Making No-Bake Cookies!!!!

For my first "at home" food item, I "baked" no-bake cookies. It was a seemingly simple recipe my mom received when she was a blue bird, which is practically the equivalent to girl scouts. The actual cookies take about 10 minutes to make, but the preparation is very time-intensive if you are a health freak. I decided to use "all-natural," "organic," and vegan ingredients in order to see what it would be like to have to worry about and search for products like these all the time when baking or cooking. The ingredients included: Organic Unsweetened Almond Milk, Organic Quick Oats, Fair Trade Turbinado Raw Cane Sugar, Earth Balance Vegan Buttery Sticks (79% vegetable oil spread?), Valhrona Cocoa Powder (organic), and peanut butter only containing crushed and ground peanuts. The peanut butter has to be ground by the buyer in a machine, there is no way to just pick it off the shelf. The ingredients came from three different stores: Kroger, Whole Foods, and Central Market. I was most interested in two of the ingredients I used...the "vegan butter" and almond milk. In the vegan butter was "Expeller-pressed natural oil blend (soybean, palm fruit, canola oil, and olive oil), filtered water, pure salt, natural flavor (DERIVED FROM CORN, no MSG, no alcohol, no gluten), soy protein, soy lecithin, lactic acid (non-dairy, derived from sugar beets), colored with beta-carotene from natural sources. Contains soy." Of course it has corn, since we learned from Pollan that almost everything we eat or touch is made of some form of corn because of its excess. I actually tried the almond milk because I was curious if it tasted like milk, and I was surprised of the flavor. It has the same texture as milk, but with a much stronger "almondy" flavor, of course.It was very tasty, I would definitely drink it just because it tastes good. Well I decided that before I found out the ingredients in the almond milk. The ingredients in the almond milk are a lot more sketchy than those in the vegan butter, surprisingly. It contains: "Organic almondmilk (filtered water, organic almonds), tricalcium phosphate, sea salt, xanthan gum, potassium citrate, sunflower lecithin, vitamin a palmitate, ergocalciferol (vitamin d2), di-alpha tocopherol acetate (vitamin e)." I don't know what half of those words are, which scares me. I looked up xanthan gum and found that it is a bacteria used as a food thickening agent or a stabilizer in products like make up. It doesn't sound very appetizing or healthy. Why would I want to eat the same thing that is used for make up and who knows what else? In conclusion, no matter how much I had to search for these ingredients I had a lot of fun making the cookies, and they turned out to be very yummy!!

~Lauren Boone~