Throwback

Food news of the week:
I preface this in the actual post but when I was vegan for almost two years, not too long ago, I was obsessed with tahini. I fell out of love with it just because it sort of reminds me how bad a vegan I became (ha), but ever since I started getting these expensive tahini chocolate cookies at the café near me, I had to replicate it. I've made tahini cookies before (put below), and one of my best friends from college still thinks it's the best thing I made by far. So I used that recipe as a template and added cashew nuts as another earthy, grounding element, and changed up the ratios of other bits as well. Has the excited approval of all my flatmates, who never tried tahini before. 

Science of the week:
An interesting bit on spiritual psychiatry. I never knew more than half of all psychiatric patients wanted to inject spirituality into their treatment, and it would be healthy to stop disconnecting their spiritual experiences from clinical treatment.

Insight of the week:
People learn what works best for them and any judgement towards each other is valid but need not be taken personally. Still working on the whole 'don't take things personally' part... for example, I felt extremely self-conscious being non-vegan in front of my flatmate's girlfriend, who is vegan. It made me second-guess myself for a while, like if I couldn't follow through on that after so long being vegan myself, how could I ever follow through on anything? Then felt all sad because I've also lost friends through this choice. Yet, the same time, I'm thriving in this life and am surrounded by wonderful people. I have my reasons, everyone does, for whatever path they decide to follow through on in life. Also, it's 100% ok to let people go.

Recipe of the week:
If you don't give the aforementioned tahini cashew cookie recipe a go, this one does the trick too, though these are slightly less chewy, flatter and sweeter. 

Tahini Chocolate Cookies (makes 10-12 medium cookies)

Ingredients

120ml (0.5 cup) light tahini

1 egg (vegan sub: 2 flax eggs, make by mixing 2 tbsp ground flaxseed with 4 tbsp water and let set aside at the beginning)

115g salted butter, at room temperature (vegan sub: vegan butter). If your butter is really hard, microwave it for half a minute

180g sugar (I used a mix of light brown and white, you can do the same or stick to either or)

1 tsp vanilla extract

150g plain flour

0.5 tsp baking powder

0.5 tsp baking soda

150g dark chocolate, chopped into chunks

Directions

Line 2 large baking sheets with parchment paper and preheat your oven to 180C (350F). In a medium bowl, using a whisk or electrical whisk, beat together the room temperature butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. This will take less than a minute if your butter is relatively soft. Then add the egg, vanilla and tahini, and beat well until you get a smooth, creamy batter that drops off your whisk easily.

In a separate bowl, briefly mix together the flour, chopped chocolate, baking powder and baking soda. If you didn’t use salted butter, add a teaspoon of fine salt to this dry mix, at this point.

Add this flour mix to the wet tahini-egg mix and mix until well combined. Scoop heaped tablespoonfuls of batter onto your lined tins, leaving at least 2 inches of space between each spoonful of batter to let the cookies spread and look less ugly (but ugly ones are still okay).

Bake the cookies, one tin at a time or both at the same time, for 15 minutes. They will look light-golden on top but still wet in the middle. This will continue to set after you take the cookies out. Take them out and, with both hands holding each end of the pan, lightly drop them on the counter-top to let gravity drop the bellies of the cookies. This technique will create crazy-chewy cookies with crisp, browned edges.

These are best enjoyed warm, and can be kept at room temperature for up to a week.

Until next time,
Alex