I haven't done much cooking for the past two weeks, with the holiday and then being sick. My husband picked up the slack, making a big batch of pumpkin soup with the remainder of the humongous pumpkin that we got from the CSA and all last week we were eating his brownies. They are really good and I did want to share the recipe, but it is out of a real cookbook, not on-line, and my husband follows recipes exactly, so I would have to copy it word for word. I am being lazy and just don't feel like doing it.
So you are going to get a recipe that I found on-line, still chocolate, and actually much healthier. I had a large bunch of beets from the CSA that I roasted in the oven until soft. I knew I wanted something chocolate, but didn't want to make a cake because then it would need icing and I don't want that many calories. We ran a 1/2 marathon on Sunday and are taking this week off to recover, so I want to try and eat relatively healthy. So I found this recipe for Double Chocolate Chunk Cookies on allrecipes.com and thought I could easily adapt it. It is really easy and quick to make after you roast the beets. Just want to warn you though that this might not be the best recipe to make with kids because between the chocolate and the beets, this is a stain nightmare!
1. To roast the beets, I scrub them, pierce them with a fork, put them in a glass pan with some olive oil on the bottom of it, cover with foil, and bake at 400 for about 30-45 minutes, until soft. When they are cool, I puree them with a little water in the Vitamix.
2. I made the following changes to the recipe:
-Instead of 2/3 cups white sugar, I used 1/3 cup plus half of a 1/3 cup.
-Instead of 2/3 cups brown sugar, I used 1/3 cup brown sugar and 1/3 cup maple syrup.
-Instead of the chocolate chips, I used about 3/4 cup of dark chocolate chips.
-For half of the batter, I added about 1/2 cup of chopped pecans.
3. After adding the dry to the wet ingredients and before adding the chocolate chips, I mixed in 1/2 cup of the beet puree. Don't over bake the cookies; take them out slightly soft and squishy. Mine got sort of cake like and soft. Pretty yummy with the chunks of chocolate and the nuts.
Share with your family and know they are getting their iron for the day. We vegetarians have to get it anyway we can, and I personally think this is way better than eating a hunk of meat. I was looking for an article on the benfits of beets and found this one. Has some interesting facts - made me laugh!
By the way, do you know how hard it is to get good pictures of almost black cookies?!