Healthy and Delicious Whole-Grain Cranberry Blueberry Oatmeal Cookies

How's that for a cookie name?

I've had these oatmeal craisin cookies on my mind, but in a effort to feed my family a whole food diet I decided to try and experiment with these cookies to see if I could make them the healthiest a cookie can possibly be.  I have to say I hit it right on the dot.  These cookies were incredibly yummy, soft, chewy and DELICIOUS!  You would never ever ever guess they were whole grain.

I have fallen in love with my wheat grinder over the last year and am trying to grind all my grains fresh since it's better for you.  If I'd know how easy it was to use I'm sure I would have been using it for years now instead of it sitting boxed up in my kitchen cupboard.  It's definitely become a staple appliance in my home.  

I've been experimenting and learning about different grains.  We use so much wheat here in America but there are so many other grains out there that are fun to use and add different favors and textures to your food. 

Lately I've been using the combination of wheat, kamut, and spelt a lot.  I've recently learned that spelt can be substituted directly for wheat in recipes and it has a much lighter crumb than heavy whole wheat so for my cookies I decided to try cutting out the wheat entirely and used spelt flour in it's place.

I picked up some sucanat in the bulk foods section of Whole Foods and decided to use it to replace the sugar in my recipe.  I also spied some dried blueberries in my cupboard and decided to throw them in as well.  It was a good choice.

 Here's the recipe I came up with:

Whole Grain Cranberry Blueberry Oatmeal Cookies

1 cup butter, softened

1 1/4 cups sucanat

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 1/2 cups freshly ground spelt, packed

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

3 cups old fashioned rolled oats

3/4 cup craisins

1/2 cup dried blueberries

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Beat together butter, sucanat, eggs, and vanilla.  Mix and mix and mix and then mix some more.  This is what is going to make you cookie soft and chewy.

3. Add remaining dry ingredients an stir until just barely mixed.  Do not overmix.

4. Fold in craisins and blueberries.

5. Roll into balls and place on ungreased cookie sheet.

6. Bake 10 to 12 minutes.  Cool on wire rack.

Makes about 4 dozen cookies.

My kids were happy to help make the cookies.  I mean what kid doesn't love to help make cookies?  They're usually pretty good at keeping their hands out of the bowl, but they couldn't resist this time.  This stuff is just that good.

I usually bake up half  of the batch and then freeze the other half in ready to go cookie dough balls to thaw and bake later.  Cookies are a definite weakness of mine.  I can't make too many at a time or else I'll just eat and eat them until they're gone.  It's best to freeze half for later.

Yum!