Were yesterday’s gluten-free oatmeal raisin cookies still not healthy enough for you? Then perhaps these raw oatmeal raisin balls will be more your style! I know energy ball recipes are absurdly old hat at this point, but there’s a reason they appear on every blog on the Internet. Three reasons, to be precise: they’re easy, delicious, and good for you, too! Personally, I tire of putting dates and cashews in everything, so as with my raw almond fig balls, this recipe is free of both. They don’t taste like cookies, but they are seriously fantastic, if I may say so myself. Print Raw Oatmeal Raisin Balls Author: Claryn Prep time:  10 mins Total time:  10 mins Serves: 12 1″ balls   Ingredients ¾ c oats ½ c raisins ½ c walnuts ½ tsp cinnamon ¼ tsp vanilla pinch cloves pinch salt Instructions Pulse oats in food processor into a coarse meal. Add remaining ingredients and pulse until mixture holds together easily when squeezed between your fingers. Roll into 1″ balls. Refrigerate leftovers in an air-tight container. Notes This yields a small batch, so if you’re planning to share, you may want to double it! Wordpress Recipe Plugin by EasyRecipe 3.2.1311  

A few months ago, I tried this recipe for “turtle” cookies, and they completely blew my mind. Since that day, I’ve made a dozen variations on that recipe, adjusting ingredients and playing with flavor combinations. This is my oatmeal raisin riff on that recipe. In just a few short months, these cookies have become one of my all-time favorite dessert recipes … which is pretty remarkable, considering how picky I am about cookies. I guarantee that if I handed you one, you’d never in a million years guess that they’re both gluten-free and relatively healthy. They definitely don’t taste like it. Nuts make these cookies hearty and rich; oats give them some heft and a tender bite; and maple syrup makes all the flavors sing together. Finally, adding a pinch of cloves — one of my signature moves — gives them a warm spice that you can’t quite put your finger on. Basically, they’re made of magic. As I’ve found, this is a super versatile recipe, so I encourage you to do as I’ve done and customize it to suit your needs, hopes, and dreams. See the recipe notes for some of my suggestions! Print Vegan Gluten-Free Oatmeal Raisin Cookies […]

Oh, what the heck? Since I reposted my recipe for sesame seed balls last week, I might as well bring back this old post for regular, non-deep-fried mochi. As long as you can track down a few special ingredients (and don’t mind making a mess), making daifuku is surprisingly easy! First, a quick note on terminology, courtesy of Wikipedia. “Mochi” is a Japanese cake made of glutinous rice flour, and actually only describes the squishy outer layer of daifuku. Mochi has both sweet and savory applications; stuff it with a sweet filling and a whole strawberry in springtime to make ichigo daifuku, put chunks of it in soup, or make dango and eat it on a stick with savory sauces. Daifuku specifically refers to mochi stuffed with a sweet filling, and that’s what we’re dealing with here. When I lived in Philly, I made a point to pick up a new flavor of daifuku every time I ended up in Chinatown. My favorite kind was sold across the street from my apartment, which was not great for my bank account. During the summer, I preferred to eat daifuku straight out of the refrigerator, which rendered it cold, firm, heavy, and […]

I’ve been seeing recipes for raw tacos around the Web for years, but I never felt at all compelled to try them. I mean, tacos are perfect the way they are, right? It’s not like you have to do anything special to make a delicious vegan taco. I’ve also historically been highly suspicious of any recipe that tries to replace a carbohydrate with a lettuce leaf. This is such classic “I’m on a diet” behavior, which has absolutely no place in my kitchen. People who try to convince you a lettuce leaf is an ideal substitute for a corn taco shell (“you won’t even miss it!!!”) are the same kind of people who try to convince you that raw, spiralized zucchini is “guilt-free pasta!!!,” and that if you close your eyes and hold your breath while balancing on your head and counting down from 1000, mashed chickpeas combined with stevia and mini chocolate chips tastes “exactly like cookie dough!!!” No, dude. Just no. Seriously, crawl back into that weight loss infomercial you leapt out of. But oh, how wrong I was (– about raw tacos, that is)! I celebrated my birthday in June with dinner at G-Zen, a fancy-schmancy vegan […]

Attentive readers might notice that this has been a summer of mango and cucumber and black beans. It isn’t over ’til it’s over, y’all, so here is a recipe for black bean mango quinoa salad that contains all three! This recipe goes out to my Canadian aunt. My family isn’t particularly close, but I’ve always thought she was one of my coolest blood relations. She’s always had amazing photography skills, and has been nonchalantly whipping up inventive, healthy meals from scratch as long as I can remember (i.e. way before it was cool). In short, she’d probably make a much better food blogger than I do. But I digress! She’s younger and crunchier than my parents, and when she and her family were living in Ithaca in the late 80s, she gave my mother a cookbook from Ithaca’s renowned vegetarian(-ish) Moosewood Restaurant. I’m convinced that this cookbook, which my mother actually loved, was the only reason she even remotely tolerated my going vegetarian in 2001. Familiarity breeds comfort, after all! When my aunt caught wind of my having a vegan food blog several years ago, she asked if I had any good recipes for quinoa. At the time, I was […]