

Summer is a hard schedule to keep. With it's nice weather and flurry of happenings. We lost our rhythm at the beginning of summer, which I expected to have happen. Slowly over the last weeks or month I've been trying to work on a new rhythm for our days and weeks that will carry us into fall and winter. Not that I want a set in stone rhythm - I much prefer the semi-predictable ever evolving rhythms. Some of it's easier to keep up with than others. Such as we take our morning nature walk with out fail. Monday is always grocery shopping day. And although most day's rhythms go as normal, sometimes swimming or going to the park get us a bit off.

One I'm still working on is baking day. Which usually consists of baking our bread. If there are treats in the house, we (I) eat them. I'd much prefer to just not have them around often. But bread baking produces enough loaves to get us through two, sometimes three weeks. On the weeks in between I was lost as to what to do. I recently found a cookbook that I'm really enjoying, Feeding the Whole Family. This week I decided to bake some cookies from the book. We chose the Oatmeal Chocolate Chip and Walnut Cookies but substituted raisins for the nuts and chocolate. There is no sugar and whole wheat flour in this recipe. So really a more healthy alternative to the standard cookie - that I can handle.


Piper loves the process, the apron, the dumping and pouring of ingredients into bowls, stirring, and tasting. Today she started tasting when it was just the dry ingredients in the bowl. Who knew she'd like whole wheat flour and oatmeal so much.


Once the wet ingredients were added there was no stopping her. They're sweetened with maple syrup. I think had she not eaten so much of the dough we would have ended up with a dozen full sized cookies.

The fun, tactile, part came when we had to form the cookies with our hands. Kind of a gooey sticky consistency.And of course there is always lots of clean up. More oatmeal, less flour than our usual clean up. Now we're enjoying some delicious cookies at our house.