Pumpkin oatmeal cookies

Remember when I told you to save the remainder of that can of pumpkin from last entry’s pizza sauce? As promised, here is the perfect solution to not letting that go to waste. These are based on the recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance, though I only made a half batch (I live alone, and can only eat so much!), and I changed or substituted several ingredients.

I’m not a fan of oatmeal cookies in general; they usually just make me wish I were eating a chocolate chip cookie. I’m also not too much of a fan of wintry-spiced things. The warm scents that make other people melt (cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, etc.) just don’t do it for me. (I especially dislike gingerbread. If you were wondering.) As far as pumpkin goes, I like it ok, but I'm not wild on it. (I always choose pecan pie over pumpkin at Thanksgiving.) There are, however, a few exceptions to my pumpkin apathy, including a delicious pumpkin dip I’ll hopefully make and post sometime this winter, and now, these awesome cookies. They taste like pumpkin pie in chewy cookie form, in a good way. I may turn into a pumpkin lover yet.

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
2/3 cups quick or rolled oats
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
3/4 cup - 1/2+1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup canola oil
1 T molasses
1/2 cup canned pumpkin
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 tsp ground flaxseed
1/2 cup walnuts, finely chopped

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and either grease two baking sheets, or cover them with parchment paper (my preferred method; I even have the unbleached kind). Mix together the flour, oats, baking soda, salt, and pumpkin pie spice. (I apologize in advance for the unclear photos...I was experimenting with not using the flash. Oh well.)



Put the sugar, oil, molasses, pumpkin, vanilla, and flaxseeds in a separate (bigger) bowl. If you don’t have flaxseeds, that’s ok. The reason I have “3/4 cup - 1/2+1/3 cup sugar” in the recipe is that I used 1/2 cup+1/3 cup, and my cookies were plenty sweet; next time I would use just a little less, 3/4 cup. Your choice.



Whisk those together until very well combined, and the sugar starts to dissolve.



Add the dry ingredients to the wet in three batches, folding to combine with a spatula or wooden spoon.



After you finish adding the dry ingredients, fold in the walnuts. The original recipe also says to add raisins, but my response to that was “Ehh...no.”



Make sure you taste the dough, of course, and then drop it by tablespoons onto the baking sheets. I use an ice cream scoop to make mine uniform. I have two scoops, a 2-tsp one and a 1.5-T one, so I split the difference and made one pan of baby cookies and one pan of big ones. Since these don’t spread much, you’ll want to flatten them out with a fork or your fingers.



Now, the recipe says to bake the 1-T cookies for 16 minutes. I’ll tell you that my small cookies baked in 12 minutes, and my large ones baked in 14, so check on yours before the 16 minutes is up.



They don’t look terribly different, do they? Well, chalk that up to the fact that they remain chewy, moist, and tender, inside just a whisper of a crust. The verdict: sweet, oaty, pumpkiny, scrumptious.



Yield: 2 dozen cookies. Per cookie: 100 calories, 4.8g fat (trace sat), 13.6g carbs, 1.2g fiber, 1.2g protein.