Recipes by Rupa Sethu

Tea and cookies!

When friends stop by for a quick hello during a pandemic but you still want to serve something delicious and healthy, here’s a simple solution! Super low sodium, gluten free oatmeal cookies with walnuts and craisins – its practically breakfast!!

The Original

The original recipe (available here: How Sweet Eats) was fantastic! Soft, chewy oatmeal cookies with just the right chocolate hit. Yummy! I tried the recipe the way it was written first. Then I added other mix-ins like coconut flakes, raisins, nuts etc. No matter what, they turned out great every time. Now, I am not much of a baker so that says a lot!!

The Adaptation

Given how well the original recipe turned out, I tried to adapt it to our dietary constraints – gluten free and low sodium. I even shared these with my foodie gourmet dinner group to rave reviews!

Here’s what I used that was different from the original recipe:

The only sodium comes from the one egg in the recipe – 70mg of sodium spread over the whole batch.

Mix-Ins

For this batch I mixed in chopped toasted unsalted walnuts and a generous handful of Craisins. Variations are to add chocolate chips (milk or white), unsweetened coconut flakes etc. It does not seem to matter what the mix-ins are – the basic recipe can take anything you can come up with. If you do add the chocolate chips, remember that the cookies get a bit sweeter – which may be exactly what you are looking for!

Tips

Couple of quick tips:

  • I like to use an ice cream scoop to measure out my cookies on to the baking sheet so they are all the same size and cook evenly. For this recipe I used the small sized scoop so my cookies were about 2″ in diameter – perfect to nibble on!
  • Also, I under-bake the cookies, just till they lose the shine – so they are still really soft coming out of the oven. They do set as they cool but will stay soft and chewy!

Enjoy with a nice pot of tea!