wild foods

the desert is chock full of wild foods. mesquite, although most popular for it's color and grain in furniture, as well as a good flavored wood for smoking meats, the pods are exceptionally delicious as a flour in baked goods lending a sweet, nutty flavor. a very nutritional food high in protein, carbohydrates, calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, zinc, and rich in the amino acid lysine, it is best used in combination with other flours. you risk burning your baked goods if just using mesquite flour. actually, it's a gaurantee that you'll burn it, whatever it is. the sugar content is way too high to use the flour all on it's own. but, another little tip about mesquite flour is that the glycemic index is very, very low...so people with sugar inbalances can eat mesquite without the worry of their BSL spiking.

this recipe is my adaptation to a cookie recipe found in the Eat Mesquite! cookbook compiled by the Desert Harvesters of Arizona. these people really have a great thing going. after mesquite harvest time is over, and plenty of time has passed to allow for pods to dry, the Desert Harvesters group travel all over the state of Arizona hauling with them a beautiful grain mill and visiting farmers markets where lines of people wait with their buckets and barrels and boxes full of mesquite pods, waiting for their turn to grind the bounty into flour. and it's FREE! i had the opportunity to do this, which is a much more feasible way to acquire mesquite flour as opposed to buying it at $15 a pound.
the whole batch of cookies, all 2 1/2 dozen were gone within a few hours....Indiana, the food theif, highjacked about a third of them off the counter top when i turned my back for about 2 minutes...he's sneaky.

MESQUITE CHOCOLATE CHIP OATMEAL COOKIES (my version, adapted due to limited ingredients) oh! these are gluten free too!
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar + 1/8 cup molasses
2 farm fresh eggs, like from your neighbors back yard kind of fresh
1 1/2 ts cinnamon
1 cup brown rice flour mix (see below)
1/2 cup mesquite flour
2 ts baking soda
1 ts sea salt
1 cup oats
1 cup oat flour (basically, just grind your oats in a coffee bean grinder)
1 cup chocolate chips
1 cup chopped walnuts

brown rice flour mix
1 cup brown rice flour
1 cup sweet sorghum flour
1/4 cup tapioca flour
1/4 cup arrowroot flour

if you have a mixer, wonderful. i don't. so i beat my butter by hand. whip in sugar and molasses. mix in eggs. in separate bowl combine all dry ingredients. in thirds, add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture. add chocolate chips and walnuts. if time permits, chilling dough in fridge for one hour helps the cookies to keep a shape instead of flattening out due to the lack of a combining agent like gluten or xanthan gum. otherwise, if the butter was perfectly softened and not melted, then you might have to cut the cookies apart, but they won't totally flatten out all over the pan.
bake @ 350 for 10-12 minutes

also, this is my new antique stove top and oven. isn't she beautiful?!

 

the guilty culprits