Grain-Free birthday cookies

Several people asked me if I was going to eat Birthday Cake on Friday. I thought about it, but really, I'm more of an ice cream girl so I decided not to hurl myself off the gluten-free wagon in the name of tradition or birthday candles.

But I did want something sweet to share around the office, so I turned to my trusty G-Free board on Pinterest for an idea.

I decided to go with Coconut Lemon Meltaways from the Addicted to Veggies blog. I had all the ingredients on hand and I LOVE coconut and lemon. And who doesn't want to try something called a "meltaway"?

These cookies could be labeled and hashtagged with all kinds of non-delicious sounding things like #vegan, #grainfree, #raw, #refinedsugarfree.

But let me tell you, the more descriptive options would be #tasteslikesummer, #whoababythosearegood, and #notexactlyhealthybutslightlymorevirtuousthanaboxofthinmints.

Did I mention that they are embarrassingly easy to make?

Please check out the original post on Addicted to Veggies for the recipe and steps - I don't want to take any credit for her brilliance.

But it basically goes like this:
Mix the dry ingredients (I used Almond Meal rather than Almond Flour because it is cheaper and I had some  on hand. It does change the texture slightly, but probably not the taste).

Bust out your Stand Mixer (hooray!) or any hand mixer and blend the wet ingredients into the dry.

Roll the cookies into balls and set them out on a parchment lined sheet. These little babies are not going to be cooked, so they won't spread or rise. You can put them pretty close together.

The cookies are technically raw (not cooked). Don't worry though, they're also vegan so no angst about eating raw eggs or dairy. Bonus: you can eat as much "dough" as you want!

The original recipe says that you can leave them in a warm oven with the door cracked slightly (I had mine set at 180 for about an hour and a half) or stick em in a food dehydrator. I don't have one of those - yet - so I went with the warm oven option. All this really does is dry out the exterior slightly, which gives the cookies that divine "melt in your mouth" slight crunch on the outside, soft awesomeness on the inside.

My co-workers gobbled these up. I may have had 4 or so myself. The only people who didn't oooh and aaaahh were the handful of non-coconut eaters. I contend that the lemon has a stronger flavor than the coconut, but I guess there's no convincing you if you are anti-coconut.

Bonus #2 - These make your kitchen smell like lemon and coconut. Excellent reason to make them in February.

The Big 3-5: Another year older and a New Year of GGG

Happy Birthday to Me! And Happy Anniversary to the Green, Gray and Grace blog!

Year 2 of the Green Gray and Grace initiative wraps up today, and Year 3 begins. This year has been full of transitions and do-overs and inches and inches of movement towards a greener and more graceful life. The Gray always pretty much takes care of itself. The Green and the Grace and I are duking it out every day, year after year. It's a long but oh so good battle.

I've been feeling a bit sheepish that I don't have so much to "show" for this year. It has been tough to find as much time to write and to try projects and to cook as I would like, and I haven't earned any Gold Stars for discipline and self control. But even if everything didn't exactly go as planned, I have definitely learned a lot. Learned a lot, still a lot of room to grow.

Since last February, I:

• Tried to grow a container garden. Getting started. Getting excited. Crushed by Reality.
• Started to embrace the fact that my quality of life is significantly better when I keep a grain-free diet. 
• Attempted to massively overhaul my eating habits to focus on simplicity and abundance. And failed miserably. 
• Adopted some *slightly* crunchy, but satisfyingly simple Green personal care habits. 
• Wrote the "Why I do not eat meat" post that had been making me unreasonably anxious. 
• Thought I would hate but learned to LOVE keeping a Sabbath on (most) Sundays. 
• Wrote this post about grieving that turned out to be the most viewed and most shared thing I've ever written. 

And I got a fun new bob haircut to show off my gray:

I'm ashamed of how many camera phone self portraits I took to get ONE that I didn't totally hate.

Ok, so what's next?

I'm not entirely sure. I'm hopeful that I'll have more time to do the things that I love this year than I had last year, so hopefully more cooking, crafting, making, writing. And HOPEFULLY I'll actually take a photography class so that my blog photos can actually resemble something artful rather than embarrassing snapshots in our poorly-lit kitchen.

God and I will keep wrestling with the ways in which my desires to live more simply and graciously and abundantly only get as far as my head. 

My hair will just keep getting more awesome.