We’ve been making a lot of cookies lately. I always crave them in the winter anyway, and now that we have 4 lunches to prepare every morning, it’s nice to have a little something homemade to throw in. We’re making hummus this week, so as long as we had to buy tahini anyway, we decided to try tahini cookies. Without further ado:

Oatmeal Tahini Cookies
2 c. rolled oats
1 c. whole wheat pastry flour
1 c. chopped almonds
1 c. sucanat (or brown sugar)
scant 1/4 c. evaporated cane juice (or white sugar)
1 c. raisins (we used half craisins)
3/4 c. tahini
1/2 c. butter
2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda

Cream butter and tahini. Mix in sugars, then eggs and vanilla. Add the flour, cinnamon, salt, baking soda, and oats. Stir in the almonds and raisins last of all. Bake at 350 degrees, 8-10 minutes. Adam likes big cookies so his took the full 10 minutes. This made a  couple dozen large cookies.

This is a substantial cookie, one that could easily carry you through an afternoon of snowshoeing, for example. The tahini brings out some of the same qualities that you’d get from a peanut butter oatmeal cookie but without an overwhelming peanut taste. I couldn’t really taste the tahini in the final product, which is OK. Good stuff!

A note about sugars: we’ve been experimenting with sucanat lately. Nutrition-minded types recommend it because, among other things, it is minimally processed and therefore still contains some minerals and all the awesome molasses flavor. Sucanat caramel popcorn, for example, is AMAZING. Once again, I tried it for the nutrition but got hooked for the flavor.