Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

I noticed in my logs today that someone came here searching for “energy cookie”. I hope that person subscribed, because here is the long-promised recipe:

Ingredients
2.5 cups oatmeal or rolled oats (oatmeal, if you can get it, is more energy-dense, because of how the oats are processed)
1 cup oat bran
1/2 cup sultanas (golden raisins)
1/4 cup walnuts
1 tsp cinnamon
1 egg
1/2 cup canola oil
3/4 cup water

Method
Place dry ingredients plus the egg in the bowl of a mixer or food processor.
Start mixing, and pour in the oil and water. Mix to an even consistency.
Turn out of the bowl onto a cookie sheet. Smooth with a spatula to about 5mm or 1/4 inch thick, and divide into squares – about 20 medium or 30 small.

Bake at 180C/350F for about 35 minutes. The tops should just be turning brown and the insides may still be a little moist; the sultanas should not be burnt.

You can halve the recipe (apart from the egg) and it still works well, though you should drop the cooking time to about 25 to 30 minutes. (I found that the larger batches weren’t keeping well in the damp Auckland winter.)

The reason it’s taken me so long to post this is that I’ve been trying to get the amount of water right. Too much, and the cookies don’t cook through; too little, and they end up dry and crumbly. Three-quarters of a cup seems about right, but if your climate is particularly dry you may need to increase it a little.

The idea behind these energy cookies is to create a snack which delivers maximum calories (to assist in my weight gain goal) while remaining nutritious and heart-healthy, and with a low glycemic load. Now, I’m not a food scientist, but I can read nutrition tables, and my method of coming up with the recipe consisted largely of looking for the big numbers in the energy column of the standard NZ nutrition reference tables, and then going for an oil which had lower amounts of saturated fat than my first two choices (sunflower oil and olive oil).

There was a bit more to it than that, of course. I knew I’d need a carbohydrate base, some kind of oil to hold it together, and something to give it a more interesting taste. That would be the sultanas – the cookie is surprisingly sweet given that there is no added sugar, though the cinnamon helps with that. The sugars are also fruit sugars (fructose), which taste sweeter than table sugar (sucrose) but impose a lower glycemic load – that is, they don’t spike your blood sugar as much.

Here’s the nutritional analysis on nutritiondata.com, based on the 26g size (that is, dividing the recipe into 30 cookies).

That’s delivering 82 calories, or just over 3 calories per gram. It’s low in sodium (I don’t add salt) and high in manganese; it also has a decent amount of vitamins E and K and some thiamin, and plenty of dietary fiber. It’s high in phosphorus, so you’ll want to make sure your intake of calcium is adequate to balance it – cookies and milk would be the ideal solution.

I have several friends who have issues with gluten, and while oats are theoretically among the “gluten grains” so it isn’t totally gluten-free, it is still a lot lower in gluten than a wheat-based recipe. Oats are also very cheap, as are most of the other ingredients.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with this recipe, which I eat once or twice a day as a snack. If you have a need for sustained energy from a small, healthy snack, or, like me, are trying to gain weight, it could be what you’re looking for.

Technorati Tags: recipe, energy cookie, energy biscuit, healthy recipe, healthy snack, weight gain, oats

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